randomWalks

The All-Star Newspaper links to articles by “the best newspaper writers in the business” every day at noon ET.

Here was a woman who no longer could recognize her own children; a woman who had no idea who her husband had been; no clue where she was, what her name was, what year it was -- and yet, knew what she had been taught at a very early age to call black people. Once she was no longer capable of resisting this demon, tucked away like a ticking time bomb in the far corners of her mind, it reasserted itself and exploded with a vengeance. She could not remember how to feed herself, for God's sake. She could not go to the bathroom by herself. She could not recognize a glass of water for what it was. But she could recognize a nigger.

It's like when you go to the bathroom. After you use the toilet, you must wipe yourself. That's how you finish the job!

What went wrong is that we allowed ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security by media representations of crime and violence that portray both as the province of those who are anything but white like us. We ignore the warning signs, because in our minds the warning signs don't live in our neighborhood, but across town, in that place where we lock our car doors on the rare occasion we have to drive there. That false sense of security -- the result of racist and classist stereotypes -- then gets people killed. And still we act amazed.

Take a penny, leave a penny, says filepile.org.

Zoinks! Like, not even for ten Scooby Snacks!

Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration --
that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.
There is no such thing as death,
life is only a dream,
and we are the imagination of ourselves.
Here's Tom with the weather --

Ellison Music Labs features a hip hop stream, a drum and bass stream, and a jam band stream. That’s something for just about everyone – and three things for me!

It would be wrong to say that I would only be discriminated against because I am Korean or Asian American. I used to bus tables, and people used to think I was Mexican. The reality is that I might be discriminated against because someone thinks I am Native American or Latino or Asian American.

Holloway 7 is a brief exploration of how Jef Raskin’s ZUI (zoomable user interface) is intended to work. Interesting stuff, but I guess there’s no substitute for actually using something – I still can’t figure out if this thing makes any sense.

I ask them if Harris allows people to smoke in the loft. I ask if they know where he and Corrin keep the iron. In one particularly surreal moment, I realize I've lost my keys. I enter the chat room and ask if anybody happened to see where I left them.

These PLBM arcade games for PalmOS look great – I can’t wait to install lunar lander.

More Cold Mountain poems by Han-Shan.

Selected Han-Shan Poems for Hippie Reading

The Unimog, a converted German military vehicle manufactured by Daimler-Chrysler will be sold as a luxury vehicle in the US later this year. (This ten-foot-tall, six-ton beast dwarfs the Hummer.) According to Unimog marketing manager Bruce Barnes, “even in Scottsdale, Arizona, moms will want to take it to the grocery store. It’s a head-turning vehicle.” It seems to me this thing pretty much condemns itself, but here’s a tree-hugging press release to chew on.

I think this one’s pretty good.

It should be understood that caught in between is on fire, but I’ve been remiss in not mentioning the Black History Month blogging that BoyCaught’s been doing all month long. Take a minute today and an hour this weekend to peruse the great links he’s gathered. Maybe if we ask him nice he’ll collect them into a single page somewhere that’s easy to point to.

The next time you Napster, instead of rushing to download the latest flavor of Grammy-approved pop why not take a chance on something you’d never risk your hard-earned cash on? What have you discovered on Napster that surprised you, like full audio books (The Hobbit & Lord of the Rings are out there), spoken word (Kerouac and Ginsberg), rare live & cover versions? Let’s [discuss]!

If you follow the mainstream media, you may be told by a trustworthy, concerned-looking talking head this evening or read in a stolid, respectable rag tomorrow morning that CD sales are down 39% since last year. If you pay close attention, you might discover that the number applies to CD singles, but in any case 39% is quite a lot, isn’t it? You may think to yourself, “Oh, my… what have we done?” Well, I’m happy to say you can relax, and here is slashdot’s jamie to look at the source of that statistic:

That's right, CD singles. Unit sales for the singles were down 39%, revenue down 36% (they raised prices, of course).

And CD singles account for how much of the RIAA's profits?

Not quite one percent.

Yes, that's right: they lost 36% of 1% of their profits.

And the news media is reporting it as a 39% loss.

The facts are that their "CD sales" are up this year, even over last year's stunning performance. The RIAA increased the average price of a full-length CD from $13.65 to $14.02, and still managed to sell 3,600,000 more of them.

Total profit increase on this, the core of their business, was 3.1%, or just shy of an extra $400,000,000. (read more ...)

Dr. Menlo’s Manifesto in Hypertext is a sort of State of the Revolution address. Good reading when you’re feeling kind of isolated and out-of-sync with the world around you and wondering for the umpteenth time who’s crazy and who’s sane after all.

Squidfactory found a site that has lots of pictures of the new VW Microbus concept.

Anxious to sanitize their product to the point where it passes muster with compassionate conservatives everywhere, especially those living on Pennsylvania Avenue, major producers in the industry are proposing to discard or ban a host of sexual acts and scenarios that have in some instances become staples of the genre. Welcome to the era of kinder, gentler smut.

I really dig weather.com’s new hourly forecast.

Did my mother realize how strongly our trips to the fabric store would affect me? I doubt it. And I can only recall them in the most fleeting glimpses, when I'm exhausted or otherwise intoxicated.

From the soc.culture.asian.american FAQ:

9. What’s the difference between “Oriental” and “Asian”?

“Oriental” is a term which has negative connotations for many Asian Americans because it reflects European and American colonialistic attitudes of the past and present. It is also a term that has always been used to exotify people and products. i.e. Exotic oriental teas/women/attitudes/customs/foods/etc. A general rule of thumb is “Oriental is for rugs, not people.” Besides, no one uses the term “Occidental” to describe white folks. Additionally, “oriental” is a term which describes location in respect to Europe (and to England specifically). “Asian” is in respect to nothing.