Spring wildflowers of the Pohick Stream valley
I printed my writer's tips on one side of a sheet of paper and a .pdf map of Middle Earth on the other. It is perhaps the single most useful piece of paper ever printed. I can mock my friends' extensive use of the passive voice and their barbarously bad use of adverbs and then diagram the battle of Minias Tirith with a single piece of paper.
If you wash dishes by hand, here's a tip that will make cleanup go much quicker: rinse the dishes in the hottest water you can manage. If your heater is, like mine, set too high, that scalding water will drip off and evaporate like nobody's business.
(I picked this up reading the section on washing dishes in Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts because our dishwasher broke.)
As Apple keeps innovating, its challengers keep competing like engineers, thinking that advantages in storage capacity or battery life can make silk purses out of ugly, hard-to-use sows' ears of machines.
The first thing to do is carry a notebook and during quiet times or as the thought occurs to you, compile a list of anything that really interests you.
Reason: Gabbo Gets Laid. 2004: The Year of Puppet Sex (Thanks, Thatcher!)
For me, the defining moment of the year came when the Motion Picture Association of America required Trey Parker and Matt Stone to trim a few seconds from a sex scene in their marionette movie Team America: World Police. Even in its reduced state, the sequence probably set a record for explicit puppet-on-puppet sex.
I am doing 43 things.
I wasn't depressed about having to work on the day before the day before Christmas, but then I got on the bus which was totally empty and then I got on the train and saw all those sad bastards having a terrible Thursday. Now I'm feeling sorry for myself.
Detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were shackled to the floor in fetal positions for more than 24 hours at a time, left without food and water, and allowed to defecate on themselves, an FBI agent who said he witnessed such abuse reported in a memo to supervisors, according to documents released yesterday.
FBI Agents Allege Abuse of Detainees at Guantanamo Bay (washingtonpost.com)
"I just felt like the pace of progress at which they are comfortable moving is too slow," he says. "The audience can handle a quickened pace, and the country can't afford a slower pace."
...
NPR needs more creative marketing to reach underserved audiences, the host says. He takes the network to task for lacking a diverse staff. Even President Bush, he says, recognizes the symbolic importance of having a diverse Cabinet. "I'm not really sure that NPR has even gotten on base symbolically," Smiley says.
...
Some white listeners complained that Smiley's delivery, which diverges from the more reserved sound of most NPR hosts, is too loud and energetic.
Current.org | Tavis Smiley leaves NPR show, 2004
''The most difficult thing that I have had to do,'' he said, ``is fight a culture at NPR, a culture that is antithetical to the best interests of people of color.''
CNN.com - Court allows church to use hallucinogenic tea - Dec 10, 2004
The U.S. Supreme Court sided Friday with a New Mexico church that wants to use hallucinogenic tea as part of its Christmas services, despite government objections that the tea is illegal and potentially dangerous.
"Lest We Forget" was originally compiled and released by Aaron Elliot of the acclaimed fanzine Cometbus (and drummer for Crimpshrine and Pinhead Gunpowder) in 1991 to document the Berkeley punk scene of the 80's. I don't want to be accused of wild exaggeration by saying the music here is exactly essential (although there's some great stuff here) but it is absolutely essential to appreciate the why, who, and how of what was being created at the time. Their output has had a significant impact on today's music. You can connect the influential dots from this tape to Maximum Rock'n'Roll to Operation Ivy to Green Day to whatever indie/punk act you're listening to right now.
What we need to see is that consumption is not about conformity, it’s about distinction. People consume in order to set themselves apart from others. To show that they are cooler (Nike shoes), better connected (the latest nightclub), better informed (single-malt Scotch), morally superior (Guatemalan handcrafts), or just plain richer (bmws).
Poor Salvadorans Chase the 'Iraqi Dream' (washingtonpost.com)
Juan Nerio, a 44-year-old mason's assistant, was sick of living in a mud hut on the side of a volcano. When he heard that an American company was offering six times his $200 monthly wage, he signed up. Six weeks later he found himself holding an AK-47 assault rifle and guarding a U.S. diplomatic complex in Iraq.
...
"This is the equivalent of a poverty draft," said Geoff Thale of the Washington Office on Latin America, a rights and policy group in Washington. "The United States is unwilling to draft people, so they are recruiting people from poor countries to be cannon fodder for us. And if they are killed or injured, there will be no political consequences in the United States."
