Ghost in the Machine is
Ghost in the Machine is pointing to a fun Star Wars Episode II spoiler, but don’t you dare blame me if you click through to it.
Ghost in the Machine is pointing to a fun Star Wars Episode II spoiler, but don’t you dare blame me if you click through to it.
New Lynda Barry comic about a tough acid trip.
"Going my way?" your vehicle will bleep in autospeak. "Indeed," responds the living room on wheels in the left lane. And the two will hitch up and rocket toward their common goal together. This technology will conserve fuel and may save lives, but the pleasure of driving as you know it will be gone. That's something you should know.What You'll Need to Know In 2020 That You Don't Know Now -- also Discover mag, also from kottke.
20 Ways the World Could End from the just-so kottke.org.
Sources close to the Nader campaign say representatives of the progressive politician are talking to the Fox network about somehow including him in the first debate, scheduled for October 3, via simulcast. The candidate would sit before cameras, fielding the same questions the debate moderator puts to Bush and Gore. His answers then could be aired with clips of the debate.The Village Voice: Nation: Crazy Like a Fox
Seltzer said his office spent the summer searching for cover photos that would illustrate greater diversity at UW, where minorities are 10 percent of the 40,000 students enrolled. When he could not find one, he approved adding Shabazz’s photo to the crowd scene.Black-White Issue Leaves University Red-Faced (washingtonpost.com) – Diallo Shabazz, whose picture was digitally added to a shot of white students cheering at a football game, is a “prominent African American student activist who has never attended a UW football game and is deeply involved in efforts to promote campus diversity."
People often ask my wife and me whether we want a boy or a girl. We always say “either”, but we always mean “both.”
We’ve heard of intelligence and emotional intelligence, but what about spiritual intelligence? Gary Zukav is spiritually brilliant. He frequently appears on Oprah, from which I assume (accepting all implicit risks) that his audience consists largely of women. Which is too bad, because men have quite a lot to learn from this man as well, and it would do a world of good (being, unjustly, a man’s world) if every man did.
How could a Ralph Nader story be interesting? He has been turned into the national scold, just as I am referred to as the national gadfly (I assume that's because 'intellectual' is too difficult a word to spell). He has been made the bore of all time.... But he's not boring, he's presented as a bore, as a nag. [The corporate media] have made him the bore of all time. [They] could just as easily have made him interesting, but it did not serve the purposes of General Motors -- the first big corporation to go to war against him -- so he's really marginalized.I've been upset about Gore Vidal's remark that Kerouac's On The Road is "not writing but typing", but this Salon.com interview (realaudio) has brought me to respect him a great deal -- his insight into the state of politics in America is rather piercing. Not only that, but the man speaks (for the most part) in complete sentences! Do you know anyone who can do that? Try it for a little while, it's harder than you think. U: After I wrote this post I realized I'd confused Vidal with Truman Capote (Vidal's got the interview, Capote the remark). The story is that Kerouac gave Vidal head one time, or maybe the other way around. Either way, Vidal rocks.
Now when you get somebody really exciting who talks about change, like Jesse Jackson, they start playing hardball. Imagine smearing him as an anti-Semite? I can imagine as anti-white you might make a case -- but an anti-Semite is about as wild as you could get from Jesse Jackson. But the point is, "Eliminate him!", "Eliminate him!". You get rid of anybody who wants to make change.
I can envisage somewhere about 2050, when the greenhouse really begins to bite, when people will start looking back and saying: whose fault was all this? And they will settle on the Greens and say: 'if those damn people hadn't stopped us building nuclear power stations we wouldn't be in this mess'.James Lovelock (Gaia hypothesis) shares some provocative thoughts with The Guardian.
Following the correct technique is important, Gerberding said. If you’re in a public restroom with a towel dispenser, first pull down the paper so you have a clean sheet waiting with which to dry off. Then run the hot water and vigorously scrub for at least 15 seconds, making sure to ‘get all the nooks and crannies’ — that is the folds of your hands as well as cuticles and fingernails that can trap dirt and germs. If the wash basin has a foot pedal, be sure to use it, she added. A simple trick, she said, is to say the alphabet to yourself while washing — by the time you reach the letter ‘Z,’ your 15 seconds will have elapsed. Health-care professionals should wash for 30 seconds. If the washroom has an electric hand-dryer rather than a paper dispenser, use your elbow to turn it on, Gerberding added. Good old-fashioned soap will remove all the debris, she said, expressing concern that the newer antibacterial products on the market can give people a false sense of security — an extra cost for little gain. ‘The goal is to physically remove germs, not kill them,’ she said, ‘so unless hot water is not available, chemical products are not necessary.’Visitors must wash hands for 30 seconds after reading randomWalks.
