It was obvious to me that all of the separateness I ordinarily perceived was, in fact, an artifact of cultural conditioning, and was indeed less "real" than what I was supposedly hallucinating. At that moment, I knew that I was, for the first time, experiencing things as they are, utterly continuous. There is no discontinuity. There is not one thing and another thing. It is all the same thing, The Holy Thing.
I advise a 12-hour-a-day TV viewing regimen!!
Understanding Zippy (how to read the never intentionally obscure comic strip).
In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. For instance, suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the entire place, by a miracle of God's power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would have to close down.
How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later by Philip K. Dick.
Want to play with Apple's Front Row without buying a new iMac? Check out the hack I'm calling 'Orchestra Pit'. (Disclaimer: randomWalks did not originate any of the technologies or techniques known as 'Orchestra Pit' -- we just gave it a fancy name.) Just download:
Then follow the directions that come with Front Row Enabler. What's it good for? Well, it's a nice way to show off a photo album, and it's good for watching movie trailers. For much else, you'd really want a remote control.
We used to be a family. Now we are four women carrying heavy grocery bags past an unshaven man in an armchair who is staring intently at his thumbs.
The New York Times: Board Games to Put Families Back in Play
My blog is worth $0.00.
How much is your blog worth?
Downloadable wallet guide to pesticides in produce
The Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce lists the 12 popular fresh fruits and vegetables that are consistently the most contaminated with pesticides and those 12 fruits and vegetables that consistently have low levels of pesticides. If you are concerned about pesticides in your diet, the handy wallet card can help you choose produce that lowers exposure to pesticides for you and your family.
If (like me) you can't afford to buy organic all of the time, check out this guide to which foods are more and less likely to deliver pesticides.
flickr ad on Rocketboom today (17 November)
Most vegetarians prefer not to have their food or utensils touching meat or other animal-derived foods. This preference is similar in concept to keeping kosher. In practical terms, some individuals who have "kept vegetarian" for years may endure significant intestinal distress if they ingest meat or grease. When you're cooking for your vegetarian guest, please keep utensils separate (for instance, do not use the same spoon for deglazing the roasting pan and then serving plain steamed vegetables) and do not label a food "vegetarian" if it includes chicken, beef, or veal broth.
This article about hosting a vegetarian guest for Thanksgiving includes recipes and delves into some etiquette and lifestyle concerns that I've not seen discussed before.
NPR : 'My Lobotomy': Howard Dully's Journey
Howard Dully was lobotomized at 12, apparently because his stepmother didn't like him. The above, from lobotomist Walter Freeman's notes supporting the procedure, aptly describes my five-year-old son. The story is available as an mp3 from NPR, and transcripts and extras are at Sound Portraits.He objects to going to bed but then sleeps well. He does a good deal of daydreaming and when asked about it he says 'I don't know.' He turns the room's lights on when there is broad sunlight outside.
Tremendous! Fantastic! Erica Jacobs has her 108 high school English students blogging!
After a few hours at Yucca Mountain, it becomes clear why, despite a desperate need for a solution to the nuclear waste problem (there is already enough waste in temporary storage to fill it), the site has not opened: No one is absolutely sure what will happen if it does. If all the regulatory hurdles are cleared, if Nevada loses its political battle and Yucca Mountain's license — which Benson says will be measured in "linear feet," not pages — is finally approved, the waste that goes into it will last for hundreds of thousands, even millions of years. "We don't know what will happen in 10,000 years," Benson admits. "Will people speak English? There probably won't be a United States."
From part 2 of Judith Lewis' timely and important article in the LA Weekly: Green to the Core? How I tried to stop worrying and love nuclear power.
Open Source Mac “is a simple list of the best free and open source software for Mac OS X.”
George Hotelling nails exactly what's so great about NPR's most interesting podcast.
group cube
Originally uploaded by Xavier de San Diego.
(I'm not sure what's going on here.)
