By Sheila
Lennon
Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Fair and balanced, too!
I've updated the noontime item about the 14 Syrian musicians on Northwest
Flight 327 after an interesting email exchange with Rod Dreher of the Dallas
Morning News editorial staff. Scroll down to see the addition if you read the
item earlier.
July 22, 2004, 6:50 p.m.
Grow
your own backyard couch: Call it a sod sofa or a grass bench, the
instructions are all here.
Note: Couch may require mowing.
Before you begin, figure the dirt you need by multiplying the dimensions
of the couch you plan to make (ours was 8' x 4' x 4', or 128 cubic feet).
Next,
put on some old clothes—things are going to get messy—and locate
a suitable spot. Placement is key: There’ll be no moving once you’ve
begun. Clear the area of grass and weeds until you have a level swath of
dirt, then use a stick to sketch the shape of the couch into the dirt with
a stick.
Via Liz Donovan and Side
Salad, who both got here first.
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Today is Spooner's Day: Thanks to the elegant wood
s lot for the reminder.
Today is the day we remember the father of the spoonerism, William Spooner.
What’s a spoonerism, you ask? It’s the accidental switching of
parts of two words, usually two words in a row. So, for instance, if you had
a pair of binoculars in your hand and said you were going word botching, you’d
be making a spoonerism. “Word botching” is, in fact, a good description
of what the good Rev. Spooner excelled at.
Born in 1844, William Spooner was an Anglican priest who lectured at Oxford.
During his 60-year stay, he rose through the ranks to become dean, and
eventually, warden – or as we say, president. He was a brilliant man.
So brilliant, his mind often raced far ahead of his tongue.
Many tips of the slongue, as it were, are attributed to him, some of which
he may have actually said. Here are a few:
* “which of us has not felt in his heart a half-warmed fish?”
* “in a dark glassly”
* (at a wedding, he pronounced the couple) “loifully jawned”
* “The Lord is thy shoving leopard.”
* (to a school secretary) “Is the bean dizzy?”
* “It is now kisstomary to cuss the bride”
* (he lectured a student for) “fighting a liar in the quadrangle”
* (to a student) “You have hissed my mystery lectures. You have tasted
a whole worm. You will leave Oxford on the next town drain.”
From the History
of Spoonerisms, more about the Rev.:
Spooner was an albino, small, with a pink face, poor eyesight, and a head
too large for his body. His reputation was that of a genial, kindly, hospitable
man. He seems also to have been something of an absent-minded professor.
He once invited a faculty member to tea "to welcome our new archaeology
Fellow."
"
But, sir," the man replied, "I am our new archaeology Fellow."
"
Never mind," Spooner said, "Come all the same."
After a Sunday service he turned back to the pulpit and informed his student
audience: "In the sermon I have just preached, whenever I said Aristotle,
I meant St. Paul."
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The 9/11 Commission Report in html. Kottke.org has converted the .pdfs so
you can read it in your browser.
Link
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Tree kills environmentalist: A sad end for an environmental lawyer.
TULSA - Blake Champlin, a Tulsa lawyer and environmental activist, died Monday
at his home when a tree supporting a hammock fell and crushed him.
Champlin, 45, died instantly, said Gerald Hilsher, an attorney with Shipley & Kellogg,
Champlin's former law firm.
Champlin was a member of Sierra Club and Save the Illinois River, and the
director of Keep Tulsa Beautiful....
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12:18 p.m.
Terror (or error)? The 14 Syrian musicians of Northwest
Flight 327 found
While I was on vacation, a woman named Annie Jacobsen published an account
of her flight from Detroit to Los Angeles in WomensWallStreet.Com: Terror
in the Skies, Again?
Basically, 14 Syrian musicians, one with a McDonald's bag, turned into much
more in her imagination.
She published this extended fear riff even after, as she writes,
I received a call from Dave Adams, the Federal Air Marshal Services (FAM)
Head of Public Affairs. Adams told me what he knew:
There were 14 Syrians on NWA flight #327. They were questioned at length
by FAM, the FBI and the TSA upon landing in Los Angeles. The 14 Syrians had
been
hired as musicians to play at a casino in the desert. Adams said they were "scrubbed." None
had arrest records (in America, I presume), none showed up on the FBI's "no
fly" list or the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists List. The men checked
out and they were let go. According to Adams, the 14 men traveled on Northwest
Airlines flight #327 using one-way tickets. Two days later they were scheduled
to fly back on jetBlue from Long Beach, California to New York -- also using
one-way tickets.
