Crowds ogle Ma-Mail, a bioengineered plant that grows from a seed after five days of watering to reveal a message -- "I love you" or "Good luck" -- emblazoned on a sprout.
New communication style: Ma-Mail. 1. Open. 2. Water. 3. The Message. I love you; good luck!
New Orleans bloggers: Looka!, The Inderdictor.
Why does O'Reilly (of all organizations) use 'weblog' wrong?
Think about these things, reader. Don't sigh and turn the page. Think that I have written them and you have read them, and the odds against either of us ever having existed are greater by far than one to all of the atoms in creation.
From Roger Ebert's review of Kieslowski's Red.
"Sometimes, you're able to create a very distinct voice . . . from just the pace of their speech," Dale says, eyes twinkling, his voice drifting into the cadence of south London. "Did you know. That Michael Caine. Can only speak. In three words. At one time.
Poynter Online - Harry Potter And The Imbalance of Race
I'm sure she's a fine person. I'm saying she should stop writing as though white is normal and needs no identification, while every other race is so one-dimensional that a single word — black — sums up shade of skin, expression of eyes, length of nose, color of hair. She should describe my black friends with the same gifts of language that she uses on the white people.
George W Bush was in my dream last night. He was riding around on a motorcycle wearing a disguise depositing large sacks of I don't know what, while I was urgently trying to escape from a sprawling amalgam of office complex and amusement park. It's disconcertingly invasive to see his face appear unbidden in my mind, the jerk.
When sounds first enter the brain, they activate a region near the ears called the primary auditory cortex that starts processing sounds at their most basic level. The auditory cortex then passes on signals of its own to other regions, which can recognize more complex features of music, like rhythm, key changes and melody.
These music-processing regions may be continually looking for signals in the brain that they can interpret. When no sound is coming from the ears, the brain may still generate occasional, random impulses that the music-processing regions interpret as sound. They then try to match these impulses to memories of music, turning a few notes into a familiar melody.
For most people, these spontaneous signals may produce nothing more than a song that is hard to get out of the head.
Research into musical hallucinations is illuminating the phenomenon of the song that gets stuck in your head. My four-year-old was afflicted recently — he looked up from a construction project to say, in a bewildered tone, "Now all I can think about is Elvis."
Washington Post: Patrols on Mass Transit Intensified but Scattered
At L'Enfant Plaza, Metro officers displayed their submachine guns for a phalanx of television crews from around the world. They walked through the station, sweat pouring onto their backs from beneath their bulletproof vests.
One stepped to the side to check a trash can. Another tried the knob on a door to make sure it was locked. A third looked for anything unusual near the fareboxes. They fanned out when they reached the mezzanine, some taking position next to escalators, others staring down at passengers and the rest sweeping the platform.
An astute bit of journalism points out that, in response to the London bombings, USA's first order of business was to get pictures of guns on our subway to the media. Images of security now stand in for the real thing. Are they going to shoot the bombs?
For most of history, journalists could afford to spend their time covering wars, famines, politics and business. The reason for this is that everyone knew where the white women were at - at home, probably in the kitchen, minding the kids.
Burritoeater: “Is it as fun as skimming rocks on a frozen lake? If you imagine that the rocks are burritos and the lake is our systematic, fully thawed engine of analysis, then yes, it is.”
I see a video iPod strategy behind Apple's embrace of podcasting. iTunes 4.8 was the first version of iTunes to handle video files. The RSS enclosure format has always supported delivery of movies (as well as any other type of attachment, I assume). The pieces are coming together -- although Steve Jobs has famously dismissed the idea of watching movies on an iPod as impractical, I can certainly imagine watching a BBC News summary, a Pixar short, a cooking demonstration, or a slew of movie trailers on the subway ride to work. If videoblogging takes off, it will give Apple a legitimate content pool that will justify releasing a video iPod.
"My audience has gone from being over 95 percent Black 10 years ago to over 95 percent white today," laments Boots Riley of the Coup. "We jokingly refer to our tour as the Cotton Club," he says — a reference to the 1920s and '30s Harlem jazz spot where Black musicians played to whites-only audiences.
...