Remember the Alamo? After Eight Months, the Astor Place Cube Comes Back
"I actually thought we would put it on this post and we’d turn it to the position we wanted it and then stick it like that." But it was never bolted in place. In any case, "I did not realize that the turning was such a factor in people’s enjoyment of it."
People just love that thing. I didn't realize I had an emotional attachment to it until I walked by one morning and saw it covered with some type of sheeting. I thought something was going to happen to it and got very upset.
A line of Kerouac clothing will hit stores soon, including dinner jackets. It is inspired by his sense of style, if not the jeans and khakis he actually wore.
Lowell Sun Online - Why is Kerouac on Lowell's back burner?
"Excuse me. Are those Kerouac™ jeans you're wearing?"
Apple's Front Row Comes Closer to Couch-Driven Computing
Where most of the computer industry trudges on under a banner of "more" -- more processor speed, more expansion ports, more stickers on the front of the computer -- Apple's mission statement amounts to "less." It is one of the few companies in the business that understands editing -- how the discipline imposed by having to remove yet another button, menu and toolbar can yield simpler, easier and more useful products.
Playlist: The iPod’s interface could be even better
iTunes has those lovely little Arrow icons next to a track’s name that, if Option- or Alt-clicked, take you to the entry and its surrounding album tracks if you’ve sorted tracks by album. I’d be thrilled if there was some way to open an album or artist entry from within a track’s Now Playing screen on an iPod.
This is the outstanding feature iPod needs most.
Star Wars: Episodes I-VI - The greatest postmodern art film ever. By Aidan Wasley
Emperor Palpatine, the embodiment of the Dark Side, taunts the despairing Luke in Return of the Jedi, "Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design," and we are led to understand in Sith that it was Palpatine himself who set the entire plot in motion by manipulating the Force toward Anakin's virgin birth. Palpatine is the emblem of the artist as clockmaker or puppet master, the omniscient manipulator of his hapless characters for the purposes of a satisfying narrative payoff. At the end of Jedi, in a scene out of Pirandello or one of Ashbery's own plays, the characters assert their autonomy and kill their author.
Crowds ogle Ma-Mail, a bioengineered plant that grows from a seed after five days of watering to reveal a message -- "I love you" or "Good luck" -- emblazoned on a sprout.
New communication style: Ma-Mail. 1. Open. 2. Water. 3. The Message. I love you; good luck!
New Orleans bloggers: Looka!, The Inderdictor.
Why does O'Reilly (of all organizations) use 'weblog' wrong?
Think about these things, reader. Don't sigh and turn the page. Think that I have written them and you have read them, and the odds against either of us ever having existed are greater by far than one to all of the atoms in creation.
From Roger Ebert's review of Kieslowski's Red.
"Sometimes, you're able to create a very distinct voice . . . from just the pace of their speech," Dale says, eyes twinkling, his voice drifting into the cadence of south London. "Did you know. That Michael Caine. Can only speak. In three words. At one time.
Poynter Online - Harry Potter And The Imbalance of Race
I'm sure she's a fine person. I'm saying she should stop writing as though white is normal and needs no identification, while every other race is so one-dimensional that a single word — black — sums up shade of skin, expression of eyes, length of nose, color of hair. She should describe my black friends with the same gifts of language that she uses on the white people.
George W Bush was in my dream last night. He was riding around on a motorcycle wearing a disguise depositing large sacks of I don't know what, while I was urgently trying to escape from a sprawling amalgam of office complex and amusement park. It's disconcertingly invasive to see his face appear unbidden in my mind, the jerk.
When sounds first enter the brain, they activate a region near the ears called the primary auditory cortex that starts processing sounds at their most basic level. The auditory cortex then passes on signals of its own to other regions, which can recognize more complex features of music, like rhythm, key changes and melody.
These music-processing regions may be continually looking for signals in the brain that they can interpret. When no sound is coming from the ears, the brain may still generate occasional, random impulses that the music-processing regions interpret as sound. They then try to match these impulses to memories of music, turning a few notes into a familiar melody.
For most people, these spontaneous signals may produce nothing more than a song that is hard to get out of the head.
