By Sheila
Lennon
Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Fair and balanced, too!
August 20, 2004, 6:05 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Weekend! Books, game...
Peasant's
Quest is a text adventure game like the old Infocom
games (Zork),
with simple (and, to some, unnecessary) graphics.
You remember the drill: Look at everything, talk to everybody, try to pick
up anything you find. There's actually a trailer for it
Spoiler heaven: People looking for help in
this forum give all sorts of things
away.
Link
to this item | Comment
Lists to take to the library: From Lists
of Bests, two sci-fi books lists. (More
book lists there)
Phobos Books's "100 Science Fiction Books You Just Have to Read." The
top 10:
1 Childhood's End,
Arthur C. Clarke
2 Foundation, Isaac
Asimov
3 Dune, Frank Herbert
4 The Man in the High
Castle, Philip
K. Dick
5 Starship Troopers,
Robert A. Heinlein
6 Valis, Philip
K. Dick
7 Frankenstein,
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
8 Gateway, Frederik
Pohl
9 Space Merchants,
Frederik Pohl
10 Earth Abides,
George R. Stewart
11 Cuckoo's Egg, C.J. Cherryh
12 Star Surgeon, James White
The SF Book Club's "The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the
Last 50 Years (1953-2002)"
Put together by the Science Fiction Book Club.
1 The Lord of the Rings,
J. R. R. Tolkien
2 The Foundation Trilogy,
Isaac Asimov
3 Dune, Frank Herbert
4 Stranger in a Strange
Land Robert A. Heinlein
5 A Wizard of Earthsea,
Ursula K. Le Guin
6 Neuromancer, William
Gibson
7 Childhood's End, Arthur
C. Clarke
8 Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep? Philip K. Dick
9 The Mists of Avalon,
Marion Zimmer Bradley
10 Fahrenheit
451, Ray Bradbury
11 The Book of the New Sun,
Gene Wolfe
12 A Canticle for Leibowitz,
Walter M. Miller Jr.
Link
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Is
Science Fiction About to Go Blind? at Popular
Science:
Awed at the pace of technological advances, a faction of geeky writers believes
our world is about to change so radically that envisioning what comes next
is nearly impossible.
Link
to this item | Comment
His worst recent read is my best: MIT prof Philip
Greenspun writes in
his blog that
William
Gibson's Pattern Recognition is "The worst book that I've read
during this trip around Japan."
I
loved it when I read it back in May, and said
so again in his comments.
Link
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Portrait
of a monkey as a sentient being: Blogger Darren
Barefoot writes
Jill
Greenberg is an accomplished celebrity photographer. Recently, though,
she's turned her attention to another biped: monkeys. She discovered her affection
for monkey portraits on a commercial, and started renting various species of
trained primates and taking their photos as if they were A-list celebrities.
I originally read about this in Walrus magazine.
Link
to this item | Comment
Halftime
for Gonzo: The WaPo's Jonathan Yardley reviews Hunter S. Thompson's
Hey Rube, admitting he didn't know HST has been writing columns
at ESPN.com for four years. (The book is a collection of columns.)
Kevin Cowherd of the Baltimore Sun reviews
it, too, and doesn't like it but does quote from it. I'm throwing up
an old photo of HST, to show what he looked like when he had hair:
On the White House and the Iraq war: "That gang of born-again geeks
wouldn't know a Message from a poison meat whistle, judging by the sum of
all the ignorant,
wrong-headed evidence seen thus far in this dismal conflict."
On his plan to speed up baseball by eliminating the pitcher: "Pitchers,
as a group, are pampered little swine with too much money and no real effect
on the game except to drag it out and interrupt the action."
On the Baltimore Ravens: "Watching the Baltimore Ravens play football
is like watching scum freeze on the eyeballs of a jackass, or being stuck
for six hours in an elevator with Dick Cheney on speed. The Ravens will pounce
on you and gnaw you to death, which can take eight or nine days."
There is also a sweet, elegant tribute to an old friend, the late George
Plimpton, with lines that only Thompson could summon: "George Plimpton
kicked. ... He was a champion in everything he did. He was the finest advertisement
for
Harvard University since LSD-25, and he loved Calla Lilies, along with beautiful
women and Bob Dylan and the finest Afghani hashish."
Link
to this item | Comment
Hurricane: Riders
on the storm: Tom
Matrullo:
High intensity events arrive with the force of dreams. You drive up a road
to higher ground, hoping your home will be there when you return. After
the hurricane, you drive back down the same road, but it is not the same.