Okay, we can project our fears on anyone -- especially 14 swarthy Arabs --
but couldn't somebody at WomensWallStreet.com try to check the facts, I wondered.
How many
desert
casinos
booked Syrian bands
on
July
1?
But nobody could, apparently. The
New York Times, Salon, Dallas
Morning News,
The
Palm Springs Desert Sun and many more all picked up on Jacobsen's story
without digging to pay dirt.
But Clinton L. Taylor, DJ for KZSU at
Stanford University, found the Syrian band, and published
his findings at NRO Online:
...There aren't that many casinos in southern California, so I had my research
assistant, Mr. Google, take a look at some. An hour later I was talking
to the nice folks at Sycuan Casino & Resort, near San Diego....
..."Oh, do you mean Arab music?" inquired Angie, who answered
Sycuan's phone. Yes, they had had an Arab act perform on July 1, an artist
named Nour
Mehana. Terry, Angie's supervisor at Sycuan, confirmed that he was there
and that there was probably a backup band brought in, since there's no house
band
at Sycuan. In fractions of a second, Mr. Google found a website for Sycuan's
event promoters, Anthem Artists, whose
archive confirms Nour Mehana performed
at Sycuan on 7/01/04....
...I talked to James Cullen of Anthem Artists who confirms that Nour Mehana's
large band did arrive on Northwest Flight 327. Some of them came in from
Detroit, and some from Lebanon. Cullen says they never said anything about
a disturbance
on the flight to him, even though "I stayed in the same hotel, they
were nice, they stayed right above me." He said that they were fine
musicians, put on a great show, and he would work with them again in the
future....
...Nour Mehana (a.k.a. Noor Mehanna, or Nour Mhanna, plus various permutations
of those spellings) is, in fact, Syrian. He performs both "new-agey" hits
and old sentimental Middle Eastern classics in a style called Tarab. In this
catchy ten-minute video of Mehana on stage, (scroll down; the name is rendered
Noor Mhanan this time ) you can see he has a rather large backup band helping
him out. (The resolution is low, but Jacobsen might recognize some of the band
members Mehanna is interacting with.) Followers of news from Iraq may have
heard about the U.S. tour of the "Iraqi
Elvis." Well, Mehana comes
across not as an angry jihadi, but rather more like the Syrian Wayne Newton.
You may find Jacobsen's fears justified. They are at least understandable.
Living in a climate of fear is, after all, terrorism. We are all, to varying
degrees,
susceptible.
But couldn't somebody besides a college DJ have found out where 14 Syrian
musicians were playing near L.A. before bursting into print with an encounter
with the boogeyman?
Updated 6:35 p.m.: I just had an interesting email exchange with Rod Dreher
of the Dallas Morning News editorial staff.
He points out that their editorial did not present this story as if it were
unquestioned fact; they took care to frame the incident as either
vigilance or paranoia -- let the reader decide.
Dreher wrote that the intense popular interest in this story justified their
opinion page's attention to it.
"I find it hard to believe there's not a single air traveler who wouldn't
wonder: If I had been on that plane, what would I have done?" Dreher added.
Good question.
Airline stewards regularly "chat up" passengers. "Are you all
heading to the same wedding?" would seem natural enough.
"No, we're all musicians playing a gig at Sycuan Casino. Nour is famous,
so he's in first class," could have led to "You like cold hamburgers?" with
a glance at the McDonald's bag.
(Bouncers in local bars check people out this way all the time.)
I'm direct
that way, too. I would have asked the question myself had I been on that
plane. But I shouldn't have to: I would expect that the flight attendants were
trained to do that, too.
They dropped the ball with their passivity. Passengers shouldn't suffer these
fears over mere musicians.
Dreher agrees: "It's ridiculous that the flight crew didn't make those guys
sit down."
If you were a passenger on that flight, what would you have done?
Updated July 27: If you're coming here from Daypop or another listing, you
might want to continue
to a later post on this, with more sources.
Link
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July 21, 2004, 6:10 p.m.
Wanted:
best 'guitar face': AP reports,
The term might not be familiar, but the image definitely is - that look guitarists
get when trying to nail a high note or power chord.
Now a new contest will determine who has the best "guitar face" -
and the winner could be someone who has never held a six-string.