"I love Boots Riley's music, but in general people in the 'hood are not checking for the Coup," says Brother Ali, part owner of the Minneapolis-based hip-hop collective Rhymesayers Entertainment. "It's hard enough to get some of our people to go to a Kweli show. It has a lot to do with the fact that the emphasis on the culture has been taken away. It's just the industry now and it's sold back to us — it's not ours anymore. It used to be anti-establishment, off the radar, counterculture. People in the streets are now being told what hip-hop is and what it looks like by TV."
Village Voice: The Cotton Club by Bakari Kitwana .
I struggled to imagine the emotional currents that had carried people here to this bus, so far from their homes, to honor his memory. Later, a friend who had been born in Alaska and exiled to Maryland for five years tried to explain the overwhelming smallness and sameness of life on the suburban East Coast, where lawn care excites great interest; no wonder someone like Christopher McCandless seems adventurous and spiritual and inspiring, despite being dead.
...
For many Alaskans, the problem is not necessarily that Christopher McCandless attempted what he did — most of us came here in search of something, didn’t we? Haven’t we made our own embarrassing mistakes? But we can’t afford to take his story seriously because it doesn’t say much a careful person doesn’t already know about desire and survival. The lessons are so obvious as to be laughable: Look at a map. Take some food. Know where you are. Listen to people who are smarter than you. Be humble. Go on out there — but it won’t mean much unless you come back.
The Anchorage Press: : I Want To Ride In The Bus Chris Died In.
This thing called psychiatry -- it is a European-American invention, and it largely has no respect for nonwhite philosophies of mental health and how people function.
Washington Post: Patients' Diversity Is Often Discounted.
If you have an African American patient presenting with elevated paranoia, that has been referred to in some quarters as healthy paranoia based on how they perceive society. If you base your diagnosis on that symptom, you can be misled.
Washington Post: Racial Disparities Found in Pinpointing Mental Illness.
Planets wreaking havoc is as constant as the rain.
Big Bird is not in favor of affirmative action. Bert and Ernie are not gay. Miss Piggy is not a feminist. "The Three Tenors," "Antiques Roadshow," "Masterpiece Theater," "Wall Street Week" and nature programs do not have a political agenda. "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" is biased in favor of boring, old, white guys who appear on painfully well-balanced panels. "Washington Week in Review" is a showcase for "Inside the Beltway," conventional wisdom, power-parroting, political-geekhead, Establishment journalism -- there is nothing liberal about it.
But there is a plot to politicize public broadcasting. It is plain as a pikestaff, and it is coming from the Right.
Molly Ivins: Destroying PBS
The time feels right to me. My spirit’s ready for it.
Bodo's Bagels is open on the Corner after many lifetimes of anticipation.
Yes, first of all, this is *the* Velocity Girl. No, this isn't a track that's been locked in a vault for years, it's brand new. May we introduce you to the new Velocity Girl? Hey, wait a minute... it's exactly like the V Girl that disbanded in 1996! That's right, all members have reformed and resurrected what was perhaps THE janglepop band of the 90s. Pop sensibility and catchy hooks are back. This track, recorded earlier this year in the DC area, features the never-ending talents of Archie Moore, Brian Nelson, Kelly Riles, Jim Spellman and Sarah Shannon. If for some reason you lived under a rock and don't remember their first go-round, Velocity Girl are the band that gave the indieworld sugarpop and brilliance whilst the rest of the alterna-world was moshing in flannel. By the mid-90s they had the #2 selling album on Sub Pop of all time ('Copacetic' was #2 behind Nirvana's 'Bleach'). You have *no idea* how excited we are to debut to you new material from them...
Holy fucking... moly, randomWalks is pleased as punch to point you to a newish Velocity Girl mp3.
Also: Whither Velocity Girl?
One aspect of this transition that could prove interesting, in all positive and negative connotations of the word, is the so-called "trusted computing" capabilities of Intel's CPUs. Little has been done with them yet, but as we understand these capabilities, they're designed to work with a Microsoft digital rights management (DRM) system. There's no telling if or how they may play into Apple's existing music or future video plans.
TidBITS points out an underexamined factor in the Apple/Intel announcement.