Research into musical hallucinations is illuminating the phenomenon of the song that gets stuck in your head. My four-year-old was afflicted recently — he looked up from a construction project to say, in a bewildered tone, "Now all I can think about is Elvis."
Washington Post: Patrols on Mass Transit Intensified but Scattered
At L'Enfant Plaza, Metro officers displayed their submachine guns for a phalanx of television crews from around the world. They walked through the station, sweat pouring onto their backs from beneath their bulletproof vests.
One stepped to the side to check a trash can. Another tried the knob on a door to make sure it was locked. A third looked for anything unusual near the fareboxes. They fanned out when they reached the mezzanine, some taking position next to escalators, others staring down at passengers and the rest sweeping the platform.
An astute bit of journalism points out that, in response to the London bombings, USA's first order of business was to get pictures of guns on our subway to the media. Images of security now stand in for the real thing. Are they going to shoot the bombs?
For most of history, journalists could afford to spend their time covering wars, famines, politics and business. The reason for this is that everyone knew where the white women were at - at home, probably in the kitchen, minding the kids.
Burritoeater: “Is it as fun as skimming rocks on a frozen lake? If you imagine that the rocks are burritos and the lake is our systematic, fully thawed engine of analysis, then yes, it is.”
I see a video iPod strategy behind Apple's embrace of podcasting. iTunes 4.8 was the first version of iTunes to handle video files. The RSS enclosure format has always supported delivery of movies (as well as any other type of attachment, I assume). The pieces are coming together -- although Steve Jobs has famously dismissed the idea of watching movies on an iPod as impractical, I can certainly imagine watching a BBC News summary, a Pixar short, a cooking demonstration, or a slew of movie trailers on the subway ride to work. If videoblogging takes off, it will give Apple a legitimate content pool that will justify releasing a video iPod.
"My audience has gone from being over 95 percent Black 10 years ago to over 95 percent white today," laments Boots Riley of the Coup. "We jokingly refer to our tour as the Cotton Club," he says — a reference to the 1920s and '30s Harlem jazz spot where Black musicians played to whites-only audiences.
...
"I love Boots Riley's music, but in general people in the 'hood are not checking for the Coup," says Brother Ali, part owner of the Minneapolis-based hip-hop collective Rhymesayers Entertainment. "It's hard enough to get some of our people to go to a Kweli show. It has a lot to do with the fact that the emphasis on the culture has been taken away. It's just the industry now and it's sold back to us — it's not ours anymore. It used to be anti-establishment, off the radar, counterculture. People in the streets are now being told what hip-hop is and what it looks like by TV."
Village Voice: The Cotton Club by Bakari Kitwana .
I struggled to imagine the emotional currents that had carried people here to this bus, so far from their homes, to honor his memory. Later, a friend who had been born in Alaska and exiled to Maryland for five years tried to explain the overwhelming smallness and sameness of life on the suburban East Coast, where lawn care excites great interest; no wonder someone like Christopher McCandless seems adventurous and spiritual and inspiring, despite being dead.
...
For many Alaskans, the problem is not necessarily that Christopher McCandless attempted what he did — most of us came here in search of something, didn’t we? Haven’t we made our own embarrassing mistakes? But we can’t afford to take his story seriously because it doesn’t say much a careful person doesn’t already know about desire and survival. The lessons are so obvious as to be laughable: Look at a map. Take some food. Know where you are. Listen to people who are smarter than you. Be humble. Go on out there — but it won’t mean much unless you come back.
The Anchorage Press: : I Want To Ride In The Bus Chris Died In.
This thing called psychiatry -- it is a European-American invention, and it largely has no respect for nonwhite philosophies of mental health and how people function.
Washington Post: Patients' Diversity Is Often Discounted.
If you have an African American patient presenting with elevated paranoia, that has been referred to in some quarters as healthy paranoia based on how they perceive society. If you base your diagnosis on that symptom, you can be misled.
Washington Post: Racial Disparities Found in Pinpointing Mental Illness.
Planets wreaking havoc is as constant as the rain.
