The Voynich Manuscript mystery has been solved by a UK computer scientist. via /.

originally posted by xowie

Danceteria flyers and Zoë Tamerlis shrine at lundissimo.info.

originally posted by xowie

The following links (from today’s NYT) are dangerously unstable and might EXPIRE AT ANY MINUTE! Read them NOW!!!

• The 15,000 square-foot garden of swanky One Sutton Place has actually been owned by the City of New York for the last thirteen years. The residents had a secret non-disclosure pact so the City wouldn't find out.
• Taki al-Moosawi was imprisoned in a dungeon for several months by Saddam's regime, and his nephew Mehdi was executed with hand grenades. Still, Dr. Moosawi says, "it is freedom the Americans have given us, but it is not good freedom."
• Yeah, of course Pete Rose gambled on baseball, and of course he bet on the Reds. The real thing is: did he ever bet against the Reds?

originally posted by daiichi

Two things I learned from this article: Nancy's Yogurt is run by Ken Kesey's brother and sister-in-law, and Stonyfield Farm is 40% owned by Dannon Yogurt's parent company.

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Nancy's Yogurt, organic Oregon dairy hits it big.

Interesting, sad story about the demise of long-time publisher Creative Arts Books, and the screwing of their authors/co-publishers on the way down.

originally posted by xowie

It was Rumsfeld and Shultz who told Hussein and his emissaries that U.S. statements generally condemning the use of chemical weapons would not interfere with relations between secular Iraq and the Reagan administration, which took Iraq off the terrorist-nations list and embraced Hussein as a bulwark against fundamentalist Iran. Ironically, the U.S supported Iraq when it possessed and used weapons of mass destruction and invaded it when it didn't.

originally posted by xowie

VixenLove’s logs by score. via Blort.

originally posted by xowie

Nice guide to polyamory, not that I would know.

originally posted by daiichi

If you have any appreciation of the psychedelic G-Force software — also known as the iTunes Visualizer — check out G-Force Gold Upgrade. I post this as an excuse to reinforce my meme-child: Andy O’Meara has more than earned a MacArthur (“genius”) Fellowship. Make his Christmas merry with a purchase, if the spirit moves you.

seven o'clock, roof
eleven o'clock, back yard
three o'clock, pine tree

From '3 Haikus About Squirrels' by Bill Smith in LA Weekly: Supplement: The List 2003: More Lists

Dennis Kucinich: the Kuro5hin interview.

originally posted by xowie

This writing gig, this is my Neighborhood of Make-Believe, where it is easy to be bold and honest and confrontational. But in my real life, I have always been shy and wussy, and Mr. Rogers' gentle-Americana Buddhism made me feel as if that was good. He knew that the only reassurance in the face of the Sendakian horrors of childhood—the uncertainty, the lack of control—is acceptance. His neighborhood wasn't a utopia—he lived alone in a small apartment with a fish tank—but a community where every type of person was nice to him because he accepted them. I'd assuage my loneliness by jamming to my Mr. Rogers album all the time, but it wasn't until high school that I learned how politically radical Fred Rogers was. One of the toughest kids in the school, drunk, his gold chain hanging halfway down his already hairy chest, told me his dad would lock him and his brother in the closet every time he caught them watching Mr. Rogers, fearful the show would turn them into homosexuals. But even years later, at 18 years old and miles from a sweater vest, this kid still loved Mr. Rogers. And I realized how much worse my high school, and my world, would have been without him.

originally posted by xowie

Terror Alert Level

For Biracial Children, a Look at Attitudes (washingtonpost.com)

"You have to be very careful to explain this on a level that they understand," said Francis Wardle, director of the Center for the Study of Biracial Children in Denver. "Kids don't understand race. They don't understand who is codified by race, and how it differs from country to country."

Wardle said Williams's decision to proclaim her heritage "is a wonderful opportunity to look at the history of race in this country."

He said he does not see that happening yet, because news coverage has focused solely on Williams, rather than on the vast population of other mixed-race Americans from her era who were abandoned by white parents.

MP3 recordings of Daniel Pinchbeck at Palenque Norte 2003, a Burning Man theme camp. Author of Breaking Open the Head: a psychedelic journey into the heart of contemporary shamanism, Pinchbeck said of this talk, “I was very proud of this event … in a quite intense headspace at the time… think I put a lot of information together, and presented the core of what I am hoping to do in the next book.”

Clark's net worth (between $3 million and $3.5 million, according to his campaign spokesman) is far less than the assets of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who, with his wife, is worth an estimated $500 million. According to news accounts, the net worth of other Democratic candidates ranges from $13 million to $60 million for Sen. John Edwards (N.C.); $2.2 million to $5 million for former Vermont governor Howard Dean; and $2,000 to $32,000 for Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (Ohio).

Clark's Earnings Are Way Up (washingtonpost.com). (Thanks, linus.)

By the second bottle of wine, Kesey said, "America is hard on writers. I call it the Hemingway complex. Who I am, my persona, stands behind my characters. It's as though I'm holding a mask out in front of me and writing through the mask. Who you get is me behind the mask. You don't get that from Shakespeare, or Mark Twain. I have no idea who Melville was, but Ahab will stalk around in my attic for the rest of my life, and that's how it ought to be." Kesey the messenger had become the message. When Hemingway the hunter became Hemingway the hunted, he slipped a shotgun into his mouth and tripped the trigger with his toe. Kerouac's "Road" ended in his mother's Florida ranch house, Kerouac's magnificent youth bloated, unshaven, angry and sodden.

Sparks fly upwards: Remembering Ken Kesey

creak, creak, we’re down south: The Metaphysics of Humor

Bags and Boards Variety comics weblog

Full-Circle 360° at once panoramic camera lens w/‘aha!’ diagram

The poet rode waves that peaked on accusation and explanation:

you weren't there when whips cracked the backs
I was there I didn't see you

The crowd was shouting back to Roger as he voiced its feeling, gave air to black peoples' grievance at the commercial success of white bands imitating black bands. "The Music Man" continued. Locating himself as the heir to a culture formed from the experiences of Afrikans in enslavement. Black music is his birthright and we white people who play this music and sell it out by selling it off in watered down forms were being called to task. He said that he was there on the slave ships, that he had sung the songs of slaves, that he was those people and they were him, in him now, calling his poem, inflecting his voice with its Trinian accent, fuelling that fire that gave birth to his passion. The last verse fell off of a crescendo and he slowed down easing us to the close:

i am the music man/ i am the music man/i am the music man
and you're a t'ief.

He left the stage to acclaim from his peers. The MC came on and all he said was "Yo Red," which was my poetry call sign. Speaking to me in poetry. The whole poem was addressed to white people working with black forms. People like me. In fact, the poem was addressed directly to me. I stood there dealing with my feelings of disorientation. I was being called out, again. Twice in one night. Something was happening. Something I couldn't deny. A challenge to what I was doing surrounding myself with the signs of black cultural forms.

Photographs, it has often been said, both objectify and subjectify what they depict. They atomize time, disconnecting past from present. A picture may tell a thousand words, but words have ultimate power over photographs because each photograph is just a fragment: it needs words to assign it a context, and this context may change along with the message of the image.

originally posted by xowie

Baltimore City Paper: Funny Paper, November 24-30, 2003

The cavemen have a strange and halting conversation about how thankful they are for freedom of speech. The last B.C. was this clunky was on Nov. 10, when Johnny Hart ran a gag about a crescent-moon-adorned outhouse that some observers took to be a veiled slur against Islam. At the time, Funny Paper wasn't sure if Hart was guilty or not, but the very awkwardness of the strip made us suspicious. Plus it wasn't funny. Not that that proves anything about B.C. But we're going to have to add this Thanksgiving strip to the court file. If Hart wasn't insulting Islam, why's he taking the First Amendment now? His defense two weeks ago was that he hadn't said anything offensive in the strip. Now he appears to be saying that he had the right to say what he didn't say. Which is it, Johnny? Victim or martyr?

It is not about getting back in touch with my masculine side. It is not about getting in touch with my feminine side or my social side or my college side or my macho grunting drunken hangover side. I am not in a frat. It's about, very simply, the human side.

originally posted by xowie

How the White House Fooled NPR by NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin.

They had four different varieties. I asked them what the mildest one was and they recommended the Mexicans. Within 15 minutes I started to get this warm, tingly feeling. Within half an hour the market had become this vibrant and colourful place.

The Guardian: High times in magic mushroom business - and it's perfectly legal. Mycology in the U.K.

Please watch the Where’d The Cheese Go fan video.

Am I Infected? A Complete Guide to Testing for HIV.

originally posted by xowie

New York Times: Frank Rich: America Tunes In for the Money Shot

People are turned on by the Jackson story because it's about sex, specifically pedophilia, at a time when the sexual fetishization of children is not limited to whatever may or may not have happened at Mr. Jackson's ranch. If a mass audience can fixate on whether or not Britney Spears, a singer first marketed as a devoutly Baptist schoolgirl, has lost her virginity, it is no wonder that the Jackson sideshow would move to the center ring and become a main event.

So if anything of value is to come from this circus, let's drop the pretense that it is about something as lofty as the American system of justice or even the lure of fame. The public, while purporting to be outraged by the crime of child abuse, is hypocritically slobbering over every last speculative pornographic detail used to fill in the supposed contours of that abuse; cable news ratings immediately shot up by double digits. And those who are now taking to the public stage to intone gravely about pedophilia in the Jackson show are often trading in titillation themselves; you haven't lived until you've heard Larry King bandy about the word "penetration."

Grooming an ELF: How Tre Arrow turned Jake Sherman into an “eco-terrorist” by Carlton Smith.

originally posted by xowie

What’s up with Trader Joe’s selling (what appears beyond doubt to be) re-branded Amy’s frozen pizzas? And then marking the box “sold and distributed exclusively by…”? I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that I suspect TJ’s just rebrands generic packaged foods. I’m sure it’s tasty and I’m glad it’s cheap – I just wonder why people who turn their noses up at Sun Glory brand canned corn are thrilled to give Trader Joe’s the same .59 for the same can.

Is Santa gay?

originally posted by xowie

Once slaughtered, the turkeys have to suffer one more indignity before arriving in your grocer's meat case. Because of their monotonous diet, their flesh is so bland that processors inject them with saline solution and vegetable oils, improving "mouthfeel" while at the same time increasing shelf life and adding weight.

The New York Times Op-Ed: About a Turkey. The author wants to persuade you to seek out a turkey which didn't suffer the indignities of a factory farm for your Thanksgiving meal, if only because it may actually taste like turkey. Regardless of your intent, the accompanying graphic alone is worth your click.

Hello A’s Fans

They came for the Muslims, and I did not speak up.

Sam's most recent profile is directed toward men and women both and states that she's interested only in friendship. ''My intention was to meet girls -- because I know basically no women in New York at all,'' she said. She received only two responses from women, one of whom, Katherine, she met. ''Katherine proceeded to buy me far more drinks than was sensible and then insisted that I come and hang out at her apartment,'' Sam recalled. ''So the one time I went on an Internet date and was drunkenly taken advantage of, it was by a woman.''

originally posted by xowie

A life where TiVo has always existed

She gets quite confused when we are watching a non-TiVo TV, and she asks to watch ''a kids show'', and we have to explain that this TV won't do what ours at home does. We've sometimes shortened this explanation to ''This TV is broken'', which she seems to accept, and will wait until we get home to watch our ''fixed'' TV.

My son, too, expects every TV he sees to be able to deliver him a choice of episodes of Dora, Little Bill, or Blue's Clues on his command.

What part of No do ya still not understand? Date rape in the time of Kobe, roofies and Girls Gone Wild by Judith Lewis, with bonus ‘toon by Ellen Forney.

originally posted by xowie

Forest fires and the fire threat of conifers killed by beetles have been in the news. Earlier this year, when Colorado had a number of forest fires, a newscast said that of all the thousands of acres Colorado has lost to fires this year, 10 times as many have been lost to bark beetles, for which there is no control. What are bark beetles, should we care, and are they a problem here?

The ravages of these insects in the West are a problem of our own creation. Fire is a constant in the ecosystems of these pine woodlands, and for decades fires have been suppressed. Before fire suppression, Western forests were naturally very thin stands of trees that were widely spaced. The trees in them represented a great variety of age categories because they were really the few survivors of one or more fires.

Fire suppression changed all that. Now many of the forests are dominated by trees of a very narrow age range. They grow much closer together. They compete with each other for water.

When drought is a factor, as it has been for the past several years, trees are stressed beyond their limits. Enter the mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae. It attacks many species of pine under stress but is particularly fond of ponderosa pine, which happens to be the most widespread and adaptable pine in the West. The result is widespread death of huge areas of pine forest.

Horticulturist Scott Aker answers your gardening questions.

"The new group is called the Groonies, because they happen to live in a town where [Data], the Chinese kid, lives ... and he's got an electronics repair shop and all the kids hang out at his shop. He has this Chinese accent and he calls the Goonies the Groonies, and so the new kids call themselves the Groonies, until they get into a situation where the old Goonies have to save the new Groonies, or vice versa."

The 'Goonies' sequel is certainly off on the wrong foot.

We were sitting around the table, adults yapping and ignoring the kids and out of the corner of my eye I see Zoe, my 4-year-old,take a handful of hot rice from her plate and, in slow motion, throw it at her 6-year-old sister Ruby. But instead of jumping up to squash the thing, I sat there mesmerized, watching. "She's never thrown food before," I thought to myself. "This is a rite of passage, the primal launch."

Salon.com: Letting my kids go crazy

• Shamanic Verses, by Erik Davis
• Daniel Pinchbeck on iboga: "Ten Years of Therapy in One Night"
• MetaFilter: Ten years of therapy in one night
• MetaFilter: Iboga and Ibogaine
• Daniel Pinchbeck's breakingopenthehead.com

Okay, I get all that — but what was on that mini-disc?

Recently in The New York Times

• Nature: A Classic Tale of Girl Meets Squash
• Going With the Flow, Tech Nouveau Arrives
• In Japan, Rethinking the Shoe Box

On his second night in Iraq, one month ago, Sergeant Pogany, 32, saw an Iraqi cut in half by a machine gun. The sight disturbed him so much, he said, he threw up and shook for hours. His head pounded and his chest hurt. "I couldn't function," Sergeant Pogany said in an interview on Tuesday in his lawyer's office in Colorado Springs, not far from Fort Carson. "I had this overwhelming sense of my own mortality. I kept looking at that body thinking that could be me two seconds from now." When he informed his superior that he was having a panic attack and needed to see someone, Sergeant Pogany said he was given two sleeping pills and told to go away. A few days later, Sergeant Pogany was put on a plane and sent home. Now he faces a possible court-martial. If convicted, the punishment could range from a dock in pay to death.

My flight arrived in New York at 2 p.m. on Sept. 26, 2002. I had a few hours to wait until my connecting flight to Montreal. This is when my nightmare began. I was pulled aside at immigration and taken to another area. Two hours later some officials came and told me this was regular procedure -- they took my fingerprints and photographs. Then some police came and searched my bags and copied my Canadian passport. I was getting worried, and I asked what was going on, and they would not answer. I asked to make a phone call, and they would not let me. Then a team of people came and told me they wanted to ask me some questions. One man was from the FBI, and another was from the New York Police Department. I was scared and did not know what was going on. I told them I wanted a lawyer. They told me I had no right to a lawyer, because I was not an American citizen. They asked me where I worked and how much money I made. They swore at me, and insulted me. It was very humiliating. They wanted me to answer every question quickly. They were consulting a report while they were questioning me, and the information they had was so private -- I thought this must be from Canada. I told them everything I knew. They asked me about my travel in the United States. I told them about my work permits, and my business there. They asked about information on my computer and whether I was willing to share it. I welcomed the idea, but I don’t know if they did. They asked me about different people, some I know, and most I do not.

hello, typepad: Shouldn’t Mo Vaughn have been on that last train?

Jung/MBTI test. Another.

originally posted by xowie

Unbelievable Moroccan Trance this week at Coco’s thing.

originally posted by xowie

MacSlash and Rael Dornfest offer notes from the O’Reilly OS X Conference on a digital home session.

Remotion by Stuart Cormie.

I recount that last part to her -- Delicate and clean, she sits sipping coffee from a chintzy cup -- After an age, the hand holding it starts to shake and I watch tears form at the corners of her brown alive eyes -- "How the hell did you find out?" Ma whispers and before I even start to try to explain she tells me that it is true I am indeed Kerouac's son (she being 'Kathleen' but in reality Catherine) and that (to complete the tale) as soon as Jack discovers she is with-child he disappears never (by her) to be seen again -- And Ma is left alone to raise me eventually meeting Karl whom I always assumed was my real dad but who clearly isn't (and he's no longer around either).

I wonder then what Jack would have made of a son like me -- a boy so ... straight -- and the man he became, so responsible (until now that is) -- his very antithesis -- Shamed, probably, by my lack of resolve.

"Please Don't Kill The Freshman: A Memoir," by Zoe Trope excerpted at Salon.com.

Camped out in front of my locker like a homeless person. Waiting for a security guard to yell at me. They pass by numerous times and do not even look at me. I should be in class. Instead, I open Bukowski's "Tales of Ordinary Madness" and read with a look of confusion on my face. I find this beautiful. No. one. notices ... Cherry Bitch lets me wear her cat-eyed glasses. I feel silly and vain and I like it. I walk home and eventually kiss the Wonka Boy (supposed to be gay). He shoves his tongue in my mouth anxiously, awkwardly. Too much like a child ripping open a shiny Christmas present only to be disappointed. Curry wore a candy necklace today and I tried to bite off some candy and ended up making his neck bleed. What a tragedy. My hands are cold. My feet hurt. Career week only gets worse, I think. Tomorrow we have to write notes to the presenters we saw today (like the woman from State Farm who tried to convince us that selling insurance was a fun, interesting career field ... LYING WHORE). That could take at least two hours ... Vivarin. I believe this calls for Vivarin.

misbehaving.net “is a weblog about women and technology. It’s a celebration of women’s contributions to computing; a place to spotlight women’s contributions as well point out new opportunities and challenges for women in the computing field.”

Parents, children, and other humans should check out Dru Blood's fantastic posts on breastfeeding and vaccinations.

We'll be driving along, and all of a sudden, I'll say: ''Did you hear that? That was a funny lyric.'' And he'll say: ''No, I didn't hear that. I was listening to the groove.''

The New York Times Magazine: Doing It Her Way, questions for Edie Brickell.

Zebrahead—all original members intact—are about to release their third album, MFZB (it stands for Motherfucking Zebrahead, they tell us), and it’s their best one yet, which is just unfucking believable, but no less unfucking believable than the fact they’re still on a major label. This band is invincible! I think they’re stalking you!

originally posted by xowie

"The Bells of Balangiga have as much significance to the Filipino people as the Liberty Bell does to the American people," said Rodel Rodis, San Francisco Community College trustee and organizer of the event, to the gathering of about 50 in the church.

originally posted by xowie

I have always believed that what is now widely considered one of slavery's worst legacies — the Southern "one-drop" rule that indicted anyone with black blood as a nigger and cleaved American society into black and white with a single stroke — was also slavery's only upside. Of course I deplore the motive behind the law, which was rooted not only in white paranoia about miscegenation, but in a more practical need to maintain social order by keeping privilege and property in the hands of whites. But by forcing blacks of all complexions and blood percentages into the same boat, the law ironically laid a foundation of black unity that remains in place today. It's a foundation that allows us to talk abstractly about a "black community" as concretely as we talk about a black community in Harlem or Chicago or South-Central (a liberty that's often abused or lazily applied in modern discussions of race). And it gives the lightest-skinned among us the assurance of identity that everybody needs to feel grounded and psychologically whole — even whites, whose public non-ethnicity is really ethnicity writ so large and influential it needs no name.