"You can hold up a tennis racket, pretend it's a guitar and still enter," said
Jesse Raiford, director of programming for the on-demand television service
Mag Rack, which is sponsoring the contest. The prize is a Les Paul "Black
Beauty" electric guitar and case.
The 20-odd judges range from musicians to producers to rock photographers
like Mark Weiss, who has captured everyone from Led Zeppelin to Aerosmith and
Ozzy Osbourne in 25 years of taking pictures.
Weiss is looking for someone who reminds him of Ted Nugent. (Photo at
right) "When
he plays his notes, it's emulated in his face. He's all over the place. Look
at his mouth and you can tell he's playing the guitar; you don't have to
look
at his hands."...
...Aspiring guitar-facers can enter the contest by visiting www.magrack.com (here's the page
link) or sending a photo no larger than 4 by 6 inches, along
with name, address, age and phone number, to Guitar Face Challenge, c/o Cataldi
Public
Relations,
143 W. 29 St., Suite 904, New York, NY 10001
Thanks to my colleague Sean Polay for this one.
Link
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Shirt alert: Want a T-shirt
that reads, "Sacramento Girlie Men"?
$24 each. And 20% of proceeds will benefit the California Democratic Party,
which as you may have noticed could use the help.
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Women
Excluded From Saudi Arabia's first election: From Arab News, while
I
was
off:
RIYADH, 13 July 2004 — Women are to be excluded from either voting
or standing for office in the first partial elections ever to be held in
Saudi
Arabia, Al-Watan newspaper reported yesterday.
Only male Saudis over the age of 21 will be eligible to vote or be elected
in the upcoming municipal polls, the newspaper said quoting official sources....
...Besides women, military personnel and employees of the municipalities will
be excluded from the vote, as will anyone contracted by the municipality.
Link
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Drinkable donut: Krispy
Kreme unveils frozen beverage line, including
a glazed-flavored drink. At CNN/Money.
Isn't that sugar-flavored? The nutritional content is with the story. The
smallest -- 12 ounces -- has 440 calories and 70 grams of carbs; the 20-oz.,
730 calories, 117 grams of carbs. Phew.
Link
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3:47 p.m.
P.
Diddy Announces Campaign To Make Voting 'Sexy'. MTV's take:
NEW YORK — As political press conferences go, it was unusual to say
the least. Backed by a DJ and surrounded by chanting kids and giant monitors,
P. Diddy vowed to make voting "sexy" on Tuesday as he announced
his newest exploit, a voter-awareness campaign called Citizen
Change.
Referring to himself as "Citizen Combs," the media mogul/athlete/actor/fashion
designer said Citizen Change's goal is to champion the cause of youth and minority
voters, or as he has dubbed them, "the forgotten ones" — a
group comprised of the more than "42 million Americans age 18 to 30
that are eligible to vote on November 2."
According to Puffy, Citizen Change will be a nonpartisan organization aiming
to "educate and empower" groups that Diddy sees as not adequately
represented by politicians and thereby not well-represented at the polls.
The burden of changing this trend is not for the nation's leadership alone,
he
said. "We cannot hold [politicians] accountable if we don't hold ourselves
accountable."...
Despite his insistence that the group is nonpartisan, its staff consists
of mostly liberal political advisors, such as James Carville, the outspoken
liberal co-host of CNN's "Crossfire." The group plans to split
its time "50/50 for both candidates to speak to the people." Puffy
has already sat down to talk with Democratic candidate John Kerry (see "Ass-Kicking
P. Diddy Meets With Kerry, Young Republicans"), and he began talks with
Republican Chairman Ed Gillespie on Monday night.
The T-shirts are to be available soon at the Citizen Change site, according
to Fashion
Week Daily's report on P.'s annual White Party earlier this month.
If you just can't wait to get the vote message out, Izaak Mizrahi, Richard
Tyler and Todd Oldham have
shirts at declareyourself.com for
$20.
Mizrahi's is pictured at right.
The Philadelphia Daily News has a report about P.'s meeting with John Kerry
at the NAACP convention there last week. (Rapper
P. Diddy electrifies conventioneers: Meets with Kerry, Mfume and Mayor Street)
Thanks to my colleague Andrea Panciera for the heads-up on P.
Link
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2004
Bulwer-Lytton (bad)
Fiction Contest winner:
She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight . . . summarily,
like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp's tail . . . though
the term "love affair" now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism
. . . not unlike "sand vein," which is after all an intestine,
not a vein . . . and that tarry substance inside certainly isn't sand .