Big Bird is not in favor of affirmative action. Bert and Ernie are not gay. Miss Piggy is not a feminist. "The Three Tenors," "Antiques Roadshow," "Masterpiece Theater," "Wall Street Week" and nature programs do not have a political agenda. "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" is biased in favor of boring, old, white guys who appear on painfully well-balanced panels. "Washington Week in Review" is a showcase for "Inside the Beltway," conventional wisdom, power-parroting, political-geekhead, Establishment journalism -- there is nothing liberal about it.
But there is a plot to politicize public broadcasting. It is plain as a pikestaff, and it is coming from the Right.
Molly Ivins: Destroying PBS
The time feels right to me. My spirit’s ready for it.
Bodo's Bagels is open on the Corner after many lifetimes of anticipation.
Yes, first of all, this is *the* Velocity Girl. No, this isn't a track that's been locked in a vault for years, it's brand new. May we introduce you to the new Velocity Girl? Hey, wait a minute... it's exactly like the V Girl that disbanded in 1996! That's right, all members have reformed and resurrected what was perhaps THE janglepop band of the 90s. Pop sensibility and catchy hooks are back. This track, recorded earlier this year in the DC area, features the never-ending talents of Archie Moore, Brian Nelson, Kelly Riles, Jim Spellman and Sarah Shannon. If for some reason you lived under a rock and don't remember their first go-round, Velocity Girl are the band that gave the indieworld sugarpop and brilliance whilst the rest of the alterna-world was moshing in flannel. By the mid-90s they had the #2 selling album on Sub Pop of all time ('Copacetic' was #2 behind Nirvana's 'Bleach'). You have *no idea* how excited we are to debut to you new material from them...
Holy fucking... moly, randomWalks is pleased as punch to point you to a newish Velocity Girl mp3.
Also: Whither Velocity Girl?
One aspect of this transition that could prove interesting, in all positive and negative connotations of the word, is the so-called "trusted computing" capabilities of Intel's CPUs. Little has been done with them yet, but as we understand these capabilities, they're designed to work with a Microsoft digital rights management (DRM) system. There's no telling if or how they may play into Apple's existing music or future video plans.
TidBITS points out an underexamined factor in the Apple/Intel announcement.
Orlando Sentinel: Technicality springs DUI defendants
What's going on in Seminole is unusual. Nowhere else are judges throwing out virtually every breath test that comes before them.
That's because all four Seminole County criminal judges now use the same standard: If a DUI defendant asks for a key piece of information about how the machine works -- its software source code -- and the state can't provide it, the breath test is rejected.
Seminole judges are all following the lead of Seminole County Judge Donald Marblestone, who in January ruled, though the information may be a trade secret and controlled by a private contractor, defendants are entitled to it.
"It was important for me to be an 'at-home' mom," she explains. "I kept the kids close by; they came with me to record and I home-schooled them up until recently. I was very close to my parents; I always wanted to have my children close to me. It's difficult now that they're going to be with a nanny on this tour."
The onset of one's 30s does not necessitate a blanket disregard of new music; that would be self-defeating and a bit weird. Indeed, this is a fecund time for what was once touchingly known as "indie", with Trail Of Dead, Art Brut, Bloc Party and the Rapture all doing fine things with the gifts the good Lord has bestowed upon them. Yet the appeal of such music is so intrinsically linked to youth - it's about possibility, about arrogance, about contempt for authority and middle-aged men in denim gilets - that to be really into it beyond one's 20s demonstrates a fundamental lack of self-awareness. It is, in other words, time to move on.
Chicago Tribune | Missing white female alert
Continual focus on, and reporting of, missing, young, attractive white women is a televised slap in the face to minority mothers and parents the nation over who search for their own missing children with little or no assistance or notice from anyone.
About Six Apart - Mena's Corner: I take the bait
I could write about how women are represented in our tools or in Six Apart itself. I could write a 2,000 word essay on how more and more young women are coming online via tools like LiveJournal. Or how the booming population of cooking, knitting and family weblogs have resulted in many new communities with a dominant female presence, across all three of our platforms.