LA Weekly: Columns: CakeWalk: Black Like I Thought I Was

Tristan Louis says yesterday's big news is about Apple's cross-platform DRM and some logical progressions.

As predicted, Apple introduced a version of Itunes for windows today. A lot will be written about how this solidifies Apple's lead in the digital music player market but what many may be overlooking is how Apple is pushing its own version of Digital Rights Management into a wider market. I suspect this is a strategy similar to the one they used in the early 1990s to make quicktime a strong contender for digital video.

While companies from Intel to Microsoft are talking about how they plan to implement digital rights in the future and are taking tentative steps in that direction, Apple is working on a strategy that covers multiple platforms beginning today. The ITunes music store may be an interesting story in terms of the consumer market but it seems to me that there is also an interesting play at hand for a business to business model. If Apple succeeds in its implementation of the music store (and there is little doubt that they will), they could turn around and start offering a set of products and services to organizations dealing in digital goods. (...)

I am Looking for the code numbers in the yellow cap game that were to be postmarked by Dec. 31,2003. Where do I obtain a list of numbers? Can you E-mail me a list of winning codes. Thank you Jay Heath

Here is the full article, keen and insightful, for your convenience:

One afternoon in March 1983, Steve Jobs, the brash 28-year-old founder of Apple Computer, stood on a Manhattan rooftop terrace overlooking the Hudson River. He faced John Sculley, the 44-year-old president of Pepsi, whom he very much wanted to recruit and uttered a line that's become a Silicon Valley legend:

"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?" Sculley later recalled in his autobiography.

Twenty years later, it turns out changing the world occasionally includes selling sugar water.

The very same Steve Jobs, now somewhat older and grayer, proudly announced a huge marketing deal with Pepsi on Thursday to promote Apple's newly expanded iTunes Music Store.

The irony is hard to miss.

Jobs is famously vegetarian, reportedly subsisting on a diet largely confined to fruits and nuts. He's never seen drinking anything other than bottled water during his press events -- including Thursday's rock-star-studded show at the Moscone Center West in San Francisco.

I can't say for sure, but I'd bet Jobs' personal consumption of Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Sierra Mist -- the three soft drinks covered in the agreement with Pepsi-Cola North America -- is zero.

Well, as Apple said in its ads, sometimes you have to think different.

Pepsi will sell 300 million special bottles in February and March with distinctive yellow caps. Underneath one in three caps will be a code number winners can use to download a free song from iTunes that would otherwise cost 99 cents.

The offer doesn't include the modest 12-ounce cans of Pepsi or Sierra Mist, with a mere 150 calories and 41 grams of sugar. You have to buy either a 20-ounce bottle with 250 calories and 68 grams of sugar, or a one-liter bottle with 425 calories and 115 grams of sugar.

Soft drinks are heavily advertised to children and teenagers, also a target market for the music industry, and are a significant factor in a nationwide obesity epidemic. Diet Pepsi, of course, doesn't have sugar, but does contain caffeine and steers children away from healthier drinks such as milk and fruit juice.

The iTunes Music Store, launched in April for users of Apple's own Macintosh, is already very successful and could reshape the future of the recording industry now that it's available on Windows. It's just too bad the values of Steve Jobs in 2003 have moved so far from those of Steve Jobs in 1983.

I actually had people developing hardware to work with the Lisa. We knew that the Z8000 chip was coming out which was a 16-bit chip from Zylog. We wanted to be ahead of everybody. I had this guy who made a 16-bit compiler inside of the Apple II which is 8-bit. We got the configuration from Zylog ahead of time. So then it got released, but it got released to the Navy and they didn't have any chips to spare us. We were actually able to complete the job by getting some chips that were rejects. They worked enough for us to finish for development.

applematters interviews Herbie Hancock.

Stride and Seek: Four walks in Washington.

Salon.com Life | The Army be thuggin' it

"When I saw the Source was teaming up with the Army, I was outraged," says Bakari Kitwana, former executive editor of the Source and author of "The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture." "It's a betrayal of their readership. The military has historically used African-Americans, while the country has not done justice to African-Americans."

Ask Auntie Pinko

Your parents ask "If there is a minority scholarship, why isn't there a Caucasian scholarship?" and there is a simple answer: there are hundreds (heck, thousands!) of them. They are sponsored by Chambers of Commerce in majority white communities, American Legion and VFW Posts with mostly white membership, fraternal organizations comprised of white people, churches in denominations that are almost exclusively white (the neighborhood churches on Sunday morning are among the most segregated institutions in America!) and many other organizations. Their scholarships are aimed at residents of white communities, the children of overwhelmingly white memberships, high achievers in schools that are almost entirely white, etc. In addition, most American colleges and universities have a special affirmative action program that benefits white people highly disproportionately - it's called the 'legacy preference.'

Apple: Hip Hop

In conjunction with the release of the third generation of the iPod, Apple and TBWA/Chiat/Day/Los Angeles have unveiled an eye-popping new campaign for the iconic MP3 player. In both print and television executions, the effort shows figures silhouetted against brightly colored backgrounds, getting their grooves on with the help of what -- even in three colors -- is obviously the Apple iPod. For the television campaign, Chiat/Day turned to @radical.media director Dave Meyers, who is fresh off winning the Video of the Year award at this year's MTV Video Music Awards for his clip for Missy Elliott's "Work It." Meyers previously worked with Chiat/Day on the production number "Jimmy & Jenny" for former client Kmart. In the new iPod spot, titled "Hip Hop," the shadowy dancers shake it to the track "Hey Mama" by The Black Eyed Peas.

New York Times: Many Speakers at Meeting Cite Racism on S.I.

"White racism is the order of the day here," said the Rev. John Johnson, pastor of a church in the Clifton section and a longtime community activist who warned that "a riot is coming to this island." "Open society has never existed on Staten Island," he told the audience of about 50 people. "We need a federal prosecutor to come in here. Civil rights are being violated."

Here's the story Arnold doesn't want you to hear. The biggest single threat to Ken Lay and the electricity lords is a private lawsuit filed last year under California's unique Civil Code provision 17200, the "Unfair Business Practices Act." This litigation, heading to trial now in Los Angeles, would make the power companies return the $9 billion they filched from California electricity and gas customers.

It takes real cojones to bring such a suit. Who's the plaintiff taking on the bad guys? Cruz Bustamante, Lieutenant Governor and reluctant leading candidate against Schwarzenegger.

Now follow the action. One month after Cruz brings suit, Enron's Lay calls an emergency secret meeting in L.A. of his political buck-buddies, including Arnold. Their plan, to undercut Davis (according to Enron memos) and "solve" the energy crisis -- that is, make the Bustamante legal threat go away.

How can that be done? Follow the trail with me.

While Bustamante's kicking Enron butt in court, the Davis Administration is simultaneously demanding that George Bush's energy regulators order the $9 billion refund. Don't hold your breath: Bush's Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is headed by a guy proposed by … Ken Lay.

But Bush's boys on the commission have a problem. The evidence against the electricity barons is rock solid: fraudulent reporting of sales transactions, megawatt "laundering," fake power delivery scheduling and straight out conspiracy (including meetings in hotel rooms).

So the Bush commissioners cook up a terrific scheme: charge the companies with conspiracy but offer them, behind closed doors, deals in which they have to pay only two cents on each dollar they filched.

Problem: the slap-on-the-wrist refunds won't sail if the Governor of California won't play along. Solution: Re-call the Governor.

Either Greg Palast is a liar or we've all been hoodwinked.

Monterey County Herald: Dharma Dumb: How four guys stumbled about while trying to conquer the Matterhorn. Why this is in the Sports section I can not tell you, but I’m glad that it is.

... And I thought, "Boy, this is a fucking easy job — the guy gets to read magazines and write about them. That's got to be one of the greatest jobs for somebody who loves magazines."

Mediabistro interviews Peter Carlson, who writes "The Magazine Reader" for The Washington Post.

Dada represented everything horrible about mainstream music, predicting the laughable self-importance of helium-light R.E.M. ripoffs like Counting Crows, but it turns out there's a song on this record worth about as much as a fish taco: "Dim".

It's stupid, predictable college rock, the sort of easily hummed, whiny four-chord crap you can wake up hung-over and still have stuck in your head, but like those Dave Matthews hits you download because they remind you of high school, you just don't talk about it. If you don't know anyone at the store personally, wedge a dollar copy of Puzzle between the Matador promos your local music director sold back and enjoy this laughably catchy, Friends-esque pop song.

Whoever wrote Pitchfork's Castoffs and Cutouts: the top 50 most common used CDs (an unscientific study) has excellent taste in questionable music.

So, friend of mine is running pre-relese version of Mc OS X 10.3 (“Pnther”) nd is hving some inexplicble trouble with his keybord in which he cn produce cpitl ‘A’ but not the lowercse version of the populr vowel. Neither he nor I hve clue how to begin troubleshooting this isse, so ny dvice would be extremely welcome. Thnk you.

Do you think they clean those Slurpee machines?

Philly.com - Study: Wrong impressions helped support Iraq war. This is just so awesome on so many levels I can’t explain it.

washingtonpost.com: Canadian PM Mulls Smoking Marijuana When He Retires

Chretien, 69, said in an interview published on Friday that he might give pot a try once it is no longer a criminal offense -- presumably after he retires in February. Under the new law, pot users would only pay a fine if caught with small amounts.

"I don't know what is marijuana. Perhaps I will try it when it will no longer be criminal. I will have my money for my fine and a joint in the other hand," he said in an interview with the Winnipeg Free Press.

Garlic, the Brightest Bulb (washingtonpost.com)

Why not just break apart a head from the supermarket and plant it? Unless it is organic, it may have been treated with a growth retardant to prevent sprouting, and it may not be the best variety for your particular soil or climate. Garlic is now entering a long-overdue era of gourmet discovery, so that there are many different ones to try.

"I have the image of a guard on each side grabbing one arm and lifting both feet off the ground, and the legs are scrambling for purchase on the ground, and hence kinked like a frog's — but that's just my mental image," says Mike Agnes, editor in chief of Webster's New World Dictionaries.

Hop, Two, Three, Four: Frog-Marching Into the Lexicon (washingtonpost.com)

Once the war began, I was driving to work and listening to Sean Hannity tell me what an asshole I was for not supporting it when I saw a sign hanging from a tree that said "Remind Me: "What did the people of Baghdad have to do with 9/11?", or something very close to that. (If anyone has a picture of this sign, PLEASE send it to me.) This was precisely how I felt about the war, (or rather, the bombing campaign.) I couldn't help thinking how, out of all the messages, images and "information" I'd been receiving in the media, the one that rang most true for me was a hand-painted sign on the freeway. And then it finally dawned on me: out of all the news, commentary and "information" being fed to me about the war, that sign was the only thing that had been generated by an individual, and not a corporation.

Will Listamatic and Layout-o-matic bring clean standards-based design to the masses? Stay tuned!

The Official Commie Webpage

Modern Furniture Design on Metafilter.

“The nation’s largest telemarketing association yesterday said its members would comply with the government’s do-not-call list on Wednesday, even though a federal judge has ruled that the registry is unconstitutional.” Group Vows To Abide by No-Calls List (TechNews.com)

In recent Times:

• Street Scene in Gaza: An Outdoor Gallery of Gore and slide show: Street Scene in Gaza

• The Whitest Black Girl on TV

  Call it what you will — nouveau blackface, hip-hop-face, or simply an "act black" routine — the white-as-black character that Ms. Regen has perfected is fast becoming an American comedic staple. In four recent films — "Malibu's Most Wanted," starring Jamie Kennedy; "Bringing Down the House," with Steve Martin; Chris Rock's "Head of State"; and the jailhouse rap sequence in "Austin Powers in Goldmember" — ultra-white people earn laughs by using phrases like "fo' shizzle," boogieing down to gangsta rap and wearing extra-large basketball jerseys.

• The Role of the Delete Key in Blog is not about the Delete Key. It's about the desperate need to translucently "Track Changes" (as promoted by Rebecca and Cory and implemented by Brent and Mark) (which I am guilty of overlooking) and the associated unpacking of authorship; "...but the editors are committed to being available whenever I am ready to post" — huh?

• Mahogany

• Sneaker Stories: Following the Trail Of a Cultural Shift

  At one point, his editor asked him to cite the year, color and variation for every sneaker in the book. "That's virtually impossible," he told her, "but I'll do it."

Clean Sheets Erotica Magazine: Sex in the Blogosphere, 2003 reviews the new sex blogs and sees that they are good.

The very first ad for the Apple II.

When this ad ran, Jobs got a letter from a woman in Oregon, who felt it was sexist, so the ad was revised for subsequent insertions to show a woman using a sophisticated display and a man (me) with a low-resolution display. We got no further complaints.

I hardly ever get asked about music. I do, however, get asked about the 'Addicted to Love' video and my suits on a daily basis.

ABCNEWS.com : Robert Palmer Never Meant to Turn Us On

Full Posts + Comments RSS Template for Movable Type: everybody’s doing it.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti: It is really much more interesting today than in the 50's. There has been all of this mythologizing of the 50's and the Beat generation in San Francisco and so forth, but it has been wildly overdone, because it was a really depressing period, I thought, on account of the general repressive atmosphere and the political climate. The most interesting writing now is coming out of third world authors and women -- it takes hunger and passion to create great books.

invisible ink “is a weekly radio zine that features stories and commentaries from my favorite local (Bay Area) authors and my indie press heroes,” writes producer Roman Mars. I was so hoping to discover an interview with Aaron of Cometbus in the show archives, but no such luck. Shows are available in real audio at the website, and are being converted to mp3 and posted at epitonic.

Fametracker :: The Fame Audit :: John Ritter

I cheerfully tolerated Three's A Crowd, the ill-advised spin-off that was almost as ill-advised and unnecessary as AfterM*A*S*H*. I watched all the episodes of Hooperman, the before-its-time dramedy with no laugh track. And I will always sit through Hero At Large, the 1980 movie in which Ritter plays a guy who's mistaken for a superhero, whenever I catch it on cable, which is increasingly infrequently these days. (...)

[It seems] somehow fitting that Ritter should be overshadowed even in death, because he was often overshadowed, or at least taken for granted, in much of his life.

Blindness Of The Majority @ OliverWillis.Com

We (the public-at-large) *want* to be colorblind, which is at least a step in the right direction. We need to work towards the goal in which race no longer matters to anyone--although I personally doubt this will happen until cosmetic nanotech happens, and we can all be Star-Bellied Sneetches or not, at will. (Contrast the randomwalks view, in which everyone is achingly conscious of their race at all times, and how it impacts their value as a person. Black= self-image ++. White = selfimage --. Asian/Hispanic... *shrug*. Notice how people (and ESPECIALLY randomwalks) never talk about race in any terms other than black and white.) [anonymous commenter]/January 4, 2002 10:51 PM

This farewell to Galileo reminds me that someday I will love baseball.

The Conshohockon store is only the second IKEA unit to organize merchandise departmental grids. First-time customers will be directed onto the familiar IKEA trail, a traffic pattern designed to lead them through the entire store. But, with just a little familiarity, Cashman said, shoppers will be able to easily reach individual departments such as kitchen or lighting. So the new store becomes easier to navigate for the shopper who is accessorizing a room rather than organizing one from the ground up. To make things even easier, IKEA has repositioned the cafe at its new Philly metro location. With a central position that looks out across the store, it is an ideal point from which to plan a shopping excursion.

David: You'll get a free trip around the White House. You say, 'I wanna come and see it,' and they say. 'Oh yes, please come along.' I mean there aren't many people who can do that - you know, go and have a quick look around the Oval office. But that's about it. That, and maybe a restaurant reservation. And there's nothing else! Believe it, there is nothing else fame's good for.

The Daily Gullet: Going Wild in Urban America

In addition to figs, I also ate apples, passion fruit, guavas, citrus fruits, fish, seaweed, arugula, and forty or so other wild foods that I gathered and hunted in and around the town of Isla Vista, California, during my last quarter at U.C. Santa Barbara. I was living off the land in an urban setting, and "My Project," as I called it, was my preoccupation for 10 long weeks.

The Journal News, serving Westchester, Rockland and Putnam Counties in New York: Inside IKEA

Although IKEA is associated with a streamlined modern style emphasizing bright colors, bold patterns and wood a shade paler than blond, the company actually has four distinct style groups:

• Scandinavian is reminiscent of that look made popular during the 1950s, wood stained to mimic teak and the use of minimum color.
• Young Swede is geared toward a more youthful customer, either single or with a young family, with unfinished woods customers can personalize, pale wood, strong color and more daring designs.
• Contemporary reflects current trends, which now include such '70s hallmarks as minimalism, bold colors and graphics.
• Country features more traditional wood furniture, sometimes painted white, floral fabrics, and, recently, more Swedish folkloric patterns on rugs and embroidered pillows.

Mercury News: Down-to-earth designs

After testing more traditional designs, flowery fabrics and cushions, the company returned to its core product line. ``We started to dilute our identity. I would prefer that we contribute with something else,'' Simonsson-Berge said.

But Ikea did have to make some adjustments for its U.S. audience. Beds here are larger and mattresses softer. Glasses had to be bigger, too, because we like ice in our drinks. Platters and plates were enlarged to hold Thanksgiving turkey.

Ikea replaces on average 20 percent of its product line every year, said Simonsson-Berge, and the hot category right now is ``the green room.'' That's indoor-outdoor furniture. ``Whether you have a garden or not, the outdoor atmosphere is good for your well-being,'' she said. ``People want more natural living.''

Rattan and wicker have turned out to be the raw material chameleons, she said, working well with either traditional or modern decors.

The company has faced a number of scathing criticisms, including an environmental crisis in the late 80s which led to a 'green' revolution within the company, which now prides itself on innovative manufacturing processes which minimize the environmental impact the blue-and-yellow giant has. Equally concerning was the founder's connection to Per Engdahl, the notorious Nazi sympathizer. I suppose those blonde-haired-blue-eyed Aryan types all band together, but I was still shocked at the torrid underbelly of the friendly furniture chain. However, I can much more easily stomach the management of the modern IKEA chain, which is owned by the charitable, Netherland-based Stichting Ingka Foundation. What a convenient excuse for unfettered consumerism -- it's all for charity!

Epinions.com review of IKEA: Welcome to Teutonic Design Supremacy World.

Chile, Carmenere do well together.

The sun will rise briefly over the [South] pole on Tuesday, the spring equinox, for the first time in months.

Crew on Way to Rescue South Pole Worker (washingtonpost.com)

N.Va.’s Land Of Plenty Learns To Do Without (washingtonpost.com)

"It amounts to a petri dish that is incubated at an ideal temperature," said James Warfield, the Water Authority's executive officer. "We create an environment that bacteria like. If it's there, we want to know about it."

Tangier is on the temperate northwest coast of Africa, just 10 miles from Spain, across the Strait of Gibraltar, and washed in the breezes coming off both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. But to the average Tanjawi, Europe is a distant dream. Tangier, population 600,000, is extremely poor, almost entirely Muslim, and, like many African cities, growing rapidly. Tangier is a place where you see an amputee child hunched on the sidewalk with a begging cup beside the dusty stub of his truncated leg. Much of Morocco's homegrown hashish travels through the port here, and the quieter beaches outside of town are a prime launch point for destitute Africans who risk their lives, and pathetically seek First World fortune, by sneaking makeshift boats across the strait, toward Spain. Old movies don't tell the whole story.

