randomWalks

No Lye, No Soap! Can not make soap without LYE!

Retrogression (“a journal of music and revolution”) is a great weblog. I’d add it to my list of daily reads, but it hasn’t been updated since May.

Hober broadcasts from a geodesic dome in the oak forest just outside Washington DC. There are some strict rules governing which music is aired on Hober. The music should be hand played, without augmentation. A Hober band is people who could walk up to each other with their instruments in the middle of a field and just play their stuff. Drums should be struck by the hand rather than a stick. Hober songs should be musical descendant of melodies and rhythms which people knew, remembered and passed down - before recording machines existed.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, a political prisoner on death row in Pennsylvania, gave this year’s commencement address at Antioch College. You probably missed it today on C-Span at 4pm, but you can listen to it on the Internet (requires the free realplayer) thanks to c-span.org, where you can watch many other commencement speeches including Tom Wolfe’s at Boston College, Oprah Winfrey’s at Salem College, and George Plimpton’s at Hampshire College.

“I hate Northern Virginia. . . . I thought, if I buy a boat, I can always move it.”

Nader believes that it is "the contented classes" who need most to be aroused to indignation. The wealthy plutocrats? They are never going to join the revolution. But the top 10 percent, who live lives of comfort, who when the municipal water supplies become tainted, simply switch to Evian? When the public schools become monuments to failure, simply opt for private schools?

Police said the officer thought he saw a flash of metal, perhaps from the cellular telephone, wallet and keys that police said Buruca-Melgar was carrying in his hand.

Sarah Duncan’s What White People Can Do About Racism is required reading. Exceptions will be made only for those who have already written at least 4000 words on the same or a similar topic.

It sounds real -- it sounds like we used to. It sounds like a band. There was nobody there to say, 'Record this, don't record that, and add a keyboard there.' We didn't rehearse or play the songs to death before we recorded them, and that let us catch a freshness and energy level we've never really felt while making records.

Pull your pants up, turn your hat around, and get a job. This was the headline of an article about Napster which was posted to MetaFilter for discussion, and which struck me as rather fucked up. So of course, I said so – and was quickly put in my place by a bunch of well-meaning (I continue to hope) MetaFilter users. Check out this thread to see how it went down. If you’d like to continue the discussion you can post a comment here.

One of the critical barriers to building ever higher skyscrapers is elevator construction: Elevator passengers traveling hundreds of floors would experience inner-ear problems, from severe pain to broken ear drums.

Terrorism against the U.S. -- which is already exceptionally unusual -- would be all but imperceptible if American foreign policy were just and humane. But there's the rub: foreign policy cannot be either just or humane as long as U.S. corporations and elites seek to maintain the U.S. Empire. In other words, if you want to reduce terrorism globally dismantle the American Empire!

Most people don’t know that the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 guarantees that if you’ve held a job for at least one year and your company employs more than 50 people, you are entitled to 12 weeks of unpaid leave per year which you may use to care for a newborn child or a family member with a serious health condition. The FMLA further ensures that your position must be available to you when you return and that your medical coverage continues uninterrupted during the course of your leave. It’s unfortunate that paid paternity leave isn’t more common in the United States, but this law offers some assistance to fathers looking to stay home.

Mr. Valdés seems uncharacteristically thoughtful when discussing his friend's life. His friend, he says, has chosen to live as a black man rather than as a Miami Cuban.

. . .

"He said that?" Mr. Ruiz asks, lifting his eyebrows. "I don't know why he would think that blacks are delinquents. I know he doesn't think that of me, and I'm black. I've always been black." A pause. He thinks some more. "He grew up with blacks," he says. "I don't understand it. Maybe something bad happened to him. I am sure he is talking about American blacks."

Some compromises with authenticity must be made. Wallpaper paste used to be made with arsenic, and gardens fertilized with lethal pesticides. "We do not want the family to die," explains curator Daru Rooke.

If you’ve seen the movie Fight Club, take a look again through BoyCaught’s eyes.

I like this Gallery of Visual Journal Entries very much. Before you peek at that last entry on the right, try your hand at this logic puzzle.

Who knew the first cyborg would be a fish? This is crazier than cloning, and even that was something I didn’t expect to see in my lifetime.

He leaned his shoulder against a marble wall as he began to speak, his face so close to the cool surface he could have kissed it.

Pliny tells us that Cicero asserts that the whole Iliad was written on a piece of parchment which might be put in(to) a nutshell. For more origins of words and phrases, check out the Internet Public Library’s etymology pathfinder.

Scott McCloud’s new book Reinventing Comics is available in comic stores today. If his previous book is any indication, this new one will belong on the shelves of everyone working in new media and anyone interested in information, art, design, or literature. After you’ve read the book, check McCloud’s resources page in the next few weeks for online resources and expanded footnotes for Reinventing Comics.

Revealing Things was the first Smithsonian exhibit to be created specifically for the Internet (way back in 1998!) and it’s very, very good. The interface is full of new ideas and old ones done right, and feels natural to use. The site incorporates Flash, frames, and Java seamlessly. Any one of these technologies done well is impressive. The sum of the parts works out to a fascinating meditation on objects, as the title suggests.

These puppets are lots of fun.

A big role that this company is playing in this country is that of a massive school. This company teaches people about punctuality, about following procedures, about teamwork. That's the way I see it. Remember, this country comes from an agricultural base. If it's raining, nobody works. If it's windy, nobody works. If it's a cloudy or a dark day, that's the day you have to put the seed in the ground -- that's the day when people work. The other days, work is over by 10 AM, because the sun is too hot. We're going through a big change of that mentality, and that's what I consider this company -- a big school.