It
is a vector of indices of power. The broken power and light poles, the
crushed hardware store, the truck flung into the liquor store tell of something
that
has come this way and this way will never be the same.
```
The most annoying element of this has been the headlines. Every day, newspapers
tell us, in bold letters, there has been a RAMPAGE. we are BATTERED. We are
COMING OUT OF OUR HOLE. We are starting THE PUSH FORWARD. BETTER DAYS ARE AHEAD.
WE. WE. WE. The headline is an outmoded, fascist imposition of Order erected
upon a lie about a fiction of disorder.
The first moment after a disaster, we do not need news anchors unchained
to any news, no shred of useful information, but plenty of unctuous sympathy.
We do not need roads filled with NBC-2 vehicles containing anchorites powdering
their noses in rear view mirrors. These we have, in droves....
As you might fear, FEMA wasn't much help either:
Finding the office was not a simple matter. Once there, I found several
FEMA people milling about, avoiding eye contact with us, and 15 or so phones,
some
of which worked. The FEMA agents did not try to take questions or offer
information. They simply told us to dial an 800 number. It was 7:30 a.m.,
and the room was
already filling with people who had somehow found out where the FEMA center
was located. Apparently in George W. Bush’s Washington, disasters
may only occur after 8 a.m. and prior to 6 p.m. We waited for the emergency
experts
to arrive at their desks, then we got busy signals for more than an hour,
as they handled the first calls, one plodding 25-minute interview at a
time. It
also seems to be federal policy that victims of disasters come equipped
with everything necessary to bureaucracy. There was no water, no porta
potties,
no pens or paper, although the FEMA interview requires that you be able
to take down important information like your case number, etc. After an
hour I
got through to a FEMA agent, a nice-sounding but somberly legalistic woman
who tried to make clear the federal intricacies and limitations of FEMA
obligation while taking my info.
Buzz Bruggeman has his power back now, but here are his Thoughts
on the Charley a couple days later...
Link
to this item | Comment
Tom's
Summer
of Soul: (link fixed) Management guru Tom
Peters turned
his life around, and doesn't care who knows it, or what they think of his method.
via David Weinberger
Link
to this item | Comment
The
Real Deal: How a Philosophy Professor With a Checkered Past Became the Most
Influential Catholic Layman in George W. Bush's Washington. Good reporting and a thorough, well-documented story by Joe Feuerherd in National
Catholic Reporter.
Link
to this item | Comment
Bugmenot
is back.
August 18, 2004, 7:43 p.m.
NYC
artists revive the protest poster: The coming
of the Republican National Convention to
New York City has revived a tradition of protest art
that flowered in the Vietnam-era peace movement but hasn't had a unified focus
since.
New York is full of artists, and the impending arrival of the GOP seems to
have inspired many of them.
The No RNC Poster Project has a gallery of printable posters, such as the
one above by Hugh Gran (whose homepage
there has an embedded time-lapse video of six people painting a giant banner
in about 20 seconds; tabs above it are links to his other work,
etc.)
Some posters are classically inspired, such as this Pieta by John
Emerson.
The posters are shown in thumbnails, with links to larger jpgs and pdfs. The
site warns,
Most of the
PDFs are very large (15x22 inches) and will load slowly. JPGs are much more
manageable.
If
you have a color printer, you could start your own slice-of-history protest
art collection here.
I'm beginning to wish, for everybody's sake, that the Republicans had chosen
Orange County for their convention.
I'm
not aware of any GOP protest posters from Boston. If you are, let me know
and I'll link to them, too.
Link
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Gone tomorrow: I hope you saw My
John
Kerry scrapbook yesterday, because it's gone today. Lee Whitnum -- an
aspiring novelist using the surname Roystoneas a pen name -- dated the senator
in the early 1990s,
when he was single. She
tells BBC she received
more than 500 hate mails and no book orders and took the site down.
Odd thing: "She said she wanted to remove the scrapbook but could not right
now, without giving more detail."
The site now displays a "Site is temporarily disabled" message, which usually
means excessive bandwidth usage. Maybe she can't get back in to take it down.
Link
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No buy for the AP guy: AP business writer Michael Martinez, despite being armed
with
$1,000 to buy into the Google IPO, was rejected by Ameritrade. He didn't press
on to E-Trade, apparently, insteading interviewing those who made the cut: Getting
in on Google: It's a bargain! Or is it?
Note to AP: Next time, try somebody with some money in the bank.