. . and
that brought
her back to Ramon.
-- Dave Zobel, Manhattan Beach, Calif.
Here's the background on the contest.
An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory
(if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton
(1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged
to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known
for "The
Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times,
originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and
phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton
opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle
Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."
More entries at the headline link.
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Ruckus
over Ronstadt comments new for Baltimore Symphony Orchestra: A charming,
literate Baltimore Sun report on Ronstadt's tour band ends with,
The BSO players are unaccustomed to hearing boos and catcalls when they're
onstage. Violist Sharon Pineo Myer says she and her colleagues thought the
first incident of Desperado-inspired ruckus, early in the tour
last month in Newark, "was kind of funny. But it's been kind of scary
since then, especially in San Diego, where the audience was on folding chairs.
I was afraid they were going to be thrown at us."
On a more positive note, the BSO has been inciting nothing but approval
opening each performance on its own with music by Gershwin, including Rhapsody
in Blue. "The
audiences have gone crazy," Meyer says. "Maybe we're reaching people
who haven't heard an orchestra before."
Anderson says the BSO has enjoyed "standing ovations at every single
concert. And these are definitely not regular symphony crowds. It has been
so cool. We're getting big, rock 'n' roll-type cheers."
The tour, which wraps up next week, is also generating about $200,000 for
the BSO - welcome revenue for the financially challenged orchestra.
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Anarchist's
Cookbook: Fast Company profiles Whole Foods' John Markey and the
organic grocery empire he's built. From a small health-food store in Austin,
Texas in 1978 to the expensive and ridiculously profitable empire it is
today:
In 1992, a year after going public, Mackey announced, "We're creating
an organization based on love instead of fear."
The question of the 1990s -- after Whole Foods had acquired Wellspring,
in North Carolina (two stores); Bread & Circus, in New England (six stores);
Mrs. Gooch's, in California (seven stores); and Fresh Fields, on the East
Coast (22 stores), while opening an average of five new stores a year --
was about how the whole charming, loving, unlikely enterprise would scale
up.
In 2004, with 26,000 employees (twice the number at Apple Computer) and
nearly a billion in sales in just the first three months of the year, what
has happened to all those Woodstock-generation management ideas?
The question was how a charming, loving, unlikely enterprise would scale
up.
Every one of them is still in place -- except that executive salaries are
now limited to 14 times frontline workers' pay.
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Maybe it's time to bring back the matriarchy: (What would Sigmund Freud
make of "The Penetrator"?)
Al Jazeera reports (US
developing new bunker busters),
The US military plans to develop an experimental 30,000-pound (13,600 kg)
bomb, the biggest in its inventory, aimed at destroying deeply buried targets
beyond the reach of existing bombs, the Air Force said.
The Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, would be about one-third heavier
than the 21,000-pound (9375 kg) Massive Ordnance Air Blast, MOAB, dropped
twice last year in "live" tests at a range in Florida....
...Penetrators are made of special alloys designed to stay intact on impact
to improve the effectiveness of conventional weapons against deep tunnels
and other underground facilities.
Link
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Memories of Festival Express -- circa 1970: After
reading the item below about the Festival Express tour movie, reader Warren
Klass of
Winnipeg, Canada, wrote,
It was with great interest I saw Sheila's thing on the Festival Express tour
of 1970. I was at the concert in Winnipeg,Canada in the summer of 70.
I was
a long haired (very stoned) teenager.Festival Express was for Canada's centennial,
although there were some protests from Marxist types --tickets were $10 for
one of the greatest rock shows ever.
Here is what I remember: The Band were the most professional, Delaney
and Bonnie stole the show, Joplin was great but couldn't even stand up because
she was too stoned or drunk. Her death a few months later was no big surprise.
The biggest disapointment was the Grateful
Dead. Their jam just bored everyone.
They were booed. The crowd chanted: "Play hard rock! Play hard rock!" Phil
Lesh goes to the microphone and said: (unprintable)
"The Dead never played Winnipeg ever again.
The music of The Band, Delaney
and Bonnie, and Joplin were among the greatest I ever heard. I would love
to see the movie. I was about 4 rows from the front. It was not a concert I
will ever forget.
Thanks to the Providence Journal for reviving memories.
Link
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July 20, 2004, 6:07 p.m.