Under the Sheltering Sky (washingtonpost.com)

This week, I met the Sharif from the Clash song.

Rock the Casbah

‘Homeless Hacker’ speaks out by Declan McCullagh.

dwell forums: unusual flooring materials

Re: Taping of Windows During Storm

As for tape, I have heard more people than not say it is not worth it. It may help with glass cleanup a little bit, but my personal experience in Florida says you could use your preparation time much better by boarding up (this takes a lot of time.... be organized before the storm); bagging your computers, electronics, and important papers/photographs/heirlooms and getting your post-storm cleanup and repair supplies in order.

National Hurricane Center / Tropical Prediction Center is the mother of Isabel news.

Hurricane Hunters: Cyberflight

As your eyes adjust to the glare of sunlight, you gaze out at one of the most awesome scenes in nature: the “stadium effect” inside the eye. A solid wall of clouds circles around the WC-130, as though you are floating in a giant football stadium made of clouds. You are inside a giant well that opens up miles above your head into a bright, blue sky. Congratulations…you’ve just joined an exclusive group: those few people who have entered the eye of a hurricane.

One in ten people like to cover themselves entirely with the duvet.

macosxhints - Saving and restoring tabs in Safari

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: IE, Flash, and patents: here comes trouble

Besides paying over half a billion dollars to the patent holder, Microsoft is supposed to cripple its market-leading browser so that IE/Windows will no longer seamlessly play Flash, Quicktime, RealVideo, or Adobe Acrobat files, Java applets, and other rich media formats. Once the company does this, any site that uses these technologies will no longer work in the browser most people use.

"Three's Company" looks goofy enough in memory, basing almost every plot on Roper or Furley overhearing something and completely taking it out of context, but the writers get credit for making their slapsticky situations feel real. And Ritter gets the most credit, for carrying the whole goofy enterprise on his broad shoulders. His Jack was never cruel, never a jerk. You could write a book about the show's attitudes towards gays and women, but you never got a sense that any of that came from Ritter.

Macintosh: How to Create a Small Ethernet Network - “This document explains three simple types of Ethernet network that you can create in your home or office.”

I like the klockwerks.

Where have I seen this guide to turbans before? Oh, yeah.

“Every year we gaze enviously at the lists of the richest people in world. Wondering what it would be like to have that sort of cash. But where would you sit on one of those lists? Here’s your chance to find out.” [via Pop Culture Junk Mail]

28MM.ORG | Issue 010 | “Organic Matter” by Elena Kachuro-Rosenberg, Click!

Results Retracted On Ecstasy Study (washingtonpost.com)

Scientists at Johns Hopkins University who last year published a frightening and controversial report suggesting that a single evening's use of the illicit drug ecstasy could cause permanent brain damage and Parkinson's disease are retracting their research in its entirety, saying the drug they used in their experiments was not ecstasy after all.

Not believing in lawns is not the same thing as not having to mow them. Lawns to Gardens CONVERT!

commons-blog: Losing the Washington Commons

From one end of the Mall to the other, billboards and huge television monitors stream across the green lawn, promoting Vanilla Pepsi all in celebration of the first NFL game of the season. It seems particularly disgusting to me that the Mall, our nation's commons, is stripped of its value even for one day.

The event was deemed so auspicious that George W. Bush took yet more time off from fighting the war on terrorism to appear, via videotape, at the end of the concert and just before the game, in the manner of a TV huckster. He tried to make some connection between football and "the spirit that guides the brave men and women" of the military, much as the concert had done. He also said pro football "celebrates the values that make our country so strong." Like what, violence and greed? Then, in intense close-up, the leader of the Free World asked the trademarked rhetorical question, "Are you ready for some football?"

commons-blog: Coca-Cola Lobbyist Joins National PTA Board “A prominent lobbyist and pr flak employed by the Coca-Cola company has been tapped by the PTA to join its National Board of Directors, giving the company significant influence over an organization with a long history of participating in public school policy. The New York Times reported that John H. Downs, Jr., the company’s chief lobbyist and senior vp for public affairs, joined the PTA board on June 23.” Commercial Alert has an overview of the issue.

We urge you to give back Coca-Cola’s money. Then the National PTA will be able to speak with an uncompromised voice about health effects of junk food, and carry out its worthy mission.

Transblawg: Where IKEA gets the names

The Real Map of Europe names each country in its own (primary?) language—a simple democratic idea that delivers a blow to the anglocentric tradition.

As of this writing, an unplayable iTunes Music Store-encoded AAC file of Double Dutch Bus by Devin Vasquez is at auction for $15,099. I don’t think I’ve ever heard this song; have you?

Rebecca has a roundup of red wine recommendations. A bit late, I’d like to share a wine column in today’s Washington Post, “Where Are the New Everyday Reds?” Also of interest may be this list of wine weblogs Dr. Bacchus has collected. My mainstay is the (cheap!) Concha y Toro “Frontera” Cabernet Sauvignon, and I’ve recently been pleased by Bogle’s “Old Vine” Zinfandel as well as Lindemans Bin 45 Cabernet.

I think we’re just going to buy all of our furniture from IKEA. Have you seen the Drömminge sofa/bed?

NYT profile of Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture for Humanity.

I was thrilled to find this clock for $25. Design Within Reach within reach! I’ve just stumbled across George Nelson, who did some beautiful design.

She thought he was a liar—I think his personality, just standing there with that smirk on his face, and acting like he's this holy Christian, that's what really got her.

iTunes iSbogus

Steve Jobs says the Music Store is “revolutionizing music.” What an impoverished imagination he has. An expensive jukebox and a long-playing walkman aren’t revolutionary. A revolution in music will be when people stop buying music and start living it: when 25 cent donations support more musicians than CDs ever did, when payola’s dead and radio is commercial-free all day long, when every American highschool has a recording studio just cause they’re that cheap to set up. This can all happen right now.

Virginia Cooperative Extension Monthly Gardening Tips: August.

Wired News: Burning Man Never Gets Old

It was just one of those moments when you feel like everything is exactly as it’s supposed to be. You just had to be there. - John Perry Barlow

Modern windows is a new topic of discussion in the dwell forums.

Among the millions put out by the power loss last week were the nearly 600 designers and students attending the Industrial Designers Society of America's annual conference. When the hotel closed on Thursday because emergency generators had shut down, people who head design departments at corporations like I.B.M. and Motorola were put on the street for the night—at the mercy of their own designs, their consciences as professionals and whatever impromptu designing they cared to do.

Dear Nest Products. I'd like to place an order for the Herb chintz fabric.

The Memory Hole: White House Alters Webpages About Iraq Combat. [via BookNotes]

We were all there, for at least half an hour. They knew we were journalists. After they shot Mazen, they aimed their guns at us. I don't think it was accident.

I think I want this one.

The Work of Charles and Ray Eames (Library of Congress Exhibition), via Coudal’s MoOM.

Most folks were good natured, but hot. The breeze over the water seemed to disappear with the electricity. Merchants were selling water at gallons a minute, and at normal prices, too. More than a few people looked like heat stroke candidates: puffy red faces, clothing entirely sweat-soaked, a staggering, erratic walk. I bought two bottles of water, but I looked like I'd been fished out of the East River: covered in sweat, wet clothes, and the marks of pollution from where I'd climbed over barricades and up on bridge partitions to beat the crowds and take pictures.

There's a thing there that's got all the outside and it's got the momentum and it's going to move and it's going to demand certain forms and it's totally not embodied at all. There's no material to it yet and you feel absolutely that you're about to embody that, whatever your material is. I think painters feel that too. I remember Philip Guston talking that way. In fact he and I used to talk about paint and words to the extent that we weren't talking about paint and words anymore, we were talking about art, I mean, making that thing where we use all whatever materials we've been given to make it with. I remember some nights talking with him where we felt like it's absolutely up there somewhere and it's not paint and it's not words.

dwell forums: Why is it that people tend to choose traditional style homes over modern, contemporary homes?

artnet.com: Tripping on the Wall “Since the late 1980s, the New York artist Fred Tomaselli has been celebrated for visionary artworks made of intricately collaged images clipped from magazines and nature guides and also including, somewhat more notoriously, marijuana leaves, pharmaceutical pills and other literally mind-altering substances.”

Do you know who in the Bush administration is an ex-con? Or who never graduated from college? Can you guess the cabinet member who had an oil tanker named after them? Do you know whose nickname is "Scooter" and whose nickname is "Yoda?"

originally posted by beXn

LIFE Interview: Allen Ginsberg

Kerouac was all-American if anything. Neal Cassady was an all American kid, foot warts and all. But it really was Americana and Americanist, something in an older literary tradition that runs through Whitman and William Carlos Williams and Sherwood Anderson. There was that old Americanist tradition of recognition of the land and the people and the gawky awkward beauty of the individual eccentric citizen. Or as Kerouac said, "the old-time honesty of gamblers and straw hats." His 1959 [Playboy, June] article on "The Origins of the Beat Generation," that's his statement on what he intended, a kind of yea-saying Americana which was interpreted as some kind of negative complaining by the middle class who were themselves complaining. So yes, we were, or I was quite aware of the [cultural] impact. But so was Kerouac in "Origins of the Beat Generation" and in The Dharma Bums. He predicts a generation of long-haired kids with rucksacks. He predicts and asks for it.

Random Walk Generator

Humans have seemingly always been fascinated by random phenomena. Randomness is a pervasive component of our everyday lives. It characterizes the patterns of raindrops, shape and location of clouds, traffic on the freeway. It describes the selection of winning numbers in the lottery and day-to-day changes in the weather. The science of chaos says that everything began in pure randomness and will end that way.

The computer provides a means for the systematic extended study of randomness and pseudo-randomness that is impractical using simpler methods such as flipping coins or rolling dice. A graphics-oriented computer and a simple algorithm such as a two-dimensional random walk is ideal for the visual display and exploration of random principles. The random walk decision procedure, like the eight queens and knight's tour problems, predates computers. In one college finite math textbook (Kemeny et. al. , 1962) it is described in the context of an absorbing (i.e. terminating) Markov chain process wherein, at each decision point, only the most recent decision is considered when making the current one. Variations of the random walk method are currently used with computers to simulate systems in the fields of physics, biology, chemistry, statistics, marketing, population dynamics, and others. A bit of Internet prowling will unearth information on many current applications. An Alta Vista search on the key "random walk" generated 2988 hits, many of them redundant, but containing at least one hit for most of the current applications of the method. Sourcecode for various implementations is freely available on the net in languages ranging from Java to C to Lisp.

Stereo Images - Time for Space—“Experimenting here with a way to present stereo images on the screen by simply putting the right and left images in an animated gif.” [via MetaFilter]

"If I were to guess the drug trajectory of you and your friends," he says between bites of a burger in a cafe in New York City's East Village, "I'd say it was marijuana, acid, mushrooms, Ecstasy, coke, and/or speed."

Pretty close. Yet this wasn't the trajectory on which my largely middle- and upper-middle-class friends and I envisioned ourselves. Our organizing drug principles were more organic. Pot and 'shrooms were natural. Even acid, though made in a lab, seemed to be more about the mind than the body. We didn't do nasty, "dangerous" drugs like coke or meth or heroin. That shit was evil. Deadly, even. But E was different.

“This compilation of soldiers words, as published in the Christian Science Monitor, Evening Star, Los Angeles Times and several other publications, provides another side of the story of Occupied Iraq.”

I would like to cement this to the front of our house. Do you think someone would call the cops or something?

Technical Self-Employment Is A Fat Paycheck Waiting to Be Pocketed by Grant Barrett is a fantastic read.

“Naropa University is pleased to announce the inauguration of a low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. The program reflects the standards and qualities of the residential Writing & Poetics programs offered at Naropa since 1974, when The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at the (then) embryonic Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.” Naropa: MFA Creative Writing Online.

I really would like to stop working forever--never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now--and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I'd like to keep living with someone -- maybe even a man -- and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.

Ginsberg in the 50s

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility.  Businessmen are serious.  Movie
producers are serious.  Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

America, Allen Ginsberg. (Re: Allen Ginsberg on Time Magazine.)

Time magazine on Allen Ginsberg?

Meditation on the cover of Time magazine.

Before the work ethic was hijacked by the overwork ethic, there was a consensus in this country that work was a means, not an end, to more important goals. In 1910, President William Howard Taft proposed a two- to three-month vacation for American workers. In 1932, both the Democratic and Republican platforms called for shorter working hours, which averaged 49 a week in the 1920s. The Department of Labor issued a report in 1936 that found the lack of a national law on vacations shameful when 30 other nations had one, and recommended legislation. But it never happened. This was the fork in the road where the United States and Europe, which then had a similar amount of vacation time, parted ways.

Europe chose the route of legal, protected vacations, while we went the other -- no statutory protection and voluntary paid leave. Now we are the only industrialized nation with no minimum paid-leave law.

Matador is a Spanish-English machine translation system implemented following the Genereation-heavy Hybrid approach to Machine Translation (GHMT). What languages do you speak?

We started making a list of all we had to do to extricate ourselves: Sell our house. Sell our car. Find homes for Sarina's pet bird, rabbit and frogs. Pack up all of our furnishings and store them in a warehouse. Buy airline tickets. Cancel our Internet service, cell phone, DWP, gas, telephone, security, newspaper and other services. Find out about schools and pediatric medical care on Rarotonga.

Lorraine provides the latest update: “the place is coming slowly. we have to be out of the condo on the 31st, so we’ll be moving in then, finished or not. hopefully it will be mostly done. the painting is just about finished. and now the floors have to go in. but the bathroom has to be all put together, and that is going to take a while i think. oh well. ian loves the new house. and wants to go there everyday. he really wants to take a bath in the new bathtub we bought. and he can’t wait to bring all his toys over. mostly he just likes to be in the yard. he loves that. just being able to open the door and be outside in the sun and the grass. and there are always lots of sticks around. which is very important to him.”

“This spectacular ‘blue marble’ image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet. These images are freely available to educators, scientists, museums, and the public.” EO News: NASA Olympics Blue Marble Release; February 6, 2002. I’m minorly obsessed with images of Earth. I guess it’s the notion that observing ourselves from without can provide some perspective on within. Should we talk about the weather?

On Fridays and weekends, he performs on his wheels of steel: two turntables, speakers and a fader/mixer, all powered with a portable battery. The 27-year-old turntablist earns his living scratching and mixing funky beats here on the boardwalk.

"I got some hip hop, old school, new school, some drum and bass, acid jazz, dirty disco, old school classics," Hymn says. "There are no rules. It's just getting creative and funky."

Here’s our floorplan, from the 1954 sales brochure.

What people have to rethink is the role of the bathroom, not as the space to spend the least amount of their everyday lives but as a place to retreat and foster their spirituality.

I think two or three of these chairs and a nice bench would look great around a dining room table.

I’ve put up a photo album demonstrating our refined sense of interior design. The best way to look through the pics is to start in the boy’s room and click ‘« Previous’ to walk through the house.

The abundantly elegant What Do I Know has very nearly convinced me of what kind of lawn mower to buy.

"All my friends say I ought to put up a fence and charge people $2 a head, but that's not my way," Balestra said. "I'm enjoying this. People lying down in my wheat field, and wrapping their heads in foil."

It’s an American Basswood, aka Linden tree. They make blinds out of these. I’ll tell you what else I learn.

There is paint on walls. Tomorrow, pictures.

Reuters reports that while Bush was speaking, the residents of the local island of Goree were involuntarily rounded up at 6AM and held at a local football field until after Bush had left, to prevent them from protesting or otherwise exercising, you know, American-style freedoms that are the opposite of slavery.

“The Don DeLillo Society will not do your work for you. We have work of our own to do.”

We're going to have a few things done before we move in. We're tearing out the 'dog' carpet and putting in wood floors, painting the interior, and renovating the (busted) bathroom. It feels a little strange to be spending so much money on top of the cost of the mortgage, but I'm looking at it as an exercise in the pure experience of expressing power and control through expenditures. Put another way, we may never have another opportunity like this. In fact, blowing all of our savings and inheritance on things like tumbled natural stone-like floor tiles pretty much guarantees it, but I know you're with me on this one: those are fucking phenomenal tiles.

The new MacBytes.com looks like nothing so much as our dear Fark – just an observation.

What it always feels like to me is that while I always know my ancestors were slaves at some time, the slave masters, the slavers, the captors, and everyone else involved were these mysterious white people that have no connection to white people today.

I’ve been using Jen’s “post this” Movable Type bookmarklet for Safari for a couple weeks now and it’s quite refreshing. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a working bookmarklet and getting it back reminds me just how quick and easy it makes things. I have a slight improvement to share – this version puts any text you have selected into the ‘Entry Body’ field of the pop up window. (Be sure to check out the link above for good instructions on customizing the code to suit your needs.)

[post this]

I remember a sociology professor who worked at my university for a time. As a woman of color, she confronted her predominantly white classes with the admonition that white people can't say they're not racist until they compete against a black person in the job market. I thought it was an odd statement. Now I understood what she meant.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

originally posted by xowie

The Underground War in Gaza by Joe Sacco.

originally posted by xowie

He left behind an army of imitators and a catalogue of songs that people will be dusting off and singing for as long as they make guitars. For me personally, Woody is my hero of heroes and the only person on earth that I will go to my grave regretting that I never met.

originally posted by xowie

Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session. "They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.

originally posted by xowie

The tree grows in rich, moist, well-drained soil. The tough, fibrous inner bark has been used by Native American Indians and settlers in making rope, mats, and thongs. The wood is light and soft, and is well suited for working. Although rather weak, it has been used for cheap furniture, containers, beekeeping supplies, and various woodenware. Honeybees feed on the flowers, producing what is reputed to be a choice grade of honey. Birds eat the buds, small mammals eat the fruit, and several species feed on the bark and sprouts.

For the past few years, gullible American parents have unknowingly sent their “hard-to-handle” children to expensive offshore “behavior modification centers” where they are beaten and tortured.

• The last resort (part one)
• The last resort (part two)
• Life’s a beach when you’re bad
• Parents, shopping for discipline, turn to harsh programs abroad

originally posted by xowie

originally posted by xowie

“Instead of working, I spent the better part of a week reading over 15 different web comics in their entirety. What follows are the fruits of my labors, with a link to the comic, a rating (out of 5 stars), and a short review and description of the comic. Before we get to The List, we’ll take a brief look at the history of web comics, and provide some tips on finding those rare web comics that are actually good.” Web Comics Reviewed, Kuro5hin.org.

“William Burroughs, author of Junkie, Naked Lunch, and Cities of the Red Night, talks to Don Swaim in 1984 about his drug addiction, living in Tangiers, working as an exterminator, and his memories of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.” [link]

I like to imagine it was the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence and Gardner v. Texas that drove Lester Maddox and Strom Thurmond over the edge.

The mainstream press, after an astonishing two years of cowardice, is belatedly drawing attention to the unconscionable level of administrative deception. They seem surprised to find that when it comes to Iraq, the Bush administration isn't prone to the occasional lie of expediency but, in fact, almost never told the truth.

originally posted by xowie

According to a National Opinion Research Council poll taken in 2000, about half of whites in the United States believe that racial inequality is caused by a "lack of motivation and willpower on the part of blacks."

That just restates a centuries-old racial stereotype: that blacks are lazy and not too bright. An additional 25 years won't make it go away, either.

"The problem is not race; it's white supremacy," Paul Butler, a professor of law at George Washington University, said in an interview. "When most white people evolve to the point where race does not matter to them, we can start talking about ending affirmative action."