Sloane Crosley has written an essay for the Village Voice: “With bad manners just a ‘send’ button away, we need some rules. Call it technetiquette.” I’ll leave the odd coinage of technetiquette aside. (Google actually shows a Michael Finley using the term in 1997.) Instead, I’m happy to focus on her number one complaint: Evite.
Ah, the Starbucks of the Internet. The illusion of choice, made to order. Since I've never known anyone who has wholesomely selected a "Girl's Night In" or "Super Bowl" template (perhaps I simply need new friends), Evite as I know it has always been a bit of a nuisance. The following guidelines might get me dropped from the guest lists of future soirees, but if it means no more clip-art martini glasses, I'll take the risk. ... Because Evite is a public forum in a private space, I am still working on reminding myself I don't actually have to read the responses. There's nothing more irritating than a private joke played out among a small segment of the invitees. Tina: "I'll be there . . . as long as I can touch Bob's pineapple." Jeff: "Happy birthday man, even though we all know your pineapple has been canned since Atlantic City."I can take or leave the rest of this article, but it makes me very happy to know that others find Evite as deeply irritating as I do. Sloane even recommends using the Hide Guests ability if people insist on using it! This and her other complaints echo the small rant I have been giving about Evite for a few months now. The phrase "Evite is a public forum in a private space" pretty much cuts to the heart of the problem with the tool. It unnecessarily mixes up private and public spheres and like the worst of the so-called "social software" blurs and solidifies social relationships in awkward ways. Telling a friend you are coming to their party should not be a public performance. Read the entire article.
Air America's Beltway debut will be Jan. 20, with Franken broadcasting from President Bush's second inauguration.
Link: Air America, Touching Down in D.C. (washingtonpost.com).
When The New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh spoke at Hampshire College in Massachusetts a few weeks ago, he told two stories about the mental damages of war. The first came from his reporting of the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam.
"There were 547 people killed in My Lai," Hersh said. "People don't know this, but the blacks and Hispanics shot into the air. It was the white rural farm kids who did most of the shooting. One rural mother said to me, 'I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer.'"
When he was reporting on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, Hersh got another call, this time from a devoutly Catholic mother. When her daughter, young and newly married, returned from serving in the military police at Abu Ghraib, she immediately left her new husband and her family, cut off all contact with them, and started living alone. Every weekend she gets more big, black tattoos - enough so they now cover most of her body.
The mother said she began to understand what happened to her daughter when Hersh's Abu Ghraib stories started coming out. She began to clean out the files on her daughter's laptop and found one labeled "Iraq." It contained over 1,000 pictures.
"One of them was run in The New Yorker," Hersh said. "It was the one with the man with two dogs on either side, and they were coming to attack him. The whole thing was photographed. The dogs attacked. You can imagine what they bit. There was a lot of blood... This is something no mother should see, something no child should see. On that level, we're dealing with enormous atrocity."
It is absolutely imperative that you develop the habit of making decisions as soon as possible. I use a 60-second rule for almost every decision I have to make, no matter how big or important. Once I have all the data to make a decision, I start a timer and give myself only 60 seconds to make a firm decision. I think people too often delay making decisions when there is no advantage to putting them off. Many people probably spend more than 60 seconds just deciding what they'll eat for dinner.
On the occasion of the DVD release of "Pee Wee’s Playhouse," PEE WEE HERMAN — who hasn’t been heard from since 1991 — joins Elvis Mitchell, host of the nationally syndicated public radio program, The Treatment for a special broadcast,* *Monday, December 6th, 2:30 to 3 pm on 89.9 KCRW and KCRW.com*.
You heard it here first. Find the stream at KCRW.com.
Dave Morin is Apple’s first public weblogger. They launched a “student weblog” on their education site yesterday, “for students to hear from other students about their observations and Mac-related stuff.” (That’s the sharp focus and clarity of purpose I like to see in a new weblog.) Lacking any external links or the ability to accept comments, the most interesting thing about the blog so far may be the disclaimer: “Any information in the blogs is provided for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement or representation by Apple. Apple is not responsible for the content.” I hope Dave does something interesting with the site so it doesn’t remain the token brand-positioning corporate weblog it appears to be.