Festival Express: 'Lost'
1970 rock train movie brings back Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, Rick Danko
In 1970, The Band, the Buddy Guy Blues Band, Delaney and Bonnie and Friends,
Eric Andersen, The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin,
Sha Na Na and Tom Rush and more than 100 other musicians took a train from
one Canadian gig to another, with cameras documenting the whole party.
To pay for it all, ticket prices were high, bringing protests and half-empty
halls. Lawsuits ensued, and the film was hidden or lost for a long time. (SFGate has
that story.) Enough was found to put together Festival Express. (Here's
the trailer: QuickTime, hi-res; low-res.)
Amazing.
Festival Express will open here September 3 at the Avon on Thayer Street.
Opening dates elsewhere and much more can be found at the film's website (The
link is on the headline).
'Festival
Express' documents one wild ride - Marin (Calif.) Independent Journal:
I KNEW "FESTIVAL Express" was something extraordinary when I was
at the movies a couple of times recently and felt the excitement, the outright
commotion, that the long-lost rock documentary sparked when its trailer came
onto the screen.
On
both occasions, the theaters were packed with Marin people waiting for the
regular feature to start. When the quick preview for "Festival Express" showed
a clip of Janis Joplin onstage in all her outrageous glory, kicking into
the opening bars of "Cry Baby," the audience erupted, rumbling
and whooping and buzzing like it had just been zapped with a jolt of electricity.
And it had.
Shot in 1970, two months before Joplin's death of a drug overdose, her sequences
are galvanizing. For someone like me who never got to see her in real life,
this movie is the next best thing - about as close as I'm going to get.
And that's not even the half of it. The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia is
slim, exuberant, beaming, 28 years old, in the prime of his life. "We
were happy, man," he says near the end of the film, a crazed cinema
verité chronicle of an alcohol-fueled concert tour/ bachanal/train trip across
Canada with Joplin, the Dead, the Band, Buddy Guy, the New Riders of the
Purple Sage, Traffic, Delaney and Bonnie, Sha Na Na, Ian and Sylvia and the
Flying Burrito Brothers.
"This was really sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll," the Dead's Mickey
Hart, 60, told me before a screening this week. "It couldn't have been
better when you're a kid of 20. We'd never done anything like this before,
we never did it again and we sure couldn't do it now."...
We thought it would always be that way, that peace and love and joy were permanent
possibilities. Now, it's enough to have been alive then, to have been part
of it all, with wonderful memories for our onrushing old age.
Link
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3:07 p.m.
Waco
editor to Michael Moore: Send DVD in brown paper: John Young,
opinion page editor of the Waco (Texas) Tribune
Everybody is talking about your new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11. They're
talking about it in cities like Dallas and Austin where it is packing theaters.
But in Waco all we can talk about is the talk. Our theaters aren't showing
you.
Some might say that's not surprising. Greater Waco is George W. Bush's
home away from the White House. Some will say that whatever might disturb
local political sensibilities would be better presented elsewhere.
You might think that Waco just doesn't have enough screens or interest
to show your movie. The fact is, with a metro population of over 200,000,
we have lots of both. Movie screens? We have two 16-screen goliaths for
first-run films. That's thirty-two screens. ...
...The Peace House in Crawford would be happy to screen the movie. A wondrous
contraption called an LCD recently came to our town on the stagecoach.
With the LCD, we could take a DVD player, drape a bed sheet on the side
of a certain barn just outside of Crawford, and project your movie. You'd
need to supply a generator. Otherwise, you'd need a long extension cord.
Mr. Moore, you've shown a penchant for marketing and for venturing into
the heartland. That's us. My two marketing suggestions: (1) Send your DVD
to Jerry in brown paper. (2) Just show up with movie in hand, and watch your
audience grow.
Link
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We
Don't Need No Stinkin' Login: At Wired,
While many online newspaper readers are used to the idea of registering
to read free content online, some news buffs are supporting and creating
sites that help them beat the system with fake or shared login information
that helps keep their personal information under wraps. ...
From Steve Outing at E-Media
Tidbits, part of the Poynter collection:
Registration:
The Industry's Hot-Button Issue
On Poynter's Online-News discussion
list, for the last week's there's been a lengthy and heated discussion
about forced vs. voluntary registration on news websites that offer free
content. Indeed, this is one of the lengthiest conversations that the list
has had in some time. I've also noticed that in the comments area of this
weblog, one
discussion thread has been growing steadily, even though the item that
the discussion spawned from was published way back in January. The topic:
forced registration of news websites and the use of the service BugMeNot.com to
circumvent it. If I had to pick one issue that most riles up folks in the
online-news business right now, this would be it.