There is a certain xenophobia operating within the United States, and this is just a part of it.

"She crawls her way or stumbles or whatever to the fridge," Pauly said. "She doesn't want anyone there. I mean, last night I finally had a conversation with her, and she finally agreed last night, because she's mentally fine, even though she's Mitzi Shore — I mean Mitzi Shore's a little nuts, everyone that knows her knows that — but mentally she's actually sharp, when she's on, she's still that same person. So legally they can't take her away."

originally posted by xowie

"The next morning Dick came to class & in his coat he conseled a machedy," the boy wrote. "When the teacher told him to shut up he whipped it out & cut off her head. When the sub came 2 days later she needed a paperclip so she opened the droor. Ahh she screamed as she found Mrs. C's head in the droor."

originally posted by xowie

Judith Lewis hangs with the world’s next rock-girl idol, Brody Armstrong of the Distillers.

originally posted by xowie

Elliott of Elliott’s Amazing Juices dishes the dirt on his competitors in the beverage business.

Because Jews are afraid, and the institutions that should be helping them conquer their ignorance are instead stoking it to further solidify their grasp on Judaism’s future. The darker picture they paint of Judaism’s plight — the further synagogue membership dwindles, the greater Israel’s peril — the more money they raise. Every suicide attack on Israel and each negative report on intermarriage statistics lead to a surge in donations.

originally posted by xowie

VV: Regulars by Alison M. Rosen.

originally posted by xowie

Let's say you're in a crowded cafeteria, and you buy a cup of tea. And as you're about to sit down you see your friend way across the room. So you put the tea down and walk across the room and talk to your friend for a few minutes. Now, coming back to your tea, are you just going to pick it up and drink it? Remember, this is a crowded place and you've just left your tea unattended for several minutes. You've given anybody in that room access to your tea.

Why should your mind be any different?

Moroccan weavers use a multitude of designs. Sometimes they are of things from everyday life, such as a car or an animal. More often, they are geometric shapes -- stars, diamonds or zigzags. Weavers are very clever and imaginative in using patterns to decorate their work.

Elderly inhabitants recount that when Che was laid out in the hospital, campesinos who passed by and saw him affirmed that it was the figure of Christ. Today, people living in the area pray to Che and ask for miracles when they have personal problems, if they have lost an animal and, if there is a drought, for rain.

originally posted by xowie

Hillary greets everyone with a smile, as her eyes bulge big -- so big that the whites attain 360-degree clearance around her irises. To the people assembled, this expression means different things. To her fans, her eyes say, "I'm one of you--just a gal who likes to stop by Wal-Mart for a Sam's Choice cola and a $1.78 Nacho Chile Pie." To her moderate critics, they say, "Look at me, I'm almost human." To her Freeper-style critics, the eyes say, "Back off, or I'll ice you, just like I iced Vince Foster."

originally posted by xowie

At 27, in accordance with her faith, Mirza is a virgin, a nondrinker and a nonsmoker. She has never had a boyfriend, as it would be unacceptable to spend significant time with a man outside the bonds of marriage. ''I never make jokes about sex,'' she says. ''Because I've never had it.''

originally posted by xowie

Myron Krocek, one of the laid-off miners, takes the floor. He has 23 years of service in the salt mine. A big, bearded guy in tattered blue jeans, Krocek looks like an Old Testament prophet. "Cargill's a power-hungry ogre," Krocek says. "We've been illegally replaced by scabs, and Cargill's getting away with it. Mayor Jane sold us out. We've got to stick together and vote this contract down 100 percent. Sometimes you have to draw the line. It's a matter of principle."

originally posted by xowie

Alison M. Rosen on the death of Smile.

originally posted by xowie

"Anybody got extra tickets?" is the textbook line, but feel free to utilize iambic pentameter, poetry, or other variations. Make clear that you are looking for free tickets only. A handwritten sign can be effective as well; be careful not to get too ornate, as ticket-holders will wonder why you applied your funds to a sign rather than a ticket.

originally posted by xowie

Our man Woody in Havana. Response. (c/o LA Examiner)

originally posted by xowie

Our first computer was the Apple ][+ which my dad bought in large part because the guy who started the company attended his zendo. Particular pleasures included: Beagle Bros software, Ultima ][, text adventures, Brickout, 20 GOTO 10, PR # 6, Aztec, Wizardry, Wilderness Adventure, Ctrl-G, Castle Wolfenstein. There were many more, some of which I’ve relived lately with emulation software. Our next computer was the Mac, which was upgraded to a Mac 512k and then a Mac Plus. That thing, in its travel case, survived a fire which destroyed our Volkswagen van on the shoulder of the New Jersey Turnpike – just south of exit 8A if memory serves. I don’t think anything else was salvageable. I was… 11? – my most affecting loss was the Gordon Korman and Douglas Adams books. My bookbag full of schoolwork was also lost, but I don’t remember having any trouble in school about it. I wonder why. Then we got a Mac SE/30. Somewhere in there I got a TI99/4A to mess around with. Finally I got my own first computer, a Mac IIsi. My high school had an internet connection so I guess I’ve been online since 1992. The big “wow” came for me when I discovered the song lyrics FTP server. I knew in that moment that this thing was big. All I’ve got going on now is this silly weblog, but back in the day I was serving up an online version of Kyosaku from my IIsi in my dorm room. I didn’t have a domain name or a static IP but I was listed in Yahoo nonetheless, so whenever my server crashed I’d have to stay up until 2-3am watching the network to grab the dynamic IP I needed.

The weather cracks, starts to break. I just saw with my third eye.

RealityCarnival (C. Pickover)

originally posted by xowie

Tyree Guyton’s “OJ House” has been dismantled and sold.

originally posted by xowie

John Dean thinks Bush makes Nixon look good. Is lying about the reason for a war an impeachable offense?

originally posted by xowie

We're under contract with MTV, so we can't talk about anything.

I got an invitation to go to Apple's office for a presentation/meeting today (June 5, 2003) about how to get independent artists into the iTunes Music Store. There were about 150 people there, representatives from the best independent record labels and music services, in this invitation-only conference room. Steve Jobs came out and started a two and a half hour presentation/seminar/Q&A about iTunes and the benefits of independent labels making their music available there. I type fast and had my laptop, so I wrote down all the major points of their presentation as they went.

June 4.

originally posted by xowie

The Day Of The Jackals, a speech by Arundhati Roy.

originally posted by xowie

I think it was then that I realized that it wasn't Mount Rushmore or any other big tourist attraction that was going to turn me on. What was going to fascinate me were purple flowers on the side of the road in Wisconsin that screamed out, "There are colors that you thought were only made up by painters."

The recipe is unvarying. The Palestinians are required to pledge that they will instantly abandon all vestiges of resistance to Israel's onslaughts on their persons, children, houses, land, crops, water, trees, livestock, roads, schools, universities, graveyards and public buildings. In return Israel agrees that a few years down the road the government of Israel will begin to ponder the outlines of a dim possibility of formal ratification as a Palestinian statelet of whatever tiny sliver of territory they haven't already appropriated.

originally posted by xowie

"O, damnation, damnation! thy other name is school-teaching and thy residence Woodbury."

"I believe when the Lord created the world, he used up all the good stuff, and was forced to form Woodbury and its denisens, out of the fag ends, the scraps and refuse."

originally posted by xowie

"O my God, this War on Terrorism is gonna rule!" one character tells another in David Rees's cult cartoon Get Your War On. "I can't wait until the war is over and there's no more terrorism!" Few campaigners in poetry's war on war will have hopes as inflated as Rees's clipart man, but the swiftness and volume of responses to the recent Gulf war have already resulted in several online anthologies, public interventions by Andrew Motion, Harold Pinter and Seamus Heaney, and now Paul Keegan and Matthew Hollis's 101 Poems Against War.

originally posted by xowie

"The US is like a baby with a bomb," he barks, his eyes blazing with the famous stare. "The reaction to France that the administration allowed to happen is so immature. These people have their own opinion - they're French! They're not fuckin' Americans, they're French! Vive la difference, hello? And this big deal about Bush landing on an aircraft carrier? Talk about a six-year-old kid with a Tonka toy - we got it here."

I hear the word cheap a lot; I've heard cheesy. A lot of people are fussing about paint jobs that are not finished and about inferior carpentry.

The PowerMate (input device) and Synergy (iTunes software controller) are a sublime pair, mating this luminescent dial to my own heavenly radio.

I grabbed the latest issue of Adbusters without even looking at it because, well, Adbusters. Finding the live without dead time CD (features Allen Ginsberg, Negativland, Ani DiFranco, Saul Williams… and if you’re not listening yet I’ve got nothing left) mixed by DJ Spooky that subliminal kid,

did I mention Fugazi?

On a totally trivial subject in which I’m extremely interested: “I had a dream of setting up a little projector to display the visuals on a wall or ceiling whenever iTunes was playing." Beyond that, I hope to rent a projector to screen movies at the mad backyard parties I hope to throw once we move into an actual house with an actual yard this summer. (Print out this post for discounted admission! ;)

Felton's deception worked. Not only was he accepted as white; other white prisoners also began to turn to him for racial instruction. He was transferred to Attica, in upstate New York, where in the late 90's there was already a well-organized racist faction. There were 60 or 70 white prisoners in C Block, where Felton was held. Of those, 20 were allowed to come to the two tables in the mess hall that Felton and others had reserved for the ''politicized.''

originally posted by xowie

Despite there being more than a mile of sand, two scavengers worked Section 7 at the same time. As they passed each other, one rolled his eyes at the other with a critique of his sweeping style. Part of me hoped for a territorial brawl. Maybe they’d start beating the hell out of each other, using their metal detectors as clubs, their scoopers as shields. But they passed each other, over and over, back and forth, without incident.

originally posted by xowie

I always enjoy 28mm.org, but Coastal Beauty by Sean Slavin is exceptional.

At dollarshort.org there is a good discussion of Digital Video cameras. We recently bought the Canon ZR60, and (I don’t know from videography so I won’t say anything by way of review about it yet except that) it’s a lot of fun. I will say that my requisites matched Mena’s, and I’ve been thoroughly satisfied. I’ve been a little disappointed by the lack of web resources for amateur, no-budget, dogme documentarians, though – I’ve been looking for sites with reviews of DV media, iMovie 3 tutorials, and tips/techniques for shooting, and found nothing worth mentioning. What am I missing?

The Spector Watch by Alison M. Rosen.

originally posted by xowie

Fabulous l.a. travel pullout, Judith Lewis, ed.

originally posted by xowie

StrangeBanana is a website design generator which creates a new mostly-random set of CSS rules every time you reload the page. The designs are frequently horrendous, but it’s a nice surprise that at least one in ten are pretty effective.

In the past 25 years the number of C.C.D. pixels in all the world's telescopes has increased by a factor of 3,000, with each pixel acting as a miniature astronomical instrument. The result, Dr. Szalay says, is that the total amount of astronomical data collected every year is doubling even while the amount spent on astronomy remains constant.

originally posted by xowie

Full text of Arundhati Roy’s recent speech, Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free).

originally posted by xowie

He turned. He saw me. He recognized me. The noise was deafening but he spoke to me. I couldn't hear a thing, but I read his lips, and I'm pretty sure what he said was, "How are you coming along?" But I wasn't positive. So I replied as best I could. "What?" I said.

originally posted by xowie

Are most of the people who elect our next President going to grasp, or care, that an insidious pro-authoritarian philosophy is the altar at which the Bush zealots worship?

Electronic Entertainment Expo is the big video game conference. Who is covering it?

• games.slashdot.org
• game girl advance

"The worst fad has been these stupid little robots," said Minsky. "Graduate students are wasting 3 years of their lives soldering and repairing robots, instead of making them smart. It's really shocking."

originally posted by xowie

What I did that day should not be illegal. Adults seeking solace or insight ought to be allowed to consume psychedelics such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline.

Abraham Lincoln went to Gettysburg to consecrate that ground, and to give the horrible carnage of that battle meaning--to provide a sacred purpose for America. Can you imagine Lincoln going back to that battlefield, setting up a Chautauqua Tent and using that ground to re-nominate himself in 1864? Can you imagine Franklin Roosevelt giving a fireside chat on Normandy Beach, as a way to insure his re-election in 1944? Americans died here, people. They didn't die so that George Bush would have a swell place to rally the faithful for four more years of Middle East wars, swelling deficits, tax cuts for billionaire campaign contributors, and environmental plunder.

Young gamers today aren't training to be gun-toting carjackers. They're learning how to learn. In Pikmin, children manage an army of plantlike aliens and strategize to solve problems. In Metal Gear Solid 2, players move stealthily through virtual environments and carry out intricate missions. Even in the notorious Vice City, players craft a persona, build a history, and shape a virtual world. In strategy games like WarCraft III and Age of Mythology, they learn to micromanage an array of elements while simultaneously balancing short- and long-term goals. That sounds like something for their résumés.

The secret of a videogame as a teaching machine isn't its immersive 3-D graphics, but its underlying architecture. Each level dances around the outer limits of the player's abilities, seeking at every point to be hard enough to be just doable. In cognitive science, this is referred to as the regime of competence principle, which results in a feeling of simultaneous pleasure and frustration - a sensation as familiar to gamers as sore thumbs.

I’ve been prophesying (mostly to myself, sometimes to the coffee cup) that 2003 would be the year of the garden blog. At the time, I was sure that Garden Kids and the 13 Labs Garden represented no less than two-thirds of the garden weblogs out there. Little did I know! Sheila Lennon at the Providence Journal has done the hard work I’ve been putting off of unearthing this year’s crop of garden weblogs, the seeds if you will of a gardenblog revolution. I can taste it now.

Steve, don't take it entirely personally. Your arse, up which I gleefully would shove every bit of your music service, was a trope.

Page 24.

originally posted by xowie

Bennett's behavior also reveals something more insidious than hypocrisy, though it is a very old tale. Those who argue most loudly that, were it not for state coercion, people would go to hell in a hand basket have long been suspected of speaking knowingly from introspection. Think Jimmy Swaggart. Bennett provides an even better example. Bennett has had three consumptive vices of which we know: cigarettes (which he had to give up to take the drug-czar position), gambling (which he now has to give up to preserve his viability on the lecture circuit as virtue authority) and, obviously, food.

originally posted by xowie

Virginia’s state soil is Pamunkey.

There are no animal "owners" here. Anyone who cohabits with an animal is known as an animal "guardian." People who are disabled or senior citizens sharing a rent-controlled apartment with an animal in West Hollywood can't be evicted. The city even provides pooper-scoopers and trash bags in parks so pet owners can clean up after Fido. And other measures are under consideration to prohibit what many see as mutilations, according to City Council members.

originally posted by xowie

Bill Bennett should not be pilloried because he maxed out his credit line in Atlantic City, Vegas, or even Reno. Bennett should be taken to task for undermining teacher's unions while Education Secretary. If it weren't for the work Bennett did as Drug Czar, the federal government might not have a pretext to build a police state around combating blunts and bongs. Over two million in jail, many for weed busts, and Bill Bennett served as the Thomas Jefferson of the Drug War. These are serious gambles that the American people lost.

originally posted by xowie

The five-story dormitory was riddled by gunfire. FBI investigators estimated that more than 460 rounds struck the building, shattering every window facing the street on each floor. Investigators counted at least 160 bullet holes in the outer walls of the stairwell alone -- bullet holes that can still be seen today.

originally posted by xowie

I keep a tub of miso in the fridge at work for days like today when I didn’t eat breakfast, can’t leave for lunch, and (my wonderful wife) only packed some snacks before I rushed to catch the 10-minutes-late bus. I asked Google, “how long does miso keep” and was pleased to discover not only that “because of its salt content, miso will keep indefinitely under refrigeration, and it is OK to use miso that has been in the fridge for a year or more,” but that South River Miso has a 26-page recipe booklet online in portable document format.

With a dance remix of Madonna's "Die Another Day" playing on his computer's hard drive, he took a miniature torch to the end of a glass pipe and inhaled the ghostly smoke, proclaiming it "the martini of the future."

originally posted by xowie

Let's also be honest that gambling would not be our first-choice vice if we were designing this fantasy-come-true from scratch. But gambling will do. It will definitely do. Bill Bennett has been exposed as a humbug artist who ought to be pelted off the public stage if he lacks the decency to slink quietly away, as he is constantly calling on others to do.

originally posted by xowie

“Ebon-Aide is the adhesive bandage specially designed for people of color. From the licorice look to mocha, coffee, cinnamon, and honey skin, new Ebon-Aide blends with your skin to help conceal as you heal.” [Pop Culture Junk Mail]

I wouldn't make some false claims to safety now that the neighborhood's changing dramatically, in the same way that I wouldn't take credit for being a gentrifier.

But, the reality is, I was one of the "first-wave" gentrifiers. In real estate lingo, according to my co-worker Ryan, I exemplify "the risk oblivious." As the Saint-Ex crew builds up strength in my neighborhood, I will no doubt begin to lament the changes taking place.

Back at the Factory, things are going well. We make cockroach-size crucifixes, recliner chairs, beer, pornography, weapons of mass entertainment, extortion contracts, legislation to prevent justice, boots, arm bands, bumper stickers, baseballs, moms, apple pies, potato chips, depleted uranium ammo casings, soda pop, paraquat, genocide-silencers, cotton candy, bunker busters, embedded reporters, Cheer, Joy, thalidomide, Snickers, cyclamates, saccharine and talking anchorpuppets.

originally posted by xowie

You gotta get off your ass. You gotta question everything. You gotta see the world anew, always, every moment, to progress and evolve and vibrate higher.

originally posted by xowie

America just loooves marijuana and porn! (fark)

originally posted by xowie

"Please stop talking to them," he urged. "I have been through this before. Please do whatever they say. Please for our sake."

originally posted by xowie

And now, Charlton Heston is stepping down as the High Lord Gunmaster Poobah (or whatever they called him) of the phallically righteous increasingly paranoid adorably manly National Rifle Association. They are sighing in tribute. They are hugging each other and giving reassuring pats though not in an icky scary gay way. They are raising their rifles in salute.

originally posted by xowie

May Day, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

originally posted by xowie

Psychic Doppelgängers: A Tale of Two Deans by Judith Lewis.

(Referring to this Dean, btw.)

originally posted by xowie

"I never would have believed it in my wildest dreams," said Jerry Green, a union leader who worked for 27 years in the plant here as a cement-gun sprayer. "I thought Bethlehem was a giant and steel was king."

originally posted by xowie

“There’s lots of interesting video to watch on the web, BUT most video on the web is not particularly good or interesting to any one person and it is usually hidden behind clunky interfaces. A lot of the best content on the web is produced by independents that are hungry to have their stuff watched but can’t buy ad space on Yahoo or don’t aren’t backed by a movie studio marketing campaign. Unfortunately its scattered across many sites making it very hard to find. Hopefully, this site will give indies' work more exposure and make it easier for netizens to find the great stuff they produce by allowing them to collaboratively pick what interests them."

randomWalks digs demand media.

Woods Lot remembers Richard Fariña today.

"You've got these kids running around breathing in air, exercising," he said. "The stupidity of Beverly Hills High School baffles me."

originally posted by xowie

"Laci and Scott Peterson are attractive white people, and the media jump all over that," said Sgt. Jeff Ferguson, a homicide detective with the Oakland Police Department. "Luci wasn't particularly attractive, and neither was her husband," said Ferguson, who aided in the homicide investigation.

originally posted by xowie

in a vain attempt to stop P2P users swapping songs from Madonna's 'American Life' album, the lady herself released a series of 'dummy' files onto KaZaA. these are full length files but only the first few seconds contain sound, a recording of Madonna saying 'What the fuck do you think you're doing?'. presumably this was supposed to inspire guilt and repentant hearts in the sinful 'thieves'... but instead it seems to have been counterproductive... such a perfect sample is just crying out to be remixed!

originally posted by xowie

It took me a few hours at the convention before I realized that, of the thousands of members I had seen there, I couldn't recall any being black.