Link
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Marshfield blues: The
137th Marshfield Fair begins tomorrow in Marshfield, Mass., on the South Shore
about 40 miles from Providence. (Directions
from all directions)
North
River Blues Festival is part of it all on Sunday, with Bobby
Rush (at right), Bernard
Allison, Greg
Piccolo & Heavy
Juice, Down Home Blues with Sweet Willie,
D & J
Place, The Wildcats and, on the
side stage, Basic Black.
The Green
Harbor Roots & Blues Festival ends the fair next Sunday, Aug. 29, with Big
Sandy & His
Fly-rite Boys, Nathan & the
Zydeco Cha Cha's, Bellevue Cadillac, Lonesome
Jukebox, British Yankees and, on the side stage, Rampage Trio.
Both shows run from noon to 7 p.m. Sounds like a fine way to spend a summer
Sunday.
General admission to the fair is $8, children under
6 are free. Parking, $5. Check the fair site for ride prices and other events.
Link
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3:14 p.m.
Judge:
File-swapping tools Grokster and Morpheus are legal: Here's the
decision (pdf.) News.com reports,
A federal judge in Los Angeles has handed a stunning court victory to file-swapping
services Streamcast Networks and Grokster, dismissing much of the record industry
and movie studios' lawsuit against the two companies.
In an almost complete reversal of previous victories for the record labels
and movie studios, federal court Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that Streamcast
-- parent of the Morpheus software -- and Grokster were not liable for copyright
infringements
that took place using their software. The ruling does not directly affect
Kazaa, software distributed by Sharman Networks, which has also been targeted
by the
entertainment industry.
"Defendants distribute and support software, the users of which can
and do choose to employ it for both lawful and unlawful ends," Wilson
wrote in his opinion, released Friday. "Grokster and StreamCast are
not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders
or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe copyrights."...
Or, as the EFF's Cory Doctorow crows at boingboing, Software
doesn't have to be easy for Hollywood to wiretap!
EFF has won its Grokster case in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals -- this
is the case that establishes that if you make truly decentralized P2P software
-- like Gnutella -- you can't be held liable for any copyright infringement
that takes place on their networks. This is the "Betamax principle," from
the famous Supreme Court case that established that Sony wasn't responsoble
for any infringement that its customers undertook with their VCRs.
The Studios' argument was that people who make P2P software should be obliged
to build it in such a way as to make it easy to police,,,
Now is a good time to download the 16MB
MP3 audio of EFF IP Attorney Fred
von Lohmann's oral argument in the appeal -- he was nothing less than briliant
(and it didn't hurt that one of the shmendricks representing the rights-holders
kept forgetting the judge's name). This is some of the best courtroom drama
you'll ever hear, and when you're done, download the PDF of the decision
below and rejoice in our freedom.
Link
to this item | Comment
Bugmenot.com is homeless: Bugmenot.com, a site the allowed readers to pool
their passwords for sites that require free registration, vanished yesterday.
Today, a message from in the "What
happened to BugMeNot?" thread of the mozillazine
tech forum from "bgm," a poster who's probably behind the site, notes,
Our host pulled the plug. I reckon they were pressured. If anyone has got
some secure, preferably offshore hosting in mind then please let us know so
we can get the service back up as soon as possible.
Bugmenot has fueled fierce debate in online
news circles, with readers complaining
about invasive questionnaires at dozens of separate news sites, and news
sites insisting that the information gathered helps sell advertising that keeps
the sites free; readers counter that they lie to avoid disclosing personal
information, forget the passwords and sign up multiple times, fouling the data,
etc.
Although "bgm" will probably be able to find another host quickly, the inconvenience
of moving often leads him to suggest,
To be honest the whole system is flawed in the fact that it is so centralized.
It would be nice if someone came up with a plugin that could be fed from
multiple sources. Each source could be a list of accounts maintained by anyone
with
basic technical ability.
The real power would come if the end-user could find and combine multiple
lists and keep them up-to-date / synced easily.
If the news industry did indeed pressure bugmenot's host to terminate the
current site, a decentralized successor could be unstoppable -- like the
file-sharing tools vindicated in the item above.
via waxy
Link
to this item | Comment
August 18, 2004, 7:41 p.m.
Beautiful
food: Chocolate
& Zucchini would be irresistible even if it weren't leading today
with a photo of pink garlic.
Each dish is photographed, written about, the recipe included. Here's a sample
from the garlic post:
Apart from its undeniable attractiveness, l'Ail Rose de Lautrec is also
distinguished for its aromatic and subtle taste, sweeter and milder than
its white cousin.
It also keeps for much longer, six months to a year. It can be used anywhere
you would normally use garlic -- raw or cooked, sliced, chopped, crushed
or unpeeled ("en chemise", which means "shirt on") --
but also in a variety of recipes created especially for it : a pink garlic
soup,
a walnut and pink garlic tart, a lime and garlic sorbet, and even a pink
garlic chocolate cake!