"GFP Bunny" gives continuation to my focus on the creation, in art, of what Martin Buber called dialogical relationship, what Mikhail Bakhtin called dialogic sphere of existence, what Emile Benveniste called intersubjectivity, and what Humberto Maturana calls consensual domains: shared spheres of perception, cognition, and agency in which two or more sentient beings (human or otherwise) can negotiate their experience dialogically. The work is also informed by Emmanuel Levinas' philosophy of alterity, which states that our proximity to the other demands a response, and that the interpersonal contact with others is the unique relation of ethical responsibility. I create my works to accept and incorporate the reactions and decisions made by the participants, be they eukaryotes or prokaryotes. This is what I call the human-plant-bird-mammal-robot-insect-bacteria interface.Eduardo Kac's GFP Bunny site
NPR highlights from recent weeks (audio; requires RealPlayer):
The Simpson clan lives in two parallel francophone universes. Where American Homer visits the Kwik-E-Mart, French Homère goes to the supermarché and Quebec Homère shops at the dépanneur du coin. Where American Homer describes his shrewish sisters-in-law as the "gruesome twosome," French Homère labels them les sorcières Siamoises (the Siamese witches), in Quebec, they're called deux airs de boeuf (the two grouches). In France, the only two Simpsons characters who were not assigned standard French accents are both dark-skinned: Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the immigrant Kwik-E-Mart clerk, and Homer's black co-worker, Carl. Though Apu hails, according to plot, from India, he has been given a quasi-Arabic accent by the French. "A lot of corner shops are owned by people from North Africa or Lebanon. There is even a slur in French, 'On va chez l'Arabe,' meaning, 'We're going to the corner shop.'" As for Carl, his voice has been pidginized - though not in any easily identifiable way. The darker-hued pair gets special treatment in Quebec as well, but there, Apu's accent sounds more like Haitian Creole spoken à la Québécoise. And Carl's voice, hardly what one might call ebonical in the English original, becomes "the Québécois stereotype of the black immigrant 'nèg.'"Caste of Characters by Jonathan Kay.
War, divorce, and global warming… possible Clinton moves in October?
Behind the Candy-Coated Shell, Mac OS X Provides All the Power of Unix with Very Few Compromises
What’s up with the backlash against Oprah’s book club (Sep 13 and Sep 14)? Has she ever recommended a bad book? Maybe she has; I certainly haven’t read them all – but as far as I’m concerned, anything that gets people reading is a Good Thing, and to get millions of people reading this language’s greatest living novelist is certainly beyond reproach.
All of the people who are so paranoid about their information being collected by the supermarkets should consider this idea which I just came up with. If a website was set up where you could select your supermarket, and then send in the bonus card that you signed up for and received, and in return receive another bonus card for the same chain from some other random person around the country, that would throw off their tracking quite a bit.Donkeymon offered this up on metafilter but it's too good an idea to leave there. Unfortunately, it's never gonna happen -- but what could happen is I could go to the grocery store and try to trade cards with random shoppers while picking over peppers, considering cereal, ferreting out frozen foods, or lingering in line. Even better would be to get a few friends to each sign up for a handful of bogus cards at a few different stores several weekends in a row, and then hit the parking lots passing out Anonymous Shopper cards, proclaiming "You own your history, habits, choices and tastes! Subvert the economy that profits off of your private life!" Can you believe that Whole Foods Market has the gall to call them "loyalty cards"?
The most creative piece of mail I received in response to the essay also was the most confused. In a padded envelope from Clement, Minn., came a brand-new can of Kiwi Shoe Polish, black. Because there was no note or letter, I have to guess at my correspondent's message, but I assume the person was suggesting that if I felt so bad about being white, I might want to make myself black. But, of course, I don't feel bad about being white. The only motivation I might have to want to be black -- to be something I am not -- would be pathological guilt over my privilege. In these matters, guilt is a coward's way out, an attempt to avoid the moral and political questions. As I made clear in the original essay, there is no way to give up the privilege; the society we live in confers it upon us, no matter what we want. So, I don't feel guilty about being white in a white supremacist society, but I feel an especially strong moral obligation to engage in collective political activity to try to change the society because I benefit from the injustice.Adding Robert Jensen's two essays, White Privilege Shapes the U.S. and Why the System of White Privilege Is Wrong, to Peggy McIntosh's Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack brings the count of accessible literature about white privilege to ... 3. If you're white and haven't yet commited yourself to ending racial injustice, read these essays and then ask yourself why not? thanks to BoyCaught for the link to an About.com article on white privilege.
Literary Kicks' Beat News page has been updated with word of a handful of new books including another collection of Kerouac’s letters and a book about the so-called Beat Hotel in Paris. Also check out another beat news page at the second best Beat Generation site on the web.
If he didn't work in comicbooks, Chris Ware would be famous by now. And he may yet be — after being selected for the Smithsonian's design triennial, and having his work published in the New Yorker, his first general-trade book, "Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth," (Pantheon, $27.50) will appear in September.From the intro to Time Magazine's interview with Chris Ware. Time also has a short article about the Jimmy Corrigan story. Buy Chris Ware comics from Fantagraphics or from your local independent comic store (try Big Planet Comics if you live in the DC Metro area.) xblog rocks.
"This is like welcoming James Joyce into the ranks of novel writers," says Art Spiegelman, another New Yorker artist and the author of "Maus." "This new book seems to be another milestone in the demonstration of what [comics] can be."
"s o u l t o o l s is a set of icons for your macos or windows computer. What perhaps makes this set a little bit different from the others is that they are only in black and white. Oldschool flavour, a bit sentimental but hopefully still with a fresh look." F-R-E-S-H! thanks, xblog.
Mac OS X early adopters will want to read MacWorld’s Beta Survival Guide and to keep an eye on MacFixIt’s regularly updated Troubleshooting Mac OS X report. Those who like to get their hands dirty might want to read MacAddict’s guide to restoring developer tools to OS X public beta. Unfortunately, until ars technica weighs in, the closest thing we’ve got to an overview of the OS is MacWorld’s OS X: The Full Story.
behind the curtain will be a collection of image galleries capturing 24 hours in the lives of a bunch of webloggers (five dozen have signed up so far). I don’t so much buy the idea that there’s anything inherently interesting about webloggers, but I do think photography is interesting – I’m participating mostly as an excuse to take some pictures.