The top result of a google image search on ‘p2p art’:

On 25 April 2003, the newspaper Dagbladet (Norway) published photos of armed US soldiers forcing Iraqi men to walk naked through a park. On the chests of the men had been scrawled an Arabic phrase that translates as "Ali Baba - Thief." A military officer states that the men are thieves, and that this technique will be used again. No word yet from the newly liberated Iraqi people about some of them being summarily found guilty of theft, forced at gunpoint to strip, having a racist phrase written on their bodies, and then made to walk naked in public. No doubt the Arab/Muslim world is impressed by this display of "democracy," "freedom," "due process," and "no cruel or unusual punishment."

We wonder if the soldiers will be using this technique on their comrades who stole $13.1 million in Iraq. Or the journalists who looted Iraq's art.

originally posted by xowie

"It's frustrating. They're like little gnats that you can't get away," said Captain James McGahey, a company commander of the 101st Airborne Division who says almost every one of the patrols he sends out in the northern city of Mosul gets stoned.

originally posted by xowie

The old men march slowly, all bones stiff and sore
they’re tired old heroes from a forgotten war
and the young people ask
‘What are they marching for?'
and I ask meself the same question,
but the band plays Waltzing Matilda.

- Eric Bogle.

originally posted by xowie

DNA Gothic by Sean Flynn.

originally posted by xowie

HONG KONG: When Dr. Yu Cheuk-man, an associate professor of cardiology, tested the clinical skills of a group of medical students in a hospital ward here on March 6, he paid little attention to the 26-year-old pneumonia patient in a nearby bed. But unbeknownst to Dr. Yu or anyone else in the hospital, the patient was not a typical pneumonia case. He was infected with a disease that would be named a week later: SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome. Because the patient had been treated with a device to help him cough up the fluid in his lungs, he was spraying tiny virus-laden droplets into the air...

originally posted by xowie

There is something deeply corrupt consuming this craft of mine. It is not a recent phenomenon; look back on the "coverage" of the First World War by journalists who were subsequently knighted for their services to the concealment of the truth of that great slaughter. What makes the difference today is the technology that produces an avalanche of repetitive information, which in the United States has been the source of arguably the most vociferous brainwashing in that country's history.

originally posted by xowie

At first glance, the Northern Nevada Restitution Center looks less than inviting. Small, squat buildings are surrounded by high cyclone fences topped with rolls of barbed wire. Inside, heavy doors date back to the buildings' use as a high-security prison. But on a recent weekday morning, the gates were open and inmates walked freely around the complex, doing laundry, watching TV, making themselves a bologna and cheese sandwich at lunchtime or using one of the facility's two computers to look for work and create resumes.

originally posted by xowie

The primitive tribalism of boys at football games -- ''We're number one!'' -- has been transformed into an axiom of strategy. Military force has replaced democratic idealism as the main source of US influence.

originally posted by xowie

They talked about violence and the tools of violence the way Americans talk about sports teams -- with a touch of unknowing knowingness. When the subject turned to killing, I asked how many had seen an actual human being killed. More than half of them raised their hands, and those who didn't stared down at the floor.

originally posted by xowie

Atlantic interview: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.

originally posted by xowie

“The Enkoder Form will encrypt your Email address and convert the result to a self evaluating JavaScript, hiding it from Email-harvesting robots which crawl the web looking for exposed addresses. Your address will be displayed correctly by web-browsers, but will be virtually indecipherable to Email harvesting robots.” [dive into mark]

It might be hard to believe, but at the turn of the last century, a simple kitchen cabinet featured more convenience than virtually anything offered today. A cook could stand at a pull-out worktop and have everything handy to sift, stir and knead a loaf of bread, and not take a step until she put it in the oven. In the same spot, she could store that good bread in a mouse-proof drawer, slice and chop the dinner vegetables, be confident that ants would stay out of the sugar and that dust would not get into the pots and pans.

The University of California Press makes about 400 titles available online for free.

We are literally watching the global garden grow. We now have a regular, consistent, calibrated and near-real-time measure of a major component of the global carbon cycle for the first time. This measure can also be the basis for monitoring the expansion of deserts, the effects of droughts, and any impacts climate change may have on vegetation growth, health, and seasonality.

Dammit, why does that Iraq civilian casualty count keep going up?

Theodore Marcus “Teddy” Edwards, 1924-2003.

originally posted by xowie

Teddy Edwards was a friend of mine. He was a jazz legend and a brilliant, dapper, sweet man.

Teddy’s All Music Guide and Lycos entries

Gallery 41 clips

Timeline (c/o Saskia Laroo)

Teddy’s “official” site

Liner notes to Teddy’s Ready

Jazz Weekly interview

Teddy and Sweets Edison

* * *

L.A. Times obituary by Lynell George

Remembering Teddy Edwards by Len Dobbin.

Goodbye Teddy Edwards by Greg Burk

• • • 
      
      Teddy Edwards: Dextrous saxophonist by Steve Voce
      
      Jazz star had roots in Detroit by Mark Stryker

AllAboutGeorge, Uffish Thoughts and Woods Lot remember Nina Simone.

"Mr. President, you're asking for $76 billion to pay for this war, and you'll probably go back to Congress to ask for more. Given the fact that there'll be severe deficits for as long as you are President, why not let your tax cut slide?"

"You offered an attractive bribe to Turkey in exchange for permission to use Turkey as a base from which to invade Northern Iraq. Was the vote of the Turkish parliament to refuse the offer an example of the democracy you're trying to establish in the Middle East?"

"How did you expect to win international approval for your plan to invade Iraq when you have repeatedly told the rest of the world that the United States is ready to act alone in virtually every field, as witnessed by your withdrawal from international treaties and agreements having to do with the environment, war crimes and other matters that the rest of the world considers important?"

"Mr. President, at your news conference last month, you mentioned the Sept. 11 attacks no fewer than eight times, even though no one asked you about Sept. 11 -- they were asking you about the invasion of Iraq. The Sept. 11 attacks were carried out by al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. Will you please elaborate on the connection, if any, between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, who, if his videotapes are to be believed, has about as much affinity for Saddam Hussein as you do?"

"Mr. President, you have spent billions of dollars on homeland security to see the nation's capital paralyzed by a North Carolina tobacco farmer driving his tractor onto the Mall. Did [Homeland Security] Secretary [Tom] Ridge miss a memo or two?"

"Does pre-emptive military action without provocation set a bad example for other countries who can claim actual provocation? India and Pakistan over Kashmir, for example. Greece and Turkey over Cyprus. South Korea, provoked almost daily by North Korea."

"And speaking of North Korea, Mr. President, who is the worse dictator -- Saddam Hussein or Kim Il Jong?"

"Kim is weeks away from turning North Korea into a nuclear power if he hasn't already done so. Saddam only dreams of becoming a nuclear power, so why is he a bigger priority than Kim? And why don't you send your so-called precision bombers to take out the one plant in North Korea that you know to be a potential source of nuclear weapons?"

"When I interviewed your wife, Mr. President, she said the best byproduct of ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan was the liberation of Afghan women. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told me the same thing when I asked him what the U.S. achieved in its war in Afghanistan. If the liberation of Arab women is so important to your administration, then why is the United States not invading Saudi Arabia?"

"Sir, would you say your policy of non-involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is working out? If so, for whom?"

"Is it possible that the war in Iraq will result in regime change in Great Britain?"

Uh… There’s a little thing in the news today about MP George Galloway.

originally posted by xowie

“Kerouac reminds us how hard this form really is. Only a couple of dozen of the hundreds of haiku in this collection really work.” Jack Kerouac’s Haiku.

It is like trying to figure out the origin of water—I mean FIRST WATER—I mean the first time hydrogen and oxygen ever fucked! Skull Bolt.

Today is 4/20.

originally posted by xowie

When the invasion began, the British public was called upon to "support'' troops sent illegally and undemocratically to kill people with whom we had no quarrel. "The ultimate test of our professionalism'' is how Commander McKendrick describes an unprovoked attack on a nation with no submarines, no navy and no air force, and now with no clean water and no electricity and, in many hospitals, no anaesthetic with which to amputate small limbs shredded by shrapnel. I have seen elsewhere how this is done, with a gag in the patient's mouth.

originally posted by xowie

"Books, books, always books!" August Kubizek once wrote. "I just can't imagine Adolf without books. He had them piled up around him at home. He always had a book with him wherever he went."

originally posted by xowie

It's important to remember that the Arab world has seen a very different war than we have. They are seeing babies with limbs blown off, children wailing beside their dead mothers, Arab journalists killed by American tanks and bombers, holy men hacked to death and dragged through the streets. They are seeing American forces leaving behind a wake of destruction, looting, hunger, humiliation, and chaos.

originally posted by xowie

One by one, civilians were killed. Several hundred yards from the forward marine positions, a blue minivan was fired on; three people were killed. An old man, walking with a cane on the side of the road, was shot and killed. It is unclear what he was doing there; perhaps he was confused and scared and just trying to get away from the city. Several other vehicles were fired on; over a stretch of about 600 yards nearly a half dozen vehicles were stopped by gunfire. When the firing stopped, there were nearly a dozen corpses, all but two of which had no apparent military clothing or weapons...A squad leader, after the shooting stopped, shouted: ''My men showed no mercy. Outstanding.''

originally posted by xowie

Metaphorically, the path of the wounded healer, or the journey of the shaman has very important implications for the future of spirituality. No other metaphor sufficiently deals with the journey of humanity. We are wounded, and whether we're going to be the wounded victim, or the wounded healer is our choice. We have wounded the planet. We have wounded our genes. We've wounded the coming generations. Whether we make some remediation to the environment, and to our psyches, is something that only time will tell.

The next day people in like radioactive suits came out with tongs to pick up the poor thing. They put it in a big metal canister and took it away. Sure enough, it was rabid, and I had to go through all these shots in the fleshy parts of the stomach area, and in my back. The antitoxin that they injected me with contained dead dried duck embryo and it would leave a lump under my skin. It was very painful. I think that stopped me from picking up dead animals for awhile. (...) It was a medical school morgue, so we prepared the bodies for dissection. When a new body came in, if no one else was there, I would do a simplified Tibetan Book of the Dead ritual, calling their name, and encouraging them to go toward the light.(...) I experienced a vision where I was in a courtroom being judged. I couldn't see the face of the judge, but I knew the accuser was a woman's body who I had violated in the morgue work. She was accusing me of this sin. I said "It was for art's sake." This excuse didn't hold up under scrutiny for the judge. I was put on lifetime probation and not forgiven. The content of my work and my orientation would be watched from that point on. It made me consider the ethical intentions of my art. The motivation that moves us to creative work is critical. (...) I hope that death will be like a cosmic orgasm, where I'm released into convergence with the infinite one. Certain tantric traditions have sexual rituals to be performed in charnel grounds, and there are some pretty intense paintings of Kali astride corpse Shiva. (...) Even young children know the fear. (...) It was prior to my name change that I went to the North Magnetic Pole, and I shaved half my head of hair, in alignment with the rational and intuitive hemispheres of the brain. (...) The painting acts a portal to the mystical dimension. (...) That was an extraordinary trip that really convinced me of the reality of the transpersonal dimensions. We experienced the same transpersonal space at the same time. That space of connectedness with all beings and things through love energy seemed more real to both of us, than the phenomenal world. (...) It seems to me the universe is like a self-awareness machine. I think the world was created for each individual to manifest the boundless experiences of identity with the entire universe, and with the pregnant void that gives birth to the phenomenal universe. That's the Logos. That's the point of a universe, to increase complexity and self-awareness. The evolution of consciousness is the counter-force to the entropic laws of thermodynamics that end in stasis, heat death, and the loss of order. The evolution of consciousness appears to gain complexity, mastery, and wisdom. Lessons are learned over a lifetime-- maybe many lifetimes. And the soul grows and hopefully attains a state of spiritual awakenedness. Buddha was the "Awakened One". To be able to access all the simultaneous parallel dimensions, and come from a ground of love and infinite compassion like the awakenedness of the Buddha, is a good goal for the evolution of consciousness. The spiritual "fruit" in many spiritual paths is compassion and wisdom.

PowerBook G4 (17-inch): How the Ambient Light Sensor Works.

Damn liberals and their incessant "big picture" crapola. Do they not see the heartwarming photos? That amazing and poignant (staged) bogus PR shot of the giant Saddam statue being (staged) pulled down by a tiny crowd of (staged) cheering Iraqis, with -- what an amazing coincidence! -- the actual U.S. flag that flew at the Pentagon on 9/11 being (staged) draped around it? How can those pacifist freaks not be moved by that? Clearly, God loves America more than anyone.

originally posted by xowie

Amid it all, some people are also trying to figure out emerging social protocols. Is it rude to cross the street when someone nearby coughs? Can you disinvite a dinner guest who comes down with a cold? Even friendly conversation is under review. Aimee Gerry — one side of her family is of Japanese descent — says she often jokes with her white friends about SARS. She said that if someone coughed, "people will point to the person and say, `SARS!' " But that kind of kidding is not well received among her Asian-American friends.

originally posted by xowie

Activities director Priscilla Yablon points out that there is no bingo at Sunset Hall, for that would be regarded as an activity far too frivolous for people still occupied with the unfinished business of saving the world. You will never see sports or soap operas on the television in the common living room. It broadcasts only news programs.

originally posted by xowie

Oil and empire notwithstanding, this war is also about the American libido. Since 9-11 it's been fragile and recessed. Defensive gestures like rallying 'round the flag don't address this deficit of lust. What's needed is a spectacular conquest. A massive military strike against a blustering but bluffing foe was inevitable once we were attacked. It doesn't matter whether the enemy actually poses a threat to us. Subjugating Iraq is a way to stoke the national stiffie.

War (of Words) with Syria “is a narrow-focus warblog. In fact, it’s a blog of a war that is only verbal, so far. The content consists primarily of pronouncements by various government officials in the US, Syria and around the world, as well as analysis and commentary from media outlets.” [wood s lot]

It’s Bessie Smith’s birthday. via wood s lot.

originally posted by xowie

Amid the ashes of Iraqi history, I found a file blowing in the wind outside: pages of handwritten letters between the court of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who started the Arab revolt against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia, and the Ottoman rulers of Baghdad. And the Americans did nothing. All over the filthy yard they blew, letters of recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands for ammunition for troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks on pilgrims, all in delicate hand-written Arabic script. I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history.

originally posted by xowie

Anti-war Personality Identification Playing Cards at downloadpeace.com.

see also: Mefi.

originally posted by xowie

Quick show of hands: Who remembers the alleged reason we had to stomp Saddam in the first place? Wasn't it nukes? Chemical warfare? WMDs? Skanky mustache? Because, of course, we have found exactly nada. If he had any, and he was as vile as insane as we all seem to think, don't you think he would've used them by now? Go figure.

originally posted by xowie

Without a word, Mellor walked out of the bar, climbed into his gray 1989 Cadillac, and drove to the nearby house on J Street where he lived alone. He laid the gun, which still had a bullet in the chamber and eight more in the 18-round magazine, on his television set and calmly called 911. He told the dispatcher that he'd just killed a man "over the war," according to police reports.

originally posted by xowie

With a heavy heart I must let you know that Babatunde Olatunji passed away Sunday in his room at Esalen with his family by his side. Let us sing and drum for him in his journey to the next world. With our thoughts and prayers he will find a safe passage, and he will come to a place of peace and joy...We love you, Baba! Thank you for the joy and happiness that you have brought to the world through your music, your words and your actions. And so be it.

originally posted by xowie

>>help save us. we're completely fucked.

Brother Jim,

I believe in you and your fellow citizens. I have met them and spoken with them and they are, like yourself, good people. Sure, you feel completely fucked right now but ask yourself this: how will they sell the invasion of North Korea or Syria or Iran to the American people after this? The Bush Administration has shot its bolt. My guess is that in two or three weeks time, Rumsfeld will be gone and a new set of priorities will emerge from a chastened White House.

I can understand how you would feel powerless in the face of the war party. The tide is flowing in their direction right now. Soon though, this will change. Reach over their heads to the people of the world - find a way to manifest that barn-raising tradition. Creative carterism is what we need now from the American people, to counter the belligerence of Bush and Blair. Don't give up your country to those people.

Love,
Brother Bill

originally posted by xowie

Page 23.

originally posted by xowie

Wartime ABCs by Mikhaela B. Reid.

originally posted by xowie

I can’t get “Desert Road”:www.desertroad.net (“a hypergallery of war images from mainstream U.S. media sources including Yahoo! News, The New York Times, and CNN.") to work in Safari, but it sure sounds interesting.

4) "You can just call them 'Trail of Dead,'" says our friend, disdainfully, when we, (apparently lamely), say "?And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead," one too many times. Is it our fault they gave themselves such an unwieldy name?

originally posted by xowie

Although he has no regrets about opening fire, it is clear he'd rather it wasn't a child he killed. "I did what I had to do. I don't have a big problem with it but anyone who shoots a little kid has to feel something," he said.

originally posted by daiichi

In my fourth-grade geography class under a superb teacher, Miss Wagner, I was first introduced to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the palm trees and dates, the kayaks plying the rivers, camel caravans and desert oases, the Arabian Nights, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (my first movie), the ancient city of Baghdad, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent. This was the first class in elementary school that fired my imagination. Those wondrous images have stayed with me for more than seventy years. And it now troubles me to hear of America's bombs, missiles and military machines ravishing the cradle of civilization.

originally posted by xowie

Ms. Turner, the library director here, said librarians did not want to help terrorists, but she said other values were at stake as well. "I am more terrified of having my First Amendment rights to information and free speech infringed than I am by the kind of terrorist acts that have come down so far," Ms. Turner said.

originally posted by xowie

Any MRE that has a pack of Skittles or M&Ms is considered a good one, he said. Field studies have shown that young soldiers take comfort in name brands and commercial packaging, so some MREs feature morale-boosting snacks like M&Ms, Lorna Doone cookies, Skittles and Jolly Ranchers, which have become popular currency in poker games.

originally posted by xowie

"She'd spoken in an interview about her daughter who has been deployed in the Gulf, and her son who is in this band Spearhead," says Spearhead frontman Michael Franti. "They showed her a picture of her son wearing a t-shirt that said 'Unfuck the world' on the front, and 'Dethrone the Bushes' on the back. They told her that was an un-American statement. She said, 'That's free speech,' and they said, 'Well, things are changing these days.'"

originally posted by xowie

As the brave members of the U.S. military head out to defend our freedom, it's comforting to know that each one is sheltered in the loving hands of God.

originally posted by xowie

"Ender's Game has had a lot of influence on our thinking," said Michael Macedonia, director of the Army's simulation technology center in Orlando, Fla., which plans to build a virtual Afghanistan that could host hundreds of thousands of networked computers. "The intent is to build a simulation that allows people to play in that world for months or years, participate in different types of roles and see consequences of their decisions."

originally posted by xowie

"After my bio was read, there was no question that I had 400 pairs of eyes on me," Sparks said. "There was an instant where I was uncomfortable but my position is to never be ashamed of who I am. I made it a point to make eye contact with people, on both sides of the aisle."

originally posted by xowie

Nude Interrogation
Did you kill anyone over there? Angelica shifts her gaze from the Janis Joplin poster to the Jimi Hendrix, lifting the pale muslin blouse over her head. The blacklight deepens the blues when the needle drops into the first groove of “All Along the Watchtower.” I don’t want to look at the floor. Did you kill anyone? Did you dig a hole, crawl inside, and wait for your target? Her miniskirt drops into a rainbow at her feet. Sandalwood incense hangs a slow comet of perfume over the room. I shake my head. She unhooks her bra and flings it against a bookcase made of plywood and cinderblocks. Did you use an M-16, a hand-grenade, a bayonet, or your own two strong hands, both thumbs pressed against that little bird in the throat? She stands with her left thumb hooked into the elastic of her sky-blue panties. When she flicks off the blacklight, snowy hills rush up to the windows. Did you kill anyone over there? Are you right-handed or left-handed? Did you drop your gun afterwards? Did you kneel beside the corpse and turn it over? She’s nude against the falling snow. Yes. The record spins like a bull’s-eye on the far wall of Xanadu. Yes, I say. I was scared of the silence. The night was too big. And afterwards, I couldn’t stop looking up at the sky.