I hope she does!
Ladies and gentlemen, do not be alarmed. That is my dog, Spot. He is the bus dog. We go back a long way. Spot keeps me sane. When I am sad and lonely, he talks to me, telepathically. We are one. Thank you.
N.Y. to D.C. On the Quirky Express is Marc Fisher's account of riding the Chinatown bus.
Elmo and Zoe are on an exercise routine. Singing vegetables and talking fruit have invaded the neighborhood. Miles has a new song. It is about broccoli. And, darkest of all, Cookie Monster has been stripped of his piles of quickly and loudly consumed chocolate-chip cookies.
Cookie Monster's gluttonous binges mirrored the insatiable furball inside each of us young viewers and eventually elicited an innate recognition of "too much" — an understanding much more powerful when arrived at personally. If Cookie Monster is now learning lessons of moderation in our stead, we'll have to learn our own lessons elsewhere.
No doubt I'm but one among many former children mourning Cookie Monster's diminished id, but the most frustrating part of this moderately tragic turn of events is that the Children's Television Workshop already had a perfectly righteous Captain Vegetable with his very own catchy theme song.
Holy Sh*t! Dinosaur Jr.?! | Ask MetaFilter
I remember reading an interview with Lou Barlow a few years back where he said his dream was to play on SNL and behead J Mascis with his guitar before killing himself live on TV.
One day I walked down Broadway in New York and where Broadway crosses 52nd street there's a drugstore that has a black, plate glass window. Very clearly you can see your reflection in it, if you are of the nature to seek out your reflection in drug store windows. So, anyway I look and Pow! there I am, so I was shocked, I hadn't seen myself in about a year. So I was you know, truth be told, I was digging myself for about 45 seconds, an intense dig. When this bird that was perched overhead, like total disregard for me, just, he defecated on me. I don't know if this has ever happened to you but if it has, you know that it is virtually impossible to maintain your cool under those circumstances. Right? And all I can think of, you know how thoughts raise through your mind in moments of crisis, all I can think of is "there goes a happy bird". And then I'm fantasizing, saying : 'can you imagine this bird, sort of floating above the city of New York for a week, looking for a place to land, like saving up.' Don't dig yourself.
Simon And Garfunkel Concerts or TV appearances with spoken introduction to the songs in RealAudio.
What to Tell Children About God by Alan Watts.
God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, He has no one but himself to play with. But He gets over this difficulty by pretending that He is not Himself. This is His way of hiding from Himself. He pretends that He is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way He has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when He wakes up they will disappear.
The Village Voice links to a handful of ambient and other unpop musical recordings.
Well that didn't work too well, did it? Still I kind of like it.tales of a shaman identifier http haman h adam rice h div on the train the other v atom xml title atom li li stratum i turned h div burned
I'm taking the clips off the stack of index cards in my back pocket. It's like taking the gloves off, only not at all in any way whatsoever.
I have argued strenuously that bloggers rarely function as journalists — that, in fact, we are stronger standing outside the established media than we ever can be as junior reporters. However, all bloggers are publishers, and for legal purposes, should qualify as "the press". Consider "the press" this amendment was designed to protect. There was no establishment media at the time. It was, literally, some guys with printing presses, publishing pamphlets and the occasional newspaper. Journalism is a practice, not a professional title, and bloggers who add to the record of verifiable fact are clearly journalists. Whether this work is practiced online or on paper — or by one person with a notebook and a computer, or one person in a crowded newsroom — is irrelevant. A fact is a fact even when revealed by an amateur. Fiction is fiction, even when broadcast by an established news organization.
Hey pal...
My name is Fred. I used to have some corny web pages posted on metascene.net but obviously, I slept on the domain renewal thing. I know I hadn't been too dillignet about updating it lately, but I do sorta plan to start posting stuff again and it would be really...I dunno. I guess I have a sentimental kind of attachment to the metascene thing, it being my first domain and all. Especially since it was a gift. Anyway, I guess I am asking if there is any way you could find it in your skintied heart to sell it back to me. You can contact me at metascene@hotmail.com. You would really be doing me a solid.
