randomWalks

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She’s the author of the best Indian vegetarian cookbook you can buy, but her passion is acting. Madhur Jaffrey talks to Teresa Wiltz of the Washington Post about racial identity, colonialism, and Cotton Mary, her latest film.

Found photos rock.

Columbia Journalism Review’s Who Owns What is a guide to the holdings of the major media companies. Blah blah blah trite transition blah blah, Working Assets (the long distance company who donates a percent of your bill to progressive organizations – or the progressive organization that offers long distance service) has launched an online radio station broadcasting progressive news, intelligent talk and alternative viewpoints.

The periodic table of comic books? Check out the rare appearance of molybdenum in issue 70 of Flash, January 1993 page 6. Chlorine is key to a plot twist in issue 188 of The Avengers Volume 1, October 1979. With references to every element and a special section devoted to metal men, this site has to be seen to be believed.

Cousin Kim, I say. Which is better? The kindly massa or the sadistic overseer? And Kim doesn't answer. Neither, I tell her. They are the same. Two parts of a whole. Today, folks won't just walk up to you and call you "nigger lips." Well, they might, but mostly it is the benign racists who are killing me softly. They don't recognize themselves in the mirror. They didn't mean anything by it. They harbor no ill will. They just don't care enough to step outside their comfort zone.

In Bob Levey’s latest column, he tries to fend off “a large, friendly, conspiratorial, Caucasian arm.” Mos Def describes the same arm on his latest album. Are you familiar with the arm?

It is early June, and Cousin Kim and I are about to watch "Roots," the landmark 1970s television miniseries about a slave family. Kim says she's heard of the movie but has never seen it. So I go to queue the video in the cassette player, but first I make a cup of tea. And straighten the pillows on my couch. Then I check my voice mail.

I am puttering. Procrastinating. Loath to begin. Because I don't know if our blood ties are strong enough to withstand slavery. And I am scared to watch "Roots" with a white girl. Scared of my anger. Scared of my pain. Scared that she won't get it. Scared of how much I want her to. Scared of the way race can make strangers out of family.

The AltaMeter is a lot of fun: enter two or more words (or names, phrases, etc.) and see how they rank in terms of Altavista hits. This is actually an idea I first saw implemented by my boss (currently Executive Director of BlackPlanet.com) a couple of years ago – he wanted to chart the results of such a query over time as a sort of index of memetic currency. I didn’t think then that the search engines would do a good job of exposing trends in popular consciousness, and this query supports my thesis. I think this is due to a shortcoming of search engines in general – the idea itself is elegant and ought to be possible through the proper application of technology and algorithm.

The latest rumor regarding the Muslim formerly known as Cat Stevens is that a VH1 “Behind the Music” is in the works. As this wire story suggests, the life story of Yusuf Islam would be the show’s holy grail. The former folk singer, whose few hit records can be found on the shelves of most hippies (and their children), dropped out of the public eye when he joined one of the world’s most misunderstood religions.

I hope that last link gets you thinking about propaganda. There’s certainly a lot to think about.

How many reviews of Radiohead’s OK Computer will I have to read before I realize that the only way to know what you think about music is to hear it?

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity.

You’ll probably enjoy this.

Today’s Washington Post carried an article which purported to be about comic books going postmodern in an attempt to revive their failing popularity. The article failed to illuminate any issues facing the comics industry though, and how you can talk about postmodern comics without mentioning Frank Miller’s Dark Knight and Moore and Gibson’s Watchmen is beyond me – oh wait, you can’t. I’m guessing the article was just a reformulated press release for a new DC Comics series called “Realworlds”.

O: So what you're saying is that drugs make you a winner.
TA: Exactly. That's my point. They're the missing link between coolness and uncoolness.

The winners have been announced in the sylloge 5k web design contest. Wow. Check out the hungry little frog, iris, and WAR (the card game). I would have been impressed by any of these even if they’d been 100k.

Tanzanian Peaberry coffee beans are about the size of a pencil eraser. I've got a tad under a pound of them at home, sealed in a bag in my pantry. They're still green -- well, more like a greenish-brown, really -- because they haven't been roasted yet. This morning I scooped about six spoonfuls into my roaster and turned it on while I showered. After 15 minutes the house was filled with the aroma of freshly-roasted coffee. If you've not smelled that, and you like coffee, you are missing out. It's like the smell of coffee beans, or a nice coffee house, but smokier, richer, earthier. Enormously pleasant. I took the beans, still hot, and whirled themin my grinder. Steam was released and condensed back to water in the underside of the domed lid, all in ten seconds. The coarsly ground beans were then transferred into my French Press where they sat in nearly-boiling water for about five minutes. Twenty minutes total from raw bean to brew. To the coffee in my cup I added a spoonful of the freshly whipped cream I'd made for my strawberries and stirred with a piece of freshly cut sugar cane (a gift from my neighbors just returned from Florida. They also brought some segments that were starting to sprout, which I promptly planted in the side yard.)

The US Army expects to build a Star Trek style holodeck within 30 years. Woohoo!

Slashdot will be taking questions tomorrow for Metallica. In the meantime, John Katz has posted a diatribe against the band’s Napster lawsuit which has provoked some interesting discussion, including this post which suggests that the record companies know exactly what they’re doing – it’s not that they’ve missed the cluetrain, they’ve been busy building tracks and commandeering switches.

I’m spending a lot of time at Digital Photography Review’s Nikon forum lately – drooling over photos people have taken with their new 990s, commiserating with folks waiting for their own camera to arrive, and fantasizing about the photos I’ll take when I finally get my hands on one. One post pointed me to the very odd Beyond Red, a collection of photos taken with a 950 using a filter which only allows infrared light to be captured.

Time’s cover story this week, The Truth About the Vikings, is a fascinating though not especially well-written substitute for a field trip to the Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Check out both if you can.

The new Guardian weblog, with links to great stories such as this Boston Phoenix piece by a reporter who spent two nights undercover in jail, will, with some bending, pushing and squeezing, partly fill the hole left by the closing of World New York. On a tangent, it looks like Grant Barrett is working on another project called Mo Nickels which I hope to remember to check out in June.

Without Sanctuary: “Searching through America’s past for the last 25 years, collector James Allen uncovered an extraordinary visual legacy: photographs and postcards taken as souvenirs at lynchings throughout America. Please be aware before entering the site that much of the material is very disturbing.”

This in-depth review of the new Nikon Coolpix 990 describes a way to compensate for the noise generated in images with long exposure times by layering a blurred full black frame of equivalent exposure using the ‘difference’ layer option in Photoshop.

Seven folktales about flatulence from D. L. Ashliman’s collection of hundreds of folklore and mythology electronic texts.