Nude Interrogation, Yusef Komunyakaa, 1998.

With the war rolling ahead on television, you the viewer are made a part of the invading army. Even the local meteorologists participate in the illusion. They give two weather reports: sunshine in New York, sandstorms in Basra.

Meanwhile, just as the audience feels a part of the army, the army becomes part of the audience. American troops on an aircraft carrier watch CNN to see how the war is playing and progressing. Soldiers are watching other soldiers on television.

That is, there is general confusion as to who is acting and who is watching. And at the crux of the confusion are the traditional eyewitnesses to war, the journalists, "embedded" with the troops. Are the television cameras the witnesses to war, or are they part of the weaponry? Or both?

Regime Change
Advancing down the road from Niniveh
Death paused a while and said 'Now listen here.
You see the names of places roundabout?
They're mine now, and I've turned them inside out.
Take Eden, further south: At dawn today
I ordered up my troops to tear away
Its walls and gates so everyone can see
That gorgeous fruit which dangles from its tree.
You want it, don't you? Go and eat it then,
And lick your lips, and pick the same again.
Take Tigris and Euphrates; once they ran
Through childhood-coloured slats of sand and sun.
Not any more they don't; I've filled them up
With countless different kinds of human crap.
Take Babylon, the palace sprouting flowers
Which sweetened empires in their peaceful hours -
I've found a different way to scent the air:
Already it's a by-word for despair.
Which leaves Baghdad - the star-tipped minarets,
The marble courts and halls, the mirage-heat.
These places, and the ancient things you know,
You won't know soon. I'm working on it now.'

originally posted by xowie

The problem with [SUV ticketing] campaigns is that they target people who have already made a multi-year commitment to a particular vehicle. Such folks are very unlikely to change their behavior based on a slip of paper put under their windshield, or a bumpersticker stuck on their wide, bloated backsides. They have made wickedness their lifestyle choice. They are a lost cause.

The hybrid owners in your area have taken a substantial risk in choosing a young, largely unproven technology in an effort to conserve the environment and cut down on foreign dependencies. These owners deserve to be showered in your love and affection.

The least you could do is leave the hybrid owners a thank you card now and then.

"I saw the heads of my two little girls come off," said Lamea Hassan, 36. "My girls—I watched their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead."

Clarity
I think what you'll find,
I think what you'll find is,
Whatever it is we do substantively,
There will be near-perfect clarity
As to what it is.
And it will be known,
And it will be known to the Congress,
And it will be known to you,
Probably before we decide it,
But it will be known.
—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing 

originally posted by xowie

I watched so much and from such an early age, in fact, that I didn't understand what TV was for. I say this to people and they think I'm kidding, but I didn't realize that 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' was supposed to be funny I thought you just watched it. The people said things, and they moved around, and you just waited till you saw the kid—you know, you liked to see Richie.

Madonna has pulled the US release of her new video, which contained images of transvestite soldiers, Iraqi children and a grenade being lobbed at a lookalike of US President George W Bush. Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Texas prosecutors today agreed to throw out the convictions of 38 people, nearly all of them black, who faced drug charges based on the uncorroborated testimony of a white former undercover police officer. Washington Post

On Monday, March 31, the Los Angeles Times published a front-page photograph that had been altered in violation of Times policy. Editors Note, Los Angeles Times

"I am an American," he says after a minute. "I stand with the pope and former President Jimmy Carter. In this country, you say what you think."

originally posted by xowie

U.S. officers say they recognize that roundups of men who appear to be civilians, and who may or may not be armed, will be among the most controversial tactics they could employ, and, if applied indiscriminately, could undermine their campaign to win the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqi people.

originally posted by xowie

"What's the sin of the children? What have they done?"

originally posted by xowie

Grim preview.

originally posted by xowie

I’ve got an old pair of red/blue 3D glasses near my desk, “just in case” – Boy Scouts motto, you know, ‘be prepared’ – so I was searching images.google for some 3D pictures. There doesn’t seem to be any way to view the results as a slideshow, which seems not only fairly obvious but probably trivial with the Google API. In fact, the halfbakery has already considered the idea but I’m not sure the lazyweb has. What do you think?

• 3D Tintin
• 3D fractals OS X screensaver
• 3D camel movie
• 3D nighttime parking lot
• 3D Grateful Dead shots
• 3D high speed shots

Blogs Against War aggregates posts for peace across a growing number of weblogs. If you use Movable Type, it’s easy to have links to (and excerpts of) your peace-related posts show up on Blogs Against War automatically. If you don’t use Movable Type, there’s a form you can fill out which will accomplish the same thing. I really hope this takes off. Please encourage your favorite peacebloggers to contribute.

Other weblogs about peaceblogs:
• "PeaceTrack is a site devoted to gathering reports of peace activities"
• Peaceblogs.org is a site devoted to making connections between bloggers who oppose the impending war against Iraq
• Diveintomark.org has collected a list of blogs for peace

See also the wonderful A Beginners Guide to Trackback from the brilliant folks at Movable Type.

‘The enemy we’re fighting is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against.’

Van Riper had at his disposal a computer-generated flotilla of small boats and planes, many of them civilian, which he kept buzzing around the virtual Persian Gulf in circles as the game was about to get under way. As the US fleet entered the Gulf, Van Riper gave a signal - not in a radio transmission that might have been intercepted, but in a coded message broadcast from the minarets of mosques at the call to prayer. The seemingly harmless pleasure craft and propeller planes suddenly turned deadly, ramming into Blue boats and airfields along the Gulf in scores of al-Qaida-style suicide attacks... "A phrase I heard over and over was: 'That would never have happened,'" Van Riper recalls. "And I said: nobody would have thought that anyone would fly an airliner into the World Trade Centre... but nobody seemed interested."

originally posted by daiichi

In the midst of all this, Dr Ahmed Sufian lashed out: "Our floors are covered with blood of our people, the walls are splashed with blood. Why, why, why? Why all this blood? I'm a doctor, but I can't understand such things. They say [they] come to free us? Is this freedom?"

originally posted by daiichi

R.A.: Most of the drawings in it are of Aline. Is she your muse?

R.C.: Oh, you know. She's around a lot, and she always wanted me to draw her. Back in the 70's and 80's, she'd say: ''I'll pose. I'll pose.'' After about half an hour, she'd say, ''Can I go yet?''

L.E.: Do girls ever dress up like one of your fantasies to meet you?

R.C.: When Aline first met me, she used to dress up to suit my fancy. She kind of got tired of that. She used to put on white knee socks and these little schoolgirl outfits. She was a lot chubbier in the early days. Now she's gotten quite thin. It's a little disheartening to see her derrière go down. But she's happier being that way, so what the heck. But she's still quite muscular. She says her ideal body type now is Lance Armstrong's.

originally posted by xowie

[....] a small number of anti-Muslim American soldiers endanger their brothers-in-arms and tarnish the reputation of American soldiers generally.

Filmmaker Michael Moore’s next project.

It won't help him at the polls, but Pat's message has penetrated the smoky haze and captured the imagination of the stoner demographic.

To them he offers the promise not of a chicken in every pot, but of a pot sign for anyone who isn't chicken to grab one.

"It seems the younger generation has decided that being a stoner is cool," said Pat, who was born a Stoner and will die a Stoner. He is running for re-election as alderman.

"It's irritating," he said. "They're $4.87 apiece with the wires."

originally posted by xowie

Bush is still really pissing me off. Why can't I just forget about him?

originally posted by daiichi

According to a report to be published today by the US watchdog Center for Public Integrity, at least 10 out of 30 members of the Pentagon committee are executives or lobbyists with companies that have tens of billions of dollars' worth of contracts with the US defence department and other government agencies.

originally posted by xowie

4. Have you noticed that what the Iraqis say in press conferences is essentially true, even those things which are mocked by the U. S. press because they conflict with the American stories which turn out to be lies, but everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, said by the Americans is a lie (I'm not exaggerating - EVERYTHING)?

originally posted by xowie

1. The anti-war movement supports our troops by urging that they be brought home immediately so they neither kill nor get killed in a unjust war. How has the Bush administration shown its support for our troops?

a. The Republican-controlled House Budget Committee voted to cut $25 billion in veterans benefits over the next 10 years.

b. The Bush administration proposed cutting $172 million from impact aid programs which provide school funding for children of military personnel.

c. The administration ordered the Dept. of Veterans Affairs to stop publicizing health benefits available to veterans.

d. All of the above.

originally posted by xowie

Yesterday, in southern Iraq, U.S. troops provided an ironic example. They named two temporary refueling facilities Camp Shell and Camp Exxon.

A tad indelicate? Deliberately insensitive, given the criticism that the United States has undertaken the war to secure Iraqi oil? Neither, said a Pentagon spokesman, who explained that the camps are "basically gas stations."

originally posted by xowie

Bring them home NOW.

originally posted by xowie

Dear President Bush,
Please stop the violence because I believe it is wrong. And can you stop war and bombing places? I want peace to come soon! I love everybody in Iraq. Please could you change your ways?
Love Marianne Blough — 2nd grade

The New York Times: Channels of Influence, Paul Krugman.

Bushologists let out a collective "Aha!" when Clear Channel was revealed to be behind the pro-war rallies, because the company's top management has a history with George W. Bush. The vice chairman of Clear Channel is Tom Hicks, whose name may be familiar to readers of this column. When Mr. Bush was governor of Texas, Mr. Hicks was chairman of the University of Texas Investment Management Company, called Utimco, and Clear Channel's chairman, Lowry Mays, was on its board. Under Mr. Hicks, Utimco placed much of the university's endowment under the management of companies with strong Republican Party or Bush family ties. In 1998 Mr. Hicks purchased the Texas Rangers in a deal that made Mr. Bush a multimillionaire.

"It's something that we eat, and drink and breathe every day," he said.

The Americans are again using depleted uranium (DU) munitions in Iraq, just as they did in 1991. Before the war began, they stated that they intended to use these warheads, which are manufactured from the waste of the nuclear industry — to pierce armor — and which are believed by thousands of Gulf War Syndrome sufferers, along with Iraqi doctors, to be responsible for a plague of cancers. Yesterday, the BBC told us that the US Marines had called up A-10 strike aircraft to deal with ‘pockets of resistance ‘ — a bit more military-speak from the BBC — but failed to mention that the A-10 uses DU rounds. So for the first time since 1991, we — the West — are today spraying these uranium aerosols in battlefield explosions in southern Iraq; and we’re not being told. Why not?

originally posted by xowie

"One group of Iraqi boys on the side of the road smiled and waved as a convoy of British tanks and trucks rolled by. But once it had passed, leaving a trail of dust and grit in its wake, their smiles turned to scowls. 'We don't want them here,' said 17-year-old Fouad, looking angrily up at the plumes of grey smoke rising from Basra. 'Saddam is our leader,' he said defiantly. 'Saddam is good'."

originally posted by xowie

Most Americans don’t do blood sacrifice, except for giving blood to the Red Cross.

Most Americans don’t kill goats or sheep or chickens ritually. If they drink the blood of Christ it’s wine or grape juice.

As we watch the reports of our fighting men making the ultimate sacrifice we don’t see mangled bodies and blood, but faces of family pain and official piety. Mothers say he died doing what he loved in service of a cause he believed in.

We change the blood into fine noble wine. The Secretary of Defense is already tipsy. Our now-dry President is in the grip of a mortal addiction.

originally posted by xowie

When Turkey waffled on allowing the United States to deploy troops on its border with Iraq, the United States pulled a $15 billion aid package. That is why Ethiopia and Eritrea, which need aid to fight starvation, are ''coalition'' partners. That is why Colombia, which needs our aid in the drug war and to fight rebels, is a partner. That is why the Czech Republic, which is just getting into the Western economic game with wonderful products like cigarettes, put their name on the list. Bush needs none of them to waste a rust-bucket like Iraq. He needs them to add a veneer of morality to his aggression.

originally posted by xowie

Even using the term "shock and awe" -- I have this notion of Iraqis standing back in Baghdad being shocked and awed. Well, you know, what they are going to be is dismembered, eviscerated, and killed. So whatever disquiet we feel, we're almost robbed of the vocabulary with which to speak. I think the press would be well-advised to carry a copy of Politics and the English Language by George Orwell in their pocket.

originally posted by xowie

By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the US leads the world by miles. You would think that a country with such resources, and such a field of talent, would be able to elect a leader of the highest quality. Yet, what has happened? At the end of all the primaries and party caucuses, the speeches and the televised debates, after a year or more of non-stop electioneering bustle, who, out of that entire population of 300 million, emerges at the top of the heap? George Bush.

originally posted by xowie

Michael Waters-Bey said he did not support the war. Asked what he would tell President Bush, he said: "This was not your son or daughter. That chair he sat in at Thanksgiving will be empty forever."

As he held a picture of his son, Waters-Bey said: "I want President Bush to get a good look at this, really good look here. This is the only son I had, only son." He then walked away in tears, with his family behind him.

originally posted by xowie

LA Times: Red carpet isn’t out for war activists.

Los Angeles police are gearing up for demonstrators on both sides of the Iraq war debate outside the Oscars on Sunday, but the activists won't be allowed to get within sight of the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, where celebrities will be arriving for the 75th Academy Awards ceremony.

Pentagon officials told CNN’s Barbara Starr that Friday is “A-day,” the day a promised campaign of “shock and awe” is to hit Iraq. "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," a Pentagon official told America’s CBS News after a briefing on the plan. “The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before." Shock and Awe is terrorism. “I know it can be really effective on a beautiful cloudless morning.” If you’ve got the Real player, you can watch and hear it live (and free) on the BBC’s video stream.

De-arresting: The best time to do this is as soon as the snatch has happened. You need a group of people to break the police’s grip and some people to act as blocks. An important and low risk role in the de-arrest involves simply placing your body between the police and their target. This is sometimes called the pick or pick and roll. Once you have your person back, all should link arms and disappear into the crowd.

originally posted by xowie

The troops are on the move, and the first shots have been fired. We support the troops, and wish they did not have to fight Bush's unnecessary war. The greatest support we can give these young men and women is to call for their safe and fast return home. Just because the politicians in Washington and the UK aren't listening to us, does not mean we should stop calling on them to back away from aggression. Destroying a country and people in a hail of missiles is neither the way to free people nor the way to spread democracy and good will. All you need remember is this: War is over, if you want it.

originally posted by xowie

I believe in this beautiful country. I have studied its roots and gloried in the wisdom of its magnificent Constitution. I have marveled at the wisdom of its founders and framers. Generation after generation of Americans has understood the lofty ideals that underlie our great Republic. I have been inspired by the story of their sacrifice and their strength.

But, today I weep for my country.

originally posted by xowie

On the day after war begins, global protests will shock and awe. I’m often reminded that it took years for Vietnam protests to reach the levels we’ve already seen – of course, after 3-4 hours, it may hardly matter. cries

The newseum presents 211 front pages from 27 countries presented alphabetically. That speech is hypnotic, don’t you think?

there is still nothing happening im baghdad we can only hear distant expolsions and there still is no all clear siren. someone in the BBC said that the state radio has been overtaken by US broadcast, that didn't happen the 3 state broadcasters still operate. :: salam 6:40 AM :: ... air raid sirens in baghdad but the only sounds you can here are the anti-aircraft machine guns. will go now. :: salam 5:46 AM ::

‘Al brings an incredible wealth of knowledge and wisdom to Apple from having helped run the largest organization in the world—the United States government—as a Congressman, Senator and our 45th Vice President. Al is also an avid Mac user and does his own video editing in Final Cut Pro,’ said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.

originally posted by xowie

Salon.com, The antiwar movement prepares to escalate.

Vandenberg is about 50 miles north Santa Barbara, Calif. In a few days, activists will start converging on a nearby four-acre plot of land that Bud Boothe, a World War II veteran, donated to the Military Globalization Project. They're going to camp there and train to breach the base's security and possibly vandalize some of its equipment.

Lumsdaine, the Military Globalization Project coordinator [mgpnofate.org], is a 48-year-old who has been arrested at Vandenberg twice. He describes the base as the electronic nerve center of the global-surveillance-targeting, weapons-guidance, and military-command satellites that will largely direct the war.

Vandenberg officials revealed Friday that military security police may shoot to kill, if necessary, to protect base residents and machinery. The directive has always been in existence, but a base spokeswoman said it is more critical now that people understand its severity.

It's impossible for us to determine what their intent is, she said. Are they protesters? Are there terrorists in that group and (do) they plan on killing everyone on base?

Washington Post: Two B-1 Bombers Employed In Iraq (Saturday, March 15th).

Now, with more than 1,200 warplanes in the region, the Air Force and Navy have intensified the patrols, and one recent day flew 1,000 sorties -- that is, one mission by one plane -- into Iraqi airspace. Some military experts contend that the U.S. military effectively is engaged in combat operations that are staying just below the threshold of war, but are preparing the way for an eventual air and ground assault.

The Bush doctrine is built on two pillars: (1) The United States will do everything in its power to maintain its unquestioned military supremacy; and (2) the United States arrogates the right to preemptive action.

These pillars support two classes of sovereignty: American sovereignty, which takes precedence over international treaties and obligations, and the sovereignty of all other states. This is reminiscent of George Orwell's Animal Farm: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. To be sure, the Bush doctrine is not stated starkly; it is buried in Orwellian doublespeak. The doublespeak is needed because the doctrine contradicts American values.

Mozilla 1.3 is here.

Stacy, 29: Mankind has already landed on the Moon. I think it’s womankind’s turn on Mars. Derek, 22: It may seem a little crazy to be out here pretending we are on Mars but it is even crazier that we are not doing the real thing and exploring the planet. That would benefit humanity in ways that we can’t even imagine right now. Pierre-Emmanuel, 38: The pioneering spirit that runs through us all is the bridge that connects past and future. Alain, 55: I think it is very important that we go to Mars, to compare the evolution of planets, understand more about the origins of life, develop new technologies that can be used on Earth and increase young people’s interest in science. Also we need to dream. I can’t be the only one who wants to see the reality show. BBC News: The Mars Desert Research Station.

So I’ve been reading the excellent Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, and studying two-letter word lists, but still can’t beat Janie at Literati. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a basketball coach is losing his job, maybe, under the watchful eye of the Coach Wooden Pyramid of Success, which does not seem to apply to Scrabble, by the way. Also, what the heck, here’s an entertaining metafilter thread that might come in handy for some trivia contest yet to come.

originally posted by xowie

:: Douglas Rushkoff - Weblog :: Old School

Evolution was no longer competition, it was a team sport. Fueled by music, chemicals, motion, and, most of all, empathy. We were navigating a course through hyperspace to the attractor at the end of history.