Cory Doctorow at boingboing.net adds
(Why
registration-sites suck),
The point that everyone seems to miss is that no one can possibly keep
track of a thousand passwords for a thousand websites, which means that these
sites undoubtably contain recycled passwords (admonishments from security
experts to never recycle a password are the infosec equivalent of telling
people to "eat less and exercise more" -- simplistic doctrine that
is vanishingly unlikely to be adhered to in the field).
The more you recycle a password, the higher the likelihood that you will
use it in a sensitive context -- a bank site, a message board, an IM client,
an auction site -- where someone might impersonate you or even commit identity
theft crimes against you.
What's even worse is that while these news-sites are willing to spend
the computational cycles necessary to receive your password, none that
I've seen use SSL for their login, which means that the NYT and others
demand that you send your password in the clear when you sit down at a
WiFi cafe and want to read the paper. This is a potential disaster if that
NYT password is also a sensitive one somewhere else: it's a case of really
callous disregard for user privacy and security.
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The MP3Blogs Aggregator gathers
the latest from the blogs that link to legal audio files. There's also a
blogroll of the feeders. I'm listening to the Ahmad Jamal Trio's Dolphin
Dance as I type this, courtesy of Soul
Sides. (Bonus link here: SO
YOU WANT TO START AN AUDIOBLOG... )
At A Million
Love Songs, songs are zipfiles to download, and links expire in seven
days.
Related: A friend named Terry Cannon turned me onto Midnite, a
roots reggae band from St. Croix. At the
band's page at Ireggae.com, you can listen to entire albums (scrolll
down to Sounds). To get an idea of where to start, many of them are
reviewed here at reggae-reviews.com
Link
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Source
of president's charge that Castro promotes sex tourism: student paper on
the web: The L.A. Times reports
today (reg.req),
WASHINGTON — Like many scholars, Charles Trumbull hoped that one
day his work would attract attention in high places. So you might think
he'd be
thrilled that someone in the White House used one of his research papers
to draft a speech for President Bush last week.
But he's not.
In a hotel conference room in Tampa, Fla., on Friday, Bush told law enforcement
officials that Fidel Castro was brazenly promoting sex tourism to Cuba.
"The dictator welcomes sex tourism. Here's how he bragged about the
industry," Bush
said. "This is his quote: 'Cuba has the cleanest and most educated
prostitutes in the world.' "
Asked about the source for the quote, White House officials provided a link
to a 2001 paper, written by Trumbull, on the website of the Association for
the Study of the Cuban Economy.
At the time he wrote the paper, Trumbull was a Dartmouth College undergraduate,
and the paper won a prize from the association as the best student paper
of the year. Now a law student at Vanderbilt University, Trumbull does
not remember
the source for the wording of the Castro quote, which he did not footnote....
...According to Trumbull, who conducted field research in Cuba, prostitution
boomed in the Caribbean nation after the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991, providing an important source of currency for the Cuban economy.
Castro, who outlawed prostitution when he took power in 1959, initially
had few resources to combat it. But beginning around 1996, Cuban authorities
began to crack down on the practice.
Although prostitution still exists, Trumbull said, it is far less visible,
and it would be inaccurate to say the government promotes it.
Maybe the campaign's undergraduate summer interns were Googling around
for quotes.
Link
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Tech Bust Zaps Interest in Computer Careers: Also in the L.A. Times,
It's the same scene on campuses across the country, as enrollment in computer
science programs has dropped sharply — down 23% from 2002 to 2003.
After flocking to computer science during the technology boom, students
are fleeing it almost as fast, spooked by tales of unemployed programmers
watching
their jobs migrate to India and Eastern Europe.
Jeanne Ferrante, associate dean of the UC San Diego school of engineering,
said there was little mystery why. After hovering under 2% in the late
1990s, the jobless rate for computer scientists and systems analysts grew
to 5.4%
in the last three months of 2003. It then jumped to 6.7% in the first
quarter of this year — outstripping the overall national unemployment
rate of 6.1%.
Ironically, the enrollment dip is occurring just as companies prepare to
ratchet up hiring, prompting worries about a potential shortage of domestic
tech workers when engineers from the Class of 2007 graduate. Long term, some
fear that continuing declines could hamper technological innovation.