Thanks for your conisderation,
Fred
Design without Reach: “Tootsie Pops and a few other household items can be used to imitate a Nelson clock” fantastic!
To me, The Smiths mean cheap hair gel, unwashed sheets, damp walls, badly ventilated gas fires and impossible expectations. A beautiful fury with everything, because it isn't you.
The Independent Online Edition > Some bands are bigger than others. "It seems entirely right to me that there should be a symposium - although academia needs The Smiths far more than The Smiths need academia."
A revolution is happening based on web standards, it can either help or hurt the Mac, a lot depends on Apple and right now a lot of us don't have a lot of confidence in the decisions Apple is making so it can go either way.
Applepeels: Switching from Apple. I agree. The painful truth is that signs of cluefulness from Cupertino are few and far between these days.
That black vein in shrimp is poo!
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 (a brief excerpt from David Burner's Making Peace with the Sixties).
“Processing is a programming language and environment built for the electronic arts and visual design communities. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, and researchers for learning, prototyping, and production.”
I got on the train the other morning, on the same car through the same doors that I usually do, and instead of turning right I turned left and sat in the seat corresponding to my usual seat. Sitting down, I found a wedge of read newspapers and, next to them, a cheap paperback edition of the 14th century Christian mystical text, The Cloud of Unknowing.
Fortunately, it's a more modern translation than the online version, which I find really difficult to puzzle through. Let's look at a passage from the prologue. The first paragraph comes from the online edition, the second from my newfound copy.
Fleshly janglers, open praisers and blamers of themselves or of any other, tellers of trifles, ronners and tattlers of tales, and all manner of pinchers, cared I never that they saw this book. For mine intent was never to write such thing unto them, and therefore I would that they meddle not therewith; neither they, nor any of these curious, lettered, or unlearned men. Yea, although that they be full good men of active living, yet this matter accordeth nothing to them.
However, there are some presently engaged in the active life who are being prepared by grace to grasp the message of this book. I am thinking of those who feel the mysterious action of the Spirit in their inmost being stirring them to love. I do not say that they continually feel this stirring, as experienced contemplatives do, but now and again they taste something of contemplative love in the very core of their being. Should such folk read this book, I believe they will be greatly encouraged and reassured.
Pitchfork: Daily Music News: “J. Mascis and Lou Barlow will perform together under the Dinosaur Jr. name for the first time in 15 years.”
A digital puff of marijuana, for example, temporarily slows the action of the game like a sports replay. Taking an Ecstasy tablet creates a mellow atmosphere that can pacify aggressive foes. The use of crack momentarily makes the player a marksman: a "crack" shot.
But using each drug also leads to addiction, which can lead to blackouts that cost the player inventory and to demotions or even expulsion from the police force, which halts progress in the game. In measured doses, the substances can make a tough challenge easier, but the makers of the game say it is possible to play without using the drugs at all.
The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Where a Puff of Marijuana Is the Ultimate Power-Up
O'Reilly Network: Remixing Culture: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig
I was at the World Social Forum, but much of what was going on at the World Social Forum was related to Brazil's leadership in spreading free software and free culture. So the free software movement has exploded in Brazil, led in part by the government, which is increasingly using free software in its own work and requiring it for much of the government's coding work. The free culture movement is being pushed in Brazil largely because of the culture minister, Gilberto Gil, who envisions a future where an increasingly large proportion of the content in Brazil is made available to the world via Creative Commons licenses.
Now the strategy in both cases is to increase wealth in Brazil. The view of free software is that it's far better for Brazil if the technology industry is trained in the skills needed to build and modify and extend free software than if they're trained in the skills of how to implement a patch for the latest Windows virus. That's about technology self-sufficiency.
And in the free culture context, Brazil is eager to have their music spread broadly to increase the demand for Brazilian musicians. They have a project to create a huge archive of Brazilian music licensed under Creative Commons licenses, which will encourage people to get access to it and share it for noncommercial purposes and remix it.