At his news conference last week, George W. Bush broke a 43-year tradition by failing to call on Helen Thomas, now of the Hearst Syndicate, who has been asking questions at presidential news conferences since 1960. Thomas is openly critical of this administration, and particularly of this war. Afraid to take a question from an 82-year-old woman? Bush has no class. Equally disgusting was the White house press corps' failure to respond to the insult. What makes that bunch of smug chumps think it won't be done to any one of them?

originally posted by xowie

Yusuf Islam’s Peace Train.

originally posted by xowie

"Embedding is bullshit," Scheer insisted. "You're just getting swept up into a big, mass machinery. They're just giving you photo ops. It's when you get away from the crowds, stick around and talk to people that you get the real stories. Otherwise, you're just being led around by the nose."

originally posted by xowie

Tom Robbins on U.S. aggression:

I’m just not one of those people who believes that American lives are more valuable than the lives of others.

“In A World Gone Mad…" is a new anti-war song from the Beastie Boys available for free download.

This is outrageous, any idea if it’s true? smh.com.au: Boys quizzed about their terrorist boss father

By Olga Craig in Kuwait March 10 2003 Two young sons of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks, are being used by the CIA to force their father to talk. Yousef al-Khalid, nine, and his brother, Abed al-Khalid, seven, were taken into custody in Pakistan in September when intelligence officers raided a flat in Karachi which their father had fled hours earlier. They were found cowering behind a wardrobe with a senior al-Qaeda member. The boys have been held in Pakistan, but this weekend they were flown to America to be questioned about their father. CIA interrogators confirmed on Saturday that the boys were staying at a secret address. "We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children," said an official. "But we need to know as much about their father's recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care." Their father, Mohammed, 37, is being interrogated at the Bagram US military base in Afghanistan. He is being held in solitary confinement and subjected to "stress and duress" interrogation. He has been told that his sons are being held and is being encouraged to divulge future attacks against the West and the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. "He has said very little so far," one CIA official said Saturday. "He sits in a trance-like state and recites verses from the Koran. But while he may claim to be a devout Muslim, we know he is fond of the Western-style fast life. His sons are important to him. The promise of their release and their return to Pakistan may be the psychological lever we need to break him."

• lia on Doing Good Online: Innovative Ideas From Non-Profits on the Internet
• stingykids.net/sxsw covers the Beyond the Blog discussion
• boing boing's Cory is enabling much of the WiFi access
• george has been blogging live from the choicest events

The Onion: White History Year Resumes

White History Year, which runs annually from Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, with a 28-day break for Black History Month in February, is dedicated to the recognition of European-Americans' contributions to American politics and culture. (…)

From now until Feb. 1, 2004, educators will eschew discussions of Rosa Parks in favor of Andrew Carnegie, Neil Armstrong, and Tim Allen. Schools nationwide will shelve African-American history pamphlets in favor of such Caucasiacentric materials as the Macmillan & Rowe American History Textbook New Revised Standard Edition and Encyclopedia Britannica.

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/s_120924.html

I’m so interested — you know I don’t want to hurry it — but I’m so interested in getting to heaven. Frankly, I think that after we die, we have this wide understanding of what’s real. And we’ll probably say, Ah, so that’s what it was all about.

In a carefully orchestrated move, the International Development Secretary contacted the BBC's Westminster Hour programme early yesterday afternoon to tell them she wanted to go on air. The delighted producers lined her up, but even Andrew Rawnsley, the show's host, could not believe the ferocity of her remarks as she warned darkly of the threat to Mr Blair's "future, position and place in history".

originally posted by xowie

I carry my iPod, cell phone, wallet, cash, keys, a pen, a Leatherman Micra, and some Rolaids. I stopped carrying my Palm m505 a few months ago when I realized that over a week I couldn’t remember pulling it out of my pocket once. I miss having Bejeweled handy sometimes but reading The Lord of the Rings has kept me busy on the subway.

My backpack is often with me, and that usually contains: a stack of assorted papers I really don’t need, a magazine, a book or two, a ton of change (handy, though I often forget I have it), some more pens, bus schedules, a Leatherman Juice, a firewire cable (forgotten today – drat!), and more Rolaids. I have been assembling a list of anti-terror devices I would like to toss in there soon, including: a flashlight, some Clif bars, a mini radio, … that’s all I can think of right now. Maybe I should write this list down somewhere.

Mark asks Boing Boing readers: What do you carry and why?.

Ruth Hubbard: I was absolutely horrified listening on the radio to some of the congressional hearings on the Gays in the Military...and to hear...I remember one...I don't remember whether he was an officer or what...testifying before the Committee and saying 'I've been to my minister. I've been to psychiatrists. Do you really think I would choose this life...if I had a choice?' Now that's just heartbreaking.

Frank Aqueno: I know. It is. It seems like almost everyday the question comes at me: 'why would anyone choose to be homosexual'...these are homosexuals asking that...

RH: ...yes...

FRA: ....I always respond: Can you think of a more homophobic question to ask? That goes right over their heads.

A match is approaching the American flag.

The Pitch (Kansas City), May 23, 2002: Guards tell Krishna devotees to keep off the Plaza’s private parts.

They must have said go to jail a hundred times. They said we couldn’t be on their private property. They told us that all the fountains, all the benches, all the courtyards and all the trash cans belong to Highwoods.

I said, Well, everything does belong to God, Swami continues. Then a female officer told me, Not here. Here, Highwoods is God.

Despite the threat of jail time, the Hare Krishnas have no plans to stop their twice-weekly chants on the Plaza. Swami still holds out some hope that the security officer who declared that “Highwoods is God” will one day be less caught up in the temporary identity of being a security guard.

The Washington Post profiles Amy Goodman:

When former senator Bob Kerrey called a news conference to defend himself against charges he committed a war crime while a soldier in Vietnam, Goodman asked if perhaps a war crimes tribunal should be set up to examine the guilt of the war's architects, such as Henry Kissinger.

Kerrey's halting demurral made a few television broadcasts. But Goodman's question displeased some establishment media worthies. That Sunday, NPR reporter Mara Liason went on "Fox Special Report With Brit Hume" and complained that Goodman was not really a journalist and that no one would have asked such a question in Washington.

They are counting on the combination of battlefield omniscience, smart bombs and new weapons like microwave pulses and nausea gases to drive Baghdadis out of their homes and bunkers. The use of "nonlethal" (sic) weapons against civilian populations, especially in light of the horror of what happened during the Moscow hostage crisis last October, is a war crime waiting to happen.

originally posted by xowie

DC indymedia reports on the high-profile Code Pink arrests.

Experimental peace wiki.

originally posted by xowie

Rolling Stone: Phish Resurface

We had these jam sessions, Anastasio says one night after practice, where we drank hot chocolate with mushrooms and just played, trying to get in tune with each other, for eight hours. One of those jams, he points out, is on a record: “Union Federal,” a bonus track on the CD reissue of Phish’s 1989 independent cassette release, Junta. We used to rehearse like demons, Anastasio, 38, says excitedly, a big smile busting through his ginger forest of beard. A lot of it was mind games, challenging each other. We’d change roles: I’m always the natural leader. Page, you be that person now. We’d make Fish set up his drums left-handed instead of right: Use your mind to play, not your hands. Or we’d just play one note for an hour – weird stuff.
The weirdness bloomed in concert: in clubs such as Nectar’s on Main Street in Burlington, where Phish first played in December 1984 and honed their writing and jamming chops through 1989; then in theaters and, finally, arenas. Fishman, who turns thirty-eight on February 19th, played most gigs during Phish’s first two years flying on LSD. I still play with the feeling I got from those experiences, trying to generate wind and water, he claims quite earnestly.

When one of the protest leaders, Jodie Evans of Venice, Calif., tore off her full-length pink slip and presented it to Mrs. Clinton, the senator walked out.
"I am the senator from New York," she said, "and I will not put people's security at risk."
"But you are," the demonstrators shouted at her as she exited.

originally posted by xowie

Occasionally he would stare blankly into space during lengthy pauses between statements -- pauses that once or twice threatened to be endless. There were times when it seemed every sentence Bush spoke was of the same duration and delivered in the same dour monotone, giving his comments a numbing, soporific aura. Watching him was like counting sheep.

originally posted by xowie

Yesterday's activities kicked off early, with a combination news conference/vigil outside the White House. With temperatures in the low twenties, the event was for those who didn't need persuading -- though they did win some rather unlikely converts, with a sign that read "No Peace, No [Unprintable]" pinned strategically over one Lysistratan.

"Yeaaaaaaaaaaaah!" crowed a gaggle of high school boys passing through on a school field trip. "That's the best slogan I've ever heard in my life."

originally posted by xowie

MetaFilter in the Ruins

The problems reached a crescendo on August 9, 1995: the day Jerry Garcia died. "Everybody turned to 'NEW," St. John recalls. "They came to share the pain of losing Jerry, as they did when John Lennon died." But instead of a Garcia tribute, WNEW stayed in its format-of-the-moment: a mix of classic and alternative rock. Instead of "Casey Jones" or "Touch of Grey," listeners heard the Smashing Pumpkins.

originally posted by xowie

AP: Guantanamo Detainees Moved to New Prison

But as U.S. officials have privately acknowledged, many of these people are totally innocent.

Mrs. Xowie is on TSG today (via Drudge Report).

originally posted by xowie

What do Blume and Bower expect will come from that attention? ‘We’re generally not gifted with the knowledge of the results of our actions,’ says Blume. ‘But you know what the Buddhists tell us: No act is small. I refuse to believe this war is inevitable.’

originally posted by daiichi

He says he couldn't do anything with the Israelis and the Palestinians "because I'm against everybody and I can't take a side". Nor can the man who found so many snappy couplets and delightful tunes in impending nuclear doom see any toe-tapping inspiration in September 11, the invasion of Iraq, or the thing he seems most keen to talk about the Columbia space shuttle explosion. "They are calling it a disaster instead of a screw-up, which is all it was. They're calling these people heroes. The Columbia isn't a disaster. The disaster is that they're continuing this stupid program."

originally posted by daiichi

Kimya Dawson rocked the 930 Club last night. Don’t miss her MP3s – “this one is about Pee Wee Herman and Michael Jackson.”

McLean, famous for his hits American Pie and Vincent (Starry, Starry Night), said he was "proud of George Michael for standing up for life and sanity". "I am delighted that he chose a song of mine to express these feelings," he said in a statement. "We must remember that the Wizard is really a cowardly old man hiding behind a curtain with a loud microphone."

originally posted by daiichi

LAT photo essay on the DMZ.

originally posted by daiichi

The Lysistrata Project was conceived just six weeks ago by New York actors Kathryn Blume and Sharron Bower. "Before we started Lysistrata Project, we could do nothing but sit and watch in horror as the Bush Administration drove us toward a unilateral attack on Iraq," says cofounder Blume. "So we emailed all our friends and put up a web site. The response has been enormous." Co-founder Bower adds, "Many people have emailed us to say they now feel empowered to do something, and foster dialogue in their own communities about the dangers of this war."

originally posted by xowie

I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don't have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the coalition of the willing (after they first stash the cash.) I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what Bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the government. And it reminds me that it's not un-American to think that war — except in self-defense — is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomacy.

originally posted by xowie

Guy Dauncey’s 101 Ways to Stop the War in Iraq.

originally posted by xowie

If you had known about Hiroshima in advance, what would you have done to stop it? Today’s war-makers are telling us what they plan to do, including the possible use of nuclear weapons. This war will visit unspeakable terror and suffering on the people of Iraq, in the name of ‘liberating’ them. It will put people all over the planet at risk, in the name of protecting them. It will, no doubt, be accompanied by even more severe repression within the U.S. against immigrants and against resisters.

originally posted by xowie

There is a basic weakness in governments, however massive their armies, however wealthy they are, however they control the information given to the public, because their power depends on the obedience of citizens, of soldiers, of civil servants, of journalists and writers and teachers and artists. When these people begin to suspect they have been deceived, and withdraw their support, the government loses its legitimacy, and its power.

originally posted by xowie

BLOOD. America’s blood supply, already at such a seriously low level that some parts of the country have less than a one-day supply, may be stretched to dangerous levels if a war in Iraq proves to be bloody. A Red Cross official explains that many American service personnel are ineligible to donate blood because they may have been exposed to Mad Cow disease while stationed in Western Europe. With a reduced pool of military donors, the Red Cross may have to ask civilians for more blood, blood they haven’t been providing over the past few months.

originally posted by xowie

This American Life, May 11, 2001:

Act One. Mr. Rothbart’s Neighborhood. When he was just a kid, Davy Rothbart and his family visited the most famous neighbor in America – Mr. Rogers – at his summer cottage on Nantucket. Two decades later, as an adult, Davy went back for another visit with Mr. Rogers. This time he brought stories from his own neighborhood, stories of neighborly conflict and distrust – to see what kind of advice Mr. Rogers could give him. (20 minutes)

My long experience with human nature - I'm 80 years old now - suggests that it is possible that fascism, not democracy, is the natural state. Indeed, democracy is the special condition - a condition we will be called upon to defend in the coming years. That will be enormously difficult because the combination of the corporation, the military and the complete investiture of the flag with mass spectator sports has set up a pre-fascistic atmosphere in America already.

originally posted by xowie

NYT has gone bonkers over the 50th anniversary of DNA:

• Intro.
• Interactive feature.
• Nature vs. Nurture.
• Watson and Crick.
• Pop culture.
• More...

originally posted by xowie

DXing.info: Monitoring Iraq: War of the Airwaves. (For the shortwave radio fetishists among us.)

originally posted by xowie

“For evidence, I
submit the fact that we’re not
yet at war.” (dayku)

pencil carving

A prosecutor was trying to block a death row inmate from having his conviction reopened on the basis of new evidence, and Judge Stith, of the Missouri Supreme Court, was getting exasperated. "Are you suggesting," she asked the prosecutor, that "even if we find Mr. Amrine is actually innocent, he should be executed?"

Frank A. Jung, an assistant state attorney general, replied, "That's correct, your honor."

originally posted by xowie

A camera crew and I followed Hollywood legend Ernest Borgnine at the wheel of his beloved 40-foot luxury bus The Sunbum as he barrels across the Midwest. Yep, he actually drives it! A special thank you to my brother Michael who drove the crew RV.

originally posted by xowie

Hammer’s treachery by Anil Dash.

I would like to own a radio that doesn’t need batteries.

"Congressman Kucinich has been at work thinking about a lot of these issues, and his votes reflect a thoughtful journey," said NARAL President Kate Michelman. "I do accept, and I do welcome, that he believes the right to choose is fundamental."

originally posted by xowie

randomWalks archives for Dec., Jan., Feb.
rW posts about music, books, peace, prison, marijuana.

originally posted by xowie

Old Navy has vegan belts on sale for $9.50.

‘In the green hour’

Think of the number of police officers, judges, lawyers and prison guards — not to mention prison construction firms and other providers of basic prison services — who are employed through marijuana's criminalization. It is apparent by any measure that the marijuana laws are more harmful to society and to the individual than the behavior they are attempting to regulate.

originally posted by xowie

Tough numbers to deny, nonetheless. Over 600 cities across the globe, all staging major anti-war rallies against America's aggro attitude and insipid war posture, millions and millions of people -- teachers and salespeople and politicians and doctors and students and workers, every creed and gender and age group and nationality and hairstyle -- and yet Geedubya simply equates them all with some sort of negligible "focus group." And he said he doesn't base his policy decisions on focus groups, of course, because naturally he uses Barbie's Super Magic 8 Ball and old secret codes from his Vietnam draft-dodging days intermixed with his father's late-night gin-soaked advice and a cassette of Dick Cheney whispering demon-conjuring incantations in Latin.

originally posted by daiichi

How many is too many?

I dig the Cornell Daily Sun. E.B White and Kurt Vonnegut worked there once. Jessica Saunders and Kate McDowell work there now.

originally posted by xowie

Here in Hollywood I climbed a light pole to hang the cumbersome sign I was carrying ("Let the Inspections Work") and saw before me an endless valley of signs, bobbing like square-headed daisies and extending as far ahead as I could see. (There were a few undercover cops, too, but nobody stopped me.) For the first time I thought, as maybe civil rights workers did in '63 and AIDS activists did in '93: This mass of humans, this noise, this exuberance — maybe all of this will register in Washington. Maybe.

originally posted by daiichi

On February 26th, you can join a massive march on Washington without leaving your living room. The Virtual March on Washington is a first-of-its-kind campaign from the Win Without War coalition.

originally posted by daiichi

I know Kris and Rita and Marty Mull
Are meeting at the Troubadour
We'll get it on with the "Joy Of Cooking"
While the crowd calls out for more

- Peter Rowan, 1973

originally posted by xowie

This one’s a keeper: Browser News: Resources > Fonts features samples of just about every font it’s safe to assume a Mac and/or Windows user will have installed – with the necessary caveat that “fonts will not be depicted properly if they are not installed or if your browser’s CSS support is poor.”

“The Weblog Kitchen explores current research in weblogs, wikis, and other hypertext systems.”

The more Americans start talking with each other about where our country is headed the better. But these conversations need to be genuinely helpful, not exercises in mutual misunderstanding. And since they are most likely to occur without much prior arrangement, you need to get ready.

1, 2, 3.

originally posted by daiichi

Faces in the Crowd by Carol Lay.

originally posted by xowie

When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high. And so it is with anti-war protests in the present day. Then as now, TV did not like anti-war protesters, nor any other sort of protesters, unless they rioted. Now, as then, on account of TV, the right of citizens to peaceably assemble, and petition their government for a redress of grievances, ‘ain’t worth a pitcher of warm spit,’ as the saying goes.

I've often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they're on, why they don't fall off it, how much time they've probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on. I tried to write one once. It was called Welcome to Earth. But I got stuck explaining why we don't fall off the planet. Gravity is just a word. It doesn't explain anything. If I could get past gravity, I'd tell them how we reproduce, how long we've been here, apparently, and a little bit about evolution. And one thing I would really like to tell them about is cultural relativity. I didn't learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It's also a source of hope. It means we don't have to conitnue this way if we don't like it.

For several months he staked out the Gladstone Hotel on East 52nd Street, where she was recovering from her divorce from Joe DiMaggio and her summary dismissal from her contract at 20th Century Fox. On one of those truant mornings, Mr. Mangone took an eight-millimeter Kodak camera from his brother, headed downtown and met Monroe just as she was leaving the hotel for a therapeutic shopping spree. Then, just as in the movies, she waved, winked and asked him to come along.

originally posted by xowie

The founder of Maon Farm, Yehoshefat Tor, says he still thinks the bombing was a good idea. "The Torah says we should kill all the Arabs," he told me. "Not just Arabs who maybe help terrorists. Everybody." His neighbor at Maon Farm, David Ben Zvi, a 27-year-old shepherd who lives with his wife and children in a blue-and-white city bus, tells me that he would like to see a "Jewish Taliban" that would run the country according to the Torah. "This is my land, but it is not my nation," he says.

originally posted by daiichi

Google buys Blogger; randomwalks moves to Movable Type. Coincidence? Well, yeah.