Maybe there's hope for some of the unemployed tech workers Gina Minks blogs
for at Displaced Techies.
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Background
on a hoot: CBS interviews the pair behind the "This
Land is Your Land" parody I blogged yesterday.
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July 19, 2004, 6:40 p.m.
Many thanks to my newsroom colleagues Sean Polay, Frank Carnevale,
Dan Johnsen and Jack
Perry, the guest bloggers who stepped into this space
while I was on vacation.
It was fun to watch 'em work. (Last
week's guest weblog)
Comic
sees a bright future in impersonating John Edwards: From the
Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer Remember this name:
Frank
King has been countrifying his drawl like John Edwards, jabbing his arm
triumphantly in the air, even getting an Edwardian 'do.
King, a California comedian, thinks Edwards is the ticket -- King's personal
ticket to fame....
King was in Los Angeles on Friday getting an Edwards-style
haircut and some new publicity shots. He'll add fake hair to hide his
receding hairline,
and other makeup tricks to give him a chin cleft and chubbier cheeks.
Imitating Edwards is not a huge reach for King, who grew up in Raleigh,
attended Broughton High School and graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill. He is
47, four years younger than the buoyant senator.
King has opened for such comedy acts as Jerry Seinfeld, Dana Carvey and
Rosie O'Donnell. Now he's listening to tapes of Edwards' speeches in his
car, trying to make his accent more nasal, more country....
King said he is an Arnold Schwarzenegger Republican but plans to vote
Democratic : "I just like John Edwards' ideas on job creation. For me."
A
long time before Dana Carvey made Bush I part of his repertoire, Vaugh
Meader lost a career when JFK lost his life. Meader calls "Nov.
22, 1963, the day I died." His comedy album The
First Family -- clips at the link -- was a best seller. He never impersonated
Kennedy again after the assassination, and life went downhill into cocaine
and alcohol. Old Goat radio reported, " Last we heard, Meader was the
kitchen manager of a little hotel in Maine, doing the dishes."
But that was a while back. Meader has been living with his fourth wife,
Sheila, in Gulfport,Fla., for six years now.
A
young (Tampa) Weekly Planet reporter named Scott Harrell happened on Meader's
67th birthday party at the Gulfport Casino in April 2003, and wrote
a story about it, publishing the photo at right with the strange caption, "HIS
COLORS DON'T BLEED: Former JFK impressionist Abbott Vaughn Meader surpassed
his 15 minutes of fame with years of joyful living."
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Want
fries with outsourcing? And you thought you could always work at
McDonald's if your job was sent to India. Nope, the order-taker might be
in India someday, too. (The link is NYT via IHT.)
Pull off U.S. Interstate Highway 55 near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and into
the drive-through lane of a McDonald's next to the highway and you'll get fast,
friendly service, even though the person taking your order is not in the restaurant
- or even in Missouri.
The order taker is in a call center in Colorado Springs, more than 900
miles, or 1,450 kilometers, away, connected to the customer and to the
workers preparing
the food by high-speed data lines. Even some restaurant jobs, it seems,
are not immune to outsourcing.
The man who owns the Cape Girardeau restaurant, Shannon Davis, has linked
it and three other of his 12 McDonald's franchises to the Colorado call center,
which is run by another McDonald's franchisee, Steven Bigari. And he did it
for the same reasons that other business owners have embraced call centers:
lower costs, greater speed and fewer mistakes.
Cheap, quick and reliable telecommunications lines let the order takers
in Colorado Springs converse with customers in Missouri, take an electronic
snapshot
of them, display their order on a screen to make sure it is right, then forward
the order and the photo to the restaurant kitchen. The photo is destroyed
as soon as the order is completed, Bigari said. People picking up their burgers
never know that their order traverses two states and bounces back before
they
can even start driving to the pickup window....
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The
New iPod: Reviewed by Newsweek's Steven Levy at MSNBC.
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Aladdin
expels Ronstadt after political remarks: This is the Las Vegas
Sun music reviewer's report, which is less stark than
AP's.
How
odd:
Aladdin President Bill Timmins ordered security guards to escort pop diva
Linda Ronstadt off the property following a concert Saturday night during
which she expressed support for controversial documentary filmmaker Michael
Moore.
Timmins, who was among the almost 5,000 fans in the audience at the Aladdin
Theatre for the Performing Arts, had Ronstadt escorted to her tour bus
and her belongings from her hotel room sent to her. Timmins also sent word
to
Ronstadt that she was no longer welcome at the property for future performances,
according Aladdin spokeswoman Tyri Squyres.
