randomWalks

No gay bears will leave this store!

Enron Designed Fake Trading Floor (Click2Houston.com)

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

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

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

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

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

Digable Planets - For Corners lyrics

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

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

Cats Painted in the Progression of Psychosis of a Schizophrenic Artist

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

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

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

The okayplayers take on interracial sex scenes in movies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

See also: John Ridley on comic books for NPR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I told you so!

Nature’s Platform

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

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

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

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

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