Massive marches in
every city, in every
country on the globe

originally posted by xowie

We call upon the Spirit of the Founders to guide us as we create a new world where all may live in peace.

originally posted by daiichi

The case against the war by Jonathan Schell.

originally posted by daiichi

And the terrorists in Washington
Are drafting all the young men

And no one speaks

And they are rousting out
All the ones with turbans
And they are flushing out
All the strange immigrants
And they are shipping all the young men
To the killing fields again

And no one speaks

originally posted by daiichi

Most of the world cried out at the slaughter of the people of Guernica. Such bombings were considered highly inhumane and Picasso's painting caught much of the outrage that was shared by most civilized people... Perhaps remembering the original horror and revulsion that was felt in 1937 after the bombing of Guernica will remind us that the bombing of civilians is a hideous and immoral practice of eliminating helpless and innocent people whose only crime is living in a war zone.

originally posted by daiichi

Happy birthday, Domina Jane Die!

originally posted by daiichi

At the Coalition on Homelessness, Tracy has another idea: "There are very acute mental illnesses that are specific to the activist scene. For one, you have a society that ridicules and marginalizes your vocation. And second, people who come in and are expecting change now or change today are in for a big disappointment. If you don't have the long view, you're going to be in a constant cycle of raising your hopes and having them beat down. It's very easy to get into the 'nothing changes' mentality."

originally posted by daiichi

Bastard, by M. Shahid Alam.

originally posted by daiichi

Stop Mad Cowboy Disease.
Make Tea Not War.
War is sweet to those who haven't tasted it (Erasmus).

originally posted by daiichi

You can watch a bit of video (scroll down) at dc.indymedia and listen to a bit more of the town hall meeting on Pacifica’s PeaceWatch.

The audience — mostly middle-age professionals — broke into sustained applause when the veteran said the nation was being led into war by men who had never gone to war. He thundered off half a dozen names: "George Bush, hawk, did not fulfill his National Guard duty; Dick Cheney, hawk, did not serve; Paul Wolfowitz, hawk, did not serve; Richard Perle, hawk, did not serve."

originally posted by xowie

"I would say I'm probably relatively insane, to an extent," he was quoted as saying. "I take medication for schizophrenia, but I wouldn't say I'm schizophrenic. But I have a bipolar personality, which is strange. I'm my own worst enemy. I have devils inside that fight me."

• These people are a breed apart. We're better off that way
• This Is Your Life, Phil Spector. Phil?
• Beyond the gates
• There is another Hollywood, one Lana knew all too well
• Phil Spector's Ghosts

"Don't move the mikes," Phil would warn if we got up to take our 5-minute break which we were lucky to get. He didn't want anything to touch the "sound-waves" of that room once he had gotten balance. "DON'T MOVE THE MIKES," so we were very careful. The whole band was in the room. Some were playing chess, or throwing darts to naked ladies drawn on the walls. Phil would sometimes dress in outlandish costumes and then use his psychological tricks on us. We were ready for him.

originally posted by daiichi

There is no real evidence. There is no smoking gun. There isn't even a smoking spit wad. There is only, basically, a smoking middle finger.

originally posted by daiichi

Evidence of an electronic cut-and-paste operation by Whitehall officials can be found in the way the dossier preserves textual quirks from its original sources. One sentence in Dr Marashi's article includes a misplaced comma in referring to Iraq's head of military intelligence during the 1991 Gulf war. The same sentence in Downing Street's report contains the same misplaced comma.

originally posted by daiichi

March on Melrose by Judith Lewis.

originally posted by daiichi

>christ this is all so depressing. Isn’t something good happening?

Well I was holding back on this one… ‘A Sea of Fire,’ or Worse? by Nicholas Kristof. (Verrry depressing.)

originally posted by daiichi

Rice for Peace: If we are going to send something to Iraq it should be food, not bombs.

She needed the rewrite by Wednesday. I told her that I’d do my best but that my lover, Walta, was having brain surgery on Tuesday. A shunt was being placed in his cranium to drain fluid that was building up because of an AIDS-related infection. Sarah listened to me. When I was finished, she paused and said, "Well, that excuse might work in Boston, but it won’t fly here in New York."

originally posted by daiichi

originally posted by daiichi

Iraqis and Americans who, doctors say, might die in the next war: 48,000 to 260,000
Additional deaths expected from the civil war within Iraq following an invasion: 20,000
Additional deaths expected from “post-war adverse health effects”: 200,000
Total deaths if nuclear weapons are used: 3,900,000

VV: Blood, Stats, and Tears. Also, Dying for War by Alisa Solomon.

originally posted by daiichi

Why does Bush pronounce it “nuc-yoo-ler”? (fark)

originally posted by daiichi

JPB: I'm discouraged with the role of the Internet in the antiwar movement. Because so far what I see happening is that cyberspace is a great place for everybody to declaim. There are a million virtual streetcorners with a million lonely pamphleteers on them, all of them decrying the war and not actually coming together in any organized fashion to oppose it. It strikes me that existing political institutions -- whether it's the administration or Congress or large corporations -- only respond to other institutions. I don't care how many individuals you have marching in the streets, they're not going to pay attention until there's a leader for those individuals who can come forward and say I represent the organization of those individuals and we're going to amass the necessary money and votes to kick you the hell out of office. Then they pay attention. But not until. And so right at the moment it would strike me that the Internet is counterproductive to peace.

MJ: I'm rather shocked to hear you say that.

JPB: Well, I'm rather shocked to say it.

MJ: Is it that people just leave their anger online?

JPB: You vent online and then you dust your hands off in satisfaction and that's the last you do.

          Let her now take off her hat in summer air the contour
Of cornfields     and have enough time to kick off her one remaining
Shoe with the toes     of the other foot     to unhook her stockings
With calm fingers, noting how fatally easy it is to undress in midair
Near death     when the body will assume without effort any position
Except the one that will sustain it

originally posted by daiichi

Think Outside the Bomb
It's NUCLEAR, not NUCULAR, you idiot!
Anything War can do, Peace can do better.

originally posted by daiichi

After the shock of losing wears off and an unmitigated free-for-all ensues, the Triads go back to talking their usual shit. There's an explosion and a Triad shouts, "Suck it!" Another player laments his own death: "Damn, dude! Fuck, I had, like, no life left! How'd you not die?" His opponent curses back. "Fuck you! Owned!"

originally posted by daiichi

The RIAA has staked out an untenable position that is as unrealistic as it is anti-consumer and anti-artist... Their solutions are not good solutions. They cling unsuccessfully to the past rather than embrace the stunning opportunities offered by the future. They will be unsuccessful in their attempts to criminalize the society, and in their attempts to stretch the drum head of old laws onto the drum of new technology. It is one thing to be unsuccessful, it's one thing to argue a bad position, but it's quite another to be silly and laughed at, and that's where the RIAA has ended up. They appear to be totally irrelevant except as bagmen.

originally posted by daiichi

"I don't want to belong to a country that attacks little countries."

originally posted by daiichi

The Other Face of Fanaticism by Pankaj Mishra.

originally posted by daiichi

Jean Shepherd on mp3; also Greenwich Village, Jean Shepherd & the Web Today by Lorraine McConaghy.

originally posted by daiichi

The rebel speaks for herself, by Ben Ehrenreich. (cf.)

originally posted by daiichi

"It isn't about being drug free," Cowan argues. "It's about being free."

originally posted by daiichi

Take a Newport and dip it into the bottle of Juice and smoke it down. I would be on a Dust cloud floating over Queens. I was in a trance thinking about the fuzzy feeling that surrounds your brain, and then your whole body. I loved the way Juice made me feel like an animal that has just been released from a zoo. How all inhibitions left and I felt wild.

originally posted by daiichi

"They have a communication system that rivals the CIA," Borg said.

originally posted by daiichi

I'll post 150 updates in a day (for my purposes, from 12:01 a.m. PST Tuesday, January 21, 2003 to 12:01 a.m. PST Wednesday, January 22, 2003) to this entry, playing along by bolding the entries' numbers (like so: [#1], [#2] and so on), typing at least two sentences per update and resorting to lists and other content-producing gimmicks on an as-needed basis.

originally posted by daiichi

If you want to know what marijuana is like, ask your co-workers. Or your neighbors. Or fellow PTA members. You won't be hard-pressed to find someone who knows.

By now the poetic groove was really cooking. Harold and Andrew were just riffing on the whole vibe.

"Whoa, the oil is very viscous," wailed Andrew.

"Yeah, our politics is Robert Fiskous," Harold responded.

originally posted by daiichi

Condoleezza Rice: The Devil’s Handmaiden by The Black Commentator; Bush’s alien views on affirmative action by Derrick Z. Jackson.

originally posted by daiichi

There’s something that punk porn sites are pushing besides pictures, and it’s what really makes the kids sign on: like any other porn, they’re selling fantasy. And in this case, it’s the fantasy of reality.

originally posted by daiichi

While it’s safe to say the demonstrations here and in the capital had zero effect on the White House and big media’s drooling class of pundits, protests against the pending incineration of Iraq are growing. And they are growing at a rate that required years, not months, during the Vietnam War.

originally posted by xowie

Stephen Johnson on game demos

“Congress, which voted overwhelmingly to support Bush’s war, includes only one member who has a child in the enlisted ranks of the armed services.” It is, of course, a trial balloon but nonetheless terrifying and impossible to ignore: Is the US going to have a military draft? How does the US Draft work, anyway?

Thou shalt not distort, delay, or sequester information.
You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams. You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, accurate, and complete information.

Swiller tells the story of an abortion provider who, as she was preparing to perform an abortion, heard her patient call her a "baby killer." "She said, 'Excuse me? Are you sure you want to go through with this?' and then recognized her as one of the regular picketers. And the woman said, 'Well, I'm different. I'm married, I have two kids, and I had an affair, and my husband would kill me if he found out.' The point is that abortion is such a personal thing, it's hard to imagine yourself needing it until you're in those shoes."

originally posted by daiichi

We should all take a nice long look at the Big Game on Sunday in San Diego -- because it may be the last one we'll see for a while, at least until the War ends ... Ho ho. That is a nasty thought, as thoughts go, but it is the melancholy truth. Certainly it will be the last peacetime Super Bowl for another five years, maybe more ... But by then we will all be wearing uniforms, of one kind or another, and only the "Trusted Travelers" among us will be allowed to come and go as we please -- within reasonable military limits, of course, as long as we don't make waves and never gather in groups of more than three, and don't spit.

originally posted by daiichi

May our country, on the brink of war, take to heart the final refrain of America, the Beautiful: "America! America! God mend thine ev'ry flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law."

originally posted by daiichi

Human peace sign in Antarctica.

originally posted by daiichi

“The lives of our children are worth more than your dirty wars”.

originally posted by daiichi

Weep over my corpse, if you can weep tears of wine.
Sigh dejectedly for me, if you are intoxicated and carefree.
Bear me on your shoulders, if you stumble drunkenly along.
Cremate me on that land, where there once was a tavern.

originally posted by xowie

"This is your destiny. You were born to be here. You were born to reclaim this land. You will not abandon it. You were born to take this country back. You not only will stop this war, but you will change the priorities of this nation and return it to the people. You will do this because it is your sacred responsibility as Americans, and as citizens of the world."

- Ron Kovic, 18 Jan 2003

originally posted by daiichi

San Francisco: Pics of today’s huge demo.

originally posted by daiichi

originally posted by daiichi

Draft Impeachment Resolution Against President George W. Bush by Prof. Francis Boyle, University of Illinois School of Law.

originally posted by daiichi

Dubya actually said it. He actually went so far as to pledge his administration's commitment to "build a culture that respects life," saying this with a straight face, no violent lightning bolt striking him dead on the spot, no gnarled filthy hell-beasts reaching with clawed fingers up from the ground and dragging him under, isn't that just the sweetest thing and don't you just feel the sentiment deep in your heart? Or perhaps your colon?

originally posted by daiichi

"I believe Bush is an oedipal fool who is generating this war for oil and who will end up making the whole world hate us," said Dan Bright, 36.

originally posted by daiichi

"The fact that the inspectors have not yet come up with new evidence of Iraq's WMD program could be evidence, in and of itself, of Iraq's noncooperation."

originally posted by xowie

Even seated in folding chairs, like glamorously evil talk show hosts, they ooze authority and control. An imposing duo, they present a contrast in opposites, and work well together. Belladonna is a sultry brunette with piercing eyes; Strix a pale, removed ice queen. Both look every inch the dominatrix, even without the cliché uniform of corsets, fishnets and spike-heeled boots.

originally posted by daiichi

Disney wins, Eldred (and everyone else) loses.

originally posted by daiichi

Charters' anthology may be the first book about the Sixties that hasn't made me want to braid my hair, paint peace signs on my cheeks, and go stick a daisy in the barrel of a gun. It is, unlike many of its counterparts, a grown-up book. Wiser. Wryer. No longer the cherubic student activist clutching a tiny photo of Che Guevara. This book is 30 years past any sort of giddy optimism. This book is my dad. Get him talking about the Sixties and I don't care how many times you've read "Be Here Now," you will start to feel disillusioned.

Dumbledore lowered his hands and surveyed Harry through his half-moon glasses. 'It is time,' he said, 'for me to tell you what I should have told you five years ago, Harry.

'Please sit down. I am going to tell you everything.'

There was a big-ass anti-war demo in L.A. on Saturday.

originally posted by daiichi

Mr. Frayn is playing all the angles. "The ideal resolution would be if Claire won it," he said. "Then I'd feel rather noble, and she'd feel rather bad and rather guilty. It would give me a tremendous moral advantage for the rest of our lives. Whenever we argued, I could say, `I behaved so well over the Whitbread.' "

originally posted by daiichi

The administration has embarked on something "quite extraordinary in American history, a preventive war, and the threshold for justification should be extraordinarily high," said G. John Ikenberry, an international relations professor at Georgetown University. But "the external presentation and the justification for it really seems to be lacking," he said.

originally posted by daiichi

Naked war protest in Marin.

originally posted by daiichi

Bulletin boards are choked with offers to watch your house, your pet, your kids, your shrubs. People are willing to cook your meals, haul off your junk, clean your eaves, repair anything you need, wire your computer. Some hold fine-print résumés, bold-faced headlines and clever hooks. But I was drawn to Alan's simple, straightforward offer to live in my house.

originally posted by daiichi

1. Google News
2. boing boing
3. Mac Net Journal

Suddenly Nina brightened. It was as if she grasped that her father couldn't tolerate the view of himself that her panic reflected. ''Wanna hear a song?'' Nina asked. Toney squinted, as if he had suddenly recognized her voice from far away. Then she sang. Her father was smitten by her performance until she said, ''That's Che Che's daddy's song,'' referring to the father of her half-sister, and puncturing the moment. Toney looked away stonily. Toney often smarted at reminders of Lolli's infidelity, but solitary confinement magnified his need for a reliable family.

originally posted by xowie

There are no condoms on the set. There's no toilet paper in the bathroom. The performers brought boxes of baby wipes. Soiled sheets litter the ground, creating a trail to the bed. For more than two hours, Taylor and Rain engage in unprotected sexual acts with a male performer. During a break, Rain asks director Thomas Zupko for her co-workers' HIV tests. Handed a stack of papers, she flips through the documents. One is missing--Taylor's. Rain asks repeatedly for her paperwork, but she balks. "I don't have [expletive] AIDS," Taylor finally says. "I am not [having sex with] you."

originally posted by xowie

Kokua Line: What does ‘Pu in Sai’ really mean?

originally posted by daiichi

You cannot have a war when the so-called enemy has done nothing to provoke you and is absolutely no threat to your national safety and has no significant military force and has negligible chance of even setting off a firecracker near your own overwhelming death machines, and whose only weapons of minimal destruction are the rusty short-range warheads and biochemical agents we sold him 20 years ago, and kept selling to him, even after we knew he was gassing his own people.

originally posted by daiichi

When boys sneer at a girl who won’t join in sex games on the back seat of the school bus, and call her frigid, it hurts; she wonders whether her revulsion means that something might be wrong with her. A woman who begins to dislike the sex on offer within an adult relationship, which may well be lukewarm and mechanical, and is told that the problem is hers and that it is called FSD, is being manipulated in the same way. The difference is that this pseudo-medical concern is presented to her as pro-feminist, caring, empowering, and all that jazz.

originally posted by daiichi

Ten Greenpeace activists, including John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace in the United States, and Rashida Bi, leader of the Bhopal Gas Victim Women's Union, unloaded 250 kilograms of the waste. Three activists abseiled down the Dow Benelux building and hung eight huge photographs depicting Bhopal and a banner which called on Dow to clean up Bhopal.

originally posted by daiichi

"There are so many issues facing the gay community I don’t think a gun club is the answer or is even something that automatically gives us respect," says longtime local gay activist Randy Pesqueira. "I don’t think you necessarily project strength with a gun. In a way, you lose something; you’re becoming like the fanatics who hate you." Then he paused and continued, "That being said, I absolutely understand where this is coming from. I mean, myself, part of me has always fantasized about gays having this really cool vigilante group that would take care of all of our enemies."

originally posted by xowie

My mom wrote to Courtney Joslin at the National Center for Lesbian Rights and told her the story. She told us to look in the handbook, and we did. And then she took it to the ACLU. That’s how the lawsuit got started.

originally posted by daiichi

CAUSA BELLI by Andrew Motion

They read good books, and quote, but never learn
a language other than the scream of rocket-burn.
Our straighter talk is drowned but ironclad:
elections, money, empire, oil and Dad.

originally posted by daiichi

Dude, where’s my California?

originally posted by daiichi

Questions about how one gets on a no-fly list creates questions about how to get off it. This is a classic Catch-22 situation. The TSA says it compiles the list from names provided by other agencies, but it has no procedure for correcting a problem. Aggrieved parties would have to go to the agency that first reported their names. But for security reasons, the TSA won't disclose which agency put someone on the no-fly list.

originally posted by xowie

The most striking part of the structure is a tilted wall of windows -- to be installed later this month -- measuring roughly four metres by 10 and facing south. Below the windows will be a wide planter that serves as an indoor garden. It will be irrigated from water from the laundry room. The kitchen and living area, in particular, will be like a liveable greenhouse. "It's supposed to be like a ship, designed to supply your every need, including food," said Lefebvre.

originally posted by xowie

It’s really hard to pick a cell phone and a service, as I don’t have to tell you. All I have to offer on the topic are these couple of sites, the most helpful that I’ve found: the WirelessAdvisor.com forums and CNET’s Editors' Wireless Top 5s. I hear Verizon is the only provider who has service on the DC Metro – that’s as good a reason as any, I think.

"There's a terrible irony in the John Ashcroft Justice Department investigating the alternative press when, in fact, they have allowed far larger corporate entities to get away with transactions that have certainly raised a lot more antitrust issues than the LA Weekly-New Times deal has, and which had far greater effect on society...I don't think it's too paranoid to say that they're looking into the alternative press for political reasons."

originally posted by daiichi

At cheesedip.com: many links re Philippine president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s recent decision not to run for re-election. Also: blowing up the big Marcos head.

originally posted by daiichi

Marijuana possession is lawful in Canada, maybe.

originally posted by daiichi

Rees has no illusions about the strip's importance; in fact, he almost gave it up altogether after the summer, but started again when the Bush administration made the staggeringly vulgar decision to hire Henry Kissinger to investigate the events of September 11. "When that happened," Rees recalled, "I sat down and said to myself, 'Okay, let's see if I've still got it.'" He did: "Does Bush even know who these motherfuckers are?" asks one of the strip's generic office workers while talking on the phone. "Didn't he get suspicious when he saw Kissinger and John Poindexter licking the blood off each other's hands?"

originally posted by xowie