How much weight that carries is debatable, since the bankrupt Aladdin is
in the process of being sold to a group headed by Planet Hollywood International
Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Robert Earl.
Near the close of her performance, Ronstadt dedicated the Eagles hit "Desperado" to
Moore, producer of "Fahrenheit 9/11," and the room erupted into
equal parts boos and cheers.
She said Moore "is someone who cares about this country deeply and
is trying to help."
Ronstadt has been making the dedication at each of her engagements since
she began a national tour earlier this summer, but it has never sparked such
a reaction.
Timmins is British, so he may not have noticed that our entertainers tend
to be political. (Chalk it up to Vietnam.)
Here's how
Whoopi handled the boot.
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So how are we safer? No wonder we're confused:
Cheney says terrorists may strike before election
The Associated Press - Sunday, July 18, 200
FARGO, N.D. -- Increasing intelligence chatter indicates that terrorists
are targeting the United States ahead of the fall elections, Vice President
Dick Cheney
said.
In an interview before a campaign rally in Minneapolis on Saturday, Cheney
told The Forum newspaper and radio station WDAY that intelligence shows "the
current threat level is very real."
"We have a reason to believe they'll try to hit us before the election," he
said.
Cheney says GOP full of optimism
By Associated Press | July 18, 2004
MINNEAPOLIS -- The fall election will present a choice between hope and
negativism, Vice President Dick Cheney told a crowd of more than 1,000 Republican
faithful at a Minneapolis rally yesterday morning.
''What we're hearing from the other side is the failed thinking of the
past," Cheney
said in his 25-minute speech from the Minneapolis Convention Center.
''And we're not going back."
Vaguely related: We took the fast RIPTA ferry from Providence to Newport
Friday, and saw more of the Tall Ships from the water than we might have
waiting in lines.
The sight of very young National Guard troops directing traffic along America's
Cup Boulevard was disturbing. Not only did it look like a city under martial
law, it seemed... unsafe. Newport traffic cops have far more experience with
tourists.
A colleague
said crowds were ignoring the camo-clad kids' directions yesterday, stepping
off the curb when the traffic flow looked good to them. (The Army doesn't
give jaywalking tickets, apparently.)
It's likely that this saved Newport some money, but it looked too much like
Iraq.
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This
Land is Your Land: Wickedly clever "duet" of Kerry
and Bush singing a twisted version of the 1940
Woody Guthrie tune bashes both equally.
Link
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"Stagger Lee shot Billy...": You've heard the Lloyd Price
song (here's
a clip), now Miami Herald researcher Liz
Donovan credits Washington Post researcher
Mary Lou
White with digging up the Missouri coroner's
records on Billy.
She offers a
bonus link that includes the history, the folklore, and the
surprising fact that Dick Clark made Price go back in the studio and rewrite
the story to have a happy ending before he'd play the song on American Bandstand.
(Both sets of lyrics are
here.)
Here's the news report from The St. Louis Globe Democrat in 1895 to start
things off:
"William Lyons, 25, a levee hand, was shot in the abdomen yesterday
evening at 10 o'clock in the saloon of Bill Curtis, at Eleventh and Morgan
Streets, by Lee Sheldon, a carriage driver. Lyons and Sheldon were friends
and were talking together. Both parties, it seems, had been drinking
and were feeling in exuberant spirits. The discussion drifted to politics,
and
an argument was started, the conclusion of which was that Lyons snatched
Sheldon's hat from his head. The latter indignantly demanded its return.
Lyons refused, and Sheldon withdrew his revolver and shot Lyons in the
abdomen. When his victim fell to the floor Sheldon took his hat from the
hand of the
wounded man and coolly walked away. He was subsequently arrested and
locked up at the Chestnut Street Station. Lyons was taken to the Dispensary,
where
his wounds were pronounced serious. Lee Sheldon is also known as 'Stag'
Lee"
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Bobby
Fischer's Pathetic Endgame: Way stranger than Vaughn Meader.
At the Atlantic.
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Most
experts who promote cholesterol lowering drugs have made money from
producers: From Medical News Today, which does not imply any
wrongdoing, just coziness.
And, of course, if it turns out that sap
from the guggul tree lowers cholesterol, we may not know about this,
since it's not patentable.
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Paper toys: For those rainy days. Print cut and fold.
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