I took a sidetrip into the soup
recipes -- all are in French.
Google tried
to translate
The results are poetic: "Soup with the pink garlic of Lautrec and with let
us croûtons," "Velvety
of lettuce scented with pink garlic." Ingredients include
bay-tree and bubble (bouillon!), "To make gild without turning russet in 1
cuil
with oil soup..."
The French-English
Gastronomy Dictionary would help. There's also Patto's Gourmet Dictionary
(English - Français - Deutsch - Italiano - Español - Nihongo)
but, unfortunately, "Letters B ~ Z are currently being constructed." The
letter A is well represented, though.
Fortunately, the recipes Clotilde herself offers, such as Honey
Cheese Tart with Candied Orange Peel, are in English. Her readers comment,
some reporting on how the dish came out.
It's not hard to see this as the Food Section of the future.
Clotilde also links
to 37 other food blogs, and to other food sites.
She lives
in Paris, writes in perfect English -- she and her partner spent a couple
of years in Silicon Valley. Lucky man, he eats well.
Link
to this item | Comment
Rant:
Undecided voters — make up your frickin’ minds! Brian
Jones at the Providence Phoenix,
writing more freely than he ever could when he was here.
I know that trying to nominate a man or woman as Most Loathsome Pond Scum
Spider-Spit Person of the new American century means there will be many, many
candidates....
My ballot goes to the Undecided Voter....
...the real reason I loath the Undecided Voter is that he or she is likely
to end up running the country. It’s not lefties like me that George
Bush and John Kerry care about this election year, nor my opposite number
across
the political divide.
It doesn’t matter how much time I or my evil twin put in with the
New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, how many hours we stare at C-Span
and
Fox News, how often we listen to Imus and Rush, or that we set our browsers
to an all-news home page.
The guy or gal that Bush and Kerry care most about is the one who cares least
about them. This election is of, for, and about the prodigal voter. And as
the campaign focuses on swing states and undecided voters, Kerry and Bush will
tailor their politics to those who have no emotional stake in the outcome....
Great stuff that speaks directly to the furious blogging at both ends of the
seesaw here.
Link
to this item | Comment
Where are we again? From Doc
Searls today, a great post to chew on:
Wired no
longer capitalizes Internet and Web because in the
case of internet, web and net, a change in our house style was necessary
to put
into perspective what the internet is: another medium for delivering and
receiving information. Creeping Jeebus, what a [f*ing] sellout. Media
can be regulated and
controlled in
ways that places
and spaces cannot (as the founding editors of Wired knew well). What
we have with the Net is a
place where we inform — and therefore change — each other.
Not where we just ship "content," like so much container cargo, from producers
to consumers.
That last link is Doc himself, writing in 2000, about the wonder of seeing
the web for the first time. And,
Hackers didn't build the Net for business. They built it for research. They
wanted to make it easy for people to inform each other, no matter who or where
they were.
Is it a place? "The new home of Mind"? (from the cymbal-clashing manifesto
on the Barlow
link) Is a blog an object in space? Is it a page? A
channel? Is this just about labels and language?
More tomorrow, with your
help, I hope.
Link
to this item | Comment
Surrealist classic film online: Un Chien Andalou (The
Andalusian Dog), Louis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's 17-minute, 1929 silent film, is
online to watch.
A musical track has been added.
The plot summary at IMDB begins, "Un Chien Andalou consists of seventeen minutes
of bizarre and surreal images that may or may not mean anything..."
The trivia
section offers a clue: " A cow's eye was used in the scene where
the woman's eye is slit. The priest being dragged with the piano is Salvador
Dali."
Roger
Ebert wrote about this classic in 2000, offering lots of background and
backstory. You might watch the film, read this, then watch it again.
Here's more on his body
of work. Much later, Bunuel would make the hit Belle
du Jour, starring Catherine
Deneuve, but he started here.
Related: Rare old French film posters
Link
to this item | Comment
Venezuela to verify recall vote: Venezuela's touch-screen voting machines
have recountable paper receipts, like the ones you get at the ATM. Why
can't we? AP reports,
The referendum was carried out on touch-screen voting machines, which produced
a paper receipt of each vote, much like an ATM. Voters then deposited the receipts
into a ballot box. Amid charges that the electronic machines were rigged, the
monitors will be checking the results from the machines against the paper ballots
to make sure there are no major discrepancies. The paper ballots will be checked
at election offices while votes recorded in the machines will be examined at
an army base.