It's perhaps the most exciting place in the world right now for these issues. They're extremely well-educated and committed people there. And the movement is fundamentally political. It's a mix of all kinds of people from Brazil--I mean, particularly young, but all sorts of young people. Men and women, people who have a technical background, people who don't--all of whom are demanding a cultural and technological future for Brazil that is not dependent on someone else. That's the essential feature in both the software and culture contexts. They want a future where they're not dependent on Microsoft and a future in which they're not dependent on rich copyright holders in the United States.
Speaking of Faith | Brother Thây: A Radio Pilgrimage with Thich Nhat Hanh
Forcibly exiled from his native country, Thich Nhat Hanh is currently visiting Vietnam for the first time in nearly forty years. In 2003, Speaking of Faith took a radio pilgrimage with Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh at a Christian conference center in a lakeside setting of rural Wisconsin. Here, Nhat Hanh discusses the concepts of "engaged Buddhism," "being peace," and "mindfulness" with host Krista Tippett.
"He'd done his work," Winkel Thompson said, adding, in Hunter Thompson's own words, "He was a road man for the lords of karma."
Rocky Mountain News: Family says writer didn't kill himself out of desperation
I'm told that this is the place to get burritos in Boston, and indeed possibly the finest burrito this side of the Mississippi.
Only a handful of major-station radio gems remain on the dial anywhere in the country, stations that still fly their flags of ragged independence like beacons in a wasteland of sameness and blandness and endless replays of Beyoncé and Eric Clapton and Sting, while the FCC stands behind them all like a psychotic nun with a giant ruler and a deep scowl and callused nipples.
Mark Morford is big on podcasting, too.
The Duchess of Northumberland’s controversial poison garden has been officially opened.
Why did the Greenland Norse prefer to starve rather than copy the ways of the Inuit? How did the Anasazi fail to notice that by squandering their piñon on structures, they were eliminating a precious food source? And how do we, in this 21st-century global village, continue to live in denial about impending climate change, something every credible climatologist has confirmed?
Judith Lewis: What Did the Last Easter Islander Say as He Chopped Down the Last Tree? "Jared Diamond, The best-selling author of Guns, Germs and Steel, asks whimsical questions with grave answers. In his latest book, he turns his attention to the collapse of civilization."
Arthur Magazine issue 15 is available as a free pdf: Meditation as a subversive activity; Jessica Yu talks about her Henry Darger documentary; "Hotel and Farm" by Ben Katchor and a special feature with lots of other comics; new columnist Douglas Rushkoff; Ian Svenonius has a conversation with the Secret Service. Ok!
Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain (by Jakob Lodwick)
Tagging, as seen on Flickr and other sites, allows you to organize things in a way that makes sense to your brain. You may also notice that tagging photos on Flickr is the first time that organizing something has made perfect sense.
This is fantastic and reminds me of the eternal golden braid, but I'm a little bit worried that this guy's mind is about to turn inside out like Robert Pirsig's did.
He was arguably the best breaking-news editor of his generation. He had incredibly sharp instincts about the real news angle of any story. He was a writer's editor as well and made substantial improvements to a story without changing the writer's voice or tampering with the style. Rather, he would get the writer to make the changes the story needed and then he would organize the rewritten prose logically so that it really flowed.
Lucien Carr was one of several fascinating real-life characters, like Neal Cassady, Carl Solomon, and Herbert Huncke, who became legendary through their association with the Beat writers. Lucien holds a special position here: he introduced Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs to each other.
When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware — none of which are available for the Mac platform — it doesn't make sense for me to "switch" to a Mac at this time.
Spring wildflowers of the Pohick Stream valley
I printed my writer's tips on one side of a sheet of paper and a .pdf map of Middle Earth on the other. It is perhaps the single most useful piece of paper ever printed. I can mock my friends' extensive use of the passive voice and their barbarously bad use of adverbs and then diagram the battle of Minias Tirith with a single piece of paper.