Of course, the recipts have to be counted to be sure they match the machine
totals. IHT:
The electoral council has stated that the voting machines were audited after
the vote, but the council did so in the absence of any opposition representative
or any international observer. A cause for even greater concern is the fact
that the papers the new machines produced confirming the voter's choice - which
the voter had to verify and then drop into a closed box - were not added up
and compared with the final numbers these machines produce at the end of the
voting process, as the voting-machine manufacturer had suggested.
Link
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The Geisha Stylist Who Let His Hair Down: A fun read at WaPo.
Link
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Why
I Continue To Write: Thirty-five years after Last
Exit to Brooklyn,
Hubert Selby Jr. wrote at LA
Weekly,
When I just touch the keyboard a part of me comes to life that at one
time I did not know existed.
This was in the Feb. 26, 1999 issue. Selby died April 26, 2004. Nick Tosches wrote then,
Hubert Selby died often. But he always came back, smiling that beautiful
smile of his, and those blue eyes of his so full of life. This time he will
not be
back. My saints have always come from hell, and now, with his passing, there
are no more saints. The world is different. Yesterday, as he lay dying, the
sky here in New York was dark and full of rain. Today it is the color of
those eyes of his....
Link
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Welcome to my John Kerry scrapbook! An old girlfriend, Lee Roystone,
digs up the old photos. No dirt, she wants him to win.
Link
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Footnote: Woodstock stories I see this week seldom
mention a key reason that the gathering of a half-million young rock fans was
peaceable: There was almost no alcohol
there.
It wasn't
sold, what people brought -- trudging in from faraway parking fields -- was
gone by the end of the first night.
Link
to this item | Comment
August 17, 2004, 7:41 p.m.
Should singers strike a political note? The Nashville Tennessean asks the
musical question.
...''It's more dangerous now,'' said Merle Haggard, whose hippie-baiting,
Vietnam-era songs Okie From Muskogee and Fightin' Side of Me still rank with
his most popular works. ''It seems to be more damaging to the females: Seems
like people don't want them to say anything.''
Entertainers —male and female — are speaking up, though.
Country singers Sara Evans and Darryl Worley (Have You Forgotten) will perform
during the Republican National Convention in New York City, while the Chicks,
Bruce Springsteen and others soon will embark on a pro-John Kerry ''Vote for
Change'' tour.
A coalition of urban and hip-hop artists including Missy Elliot, Kenny ''Babyface''
Edmonds, Raphael Saadiq and Wyclef Jean will release a new single tomorrow
intended to, as Edmonds said, ''change the current administration.''
In Nashville, the Music City Democrats organization is enlisting artists
and music business people to raise money and excitement for Kerry, in a Volunteer
State that looks at present to be a win for Bush. ...
Some Nashville musicians weigh in on the question in their own words. Merle
still rules:
I never thought for one minute about what Hank Williams or Jimmie Rodgers
or Bob Wills — the people I looked up to — thought about politics.
That would have been like asking them what color shorts they had on.
I had some records that were politically oriented, but times were different
then, and my views have changed over the years. Hindsight is 20/20 in most
cases, but in my case I'm still not sure. I adore honesty, and that gets me
into trouble at times. Had I left Okie From Muskogee out of my repertoire,
my whole life would have been different. I had enough already going on in my
career when that song came about. I didn't need that, and it alienated a lot
of people.
Fortunately, I haven't been silly enough to talk about politics in my shows.
It makes my skin crawl and my hair come up on my neck for somebody to take
advantage of an audience that has come to see you perform and laid down money
for that ticket. That's unacceptable.
Link
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AP |
Properties of water: Amazing shot of Daniel Gyurta, 15, of Hungary,
swimming in the 200-meter breaststroke Olympics semifinal.
Link
to this item | Comment |
The forest & nitpicking trees: Jeff
Jarvis's intro to
warblogger Ken Layne's astonishing "The
God of War, Death & Madness" seems channeled in Ken's divinely mad
voice:
If you read just one blog post this year....Go read this post by Ken (We're
Glad He's Back) Layne, who in a drunken stupor of brilliant imagination,
tells Blair (who
sounds like an imaginary friend, a gigantic invisible kangaroo, perhaps --
but isn't) how the Bushies are getting Kerry elected thanks to Vietnam.
Here's some of Ken's apocalyptic vision:
..."Look at you people with this Vietnam boat nonsense. Every day,
you're pounding home the fact that Kerry fought in Vietnam. You idiots started
this
stuff so early -- with the "Oh he protested the war" and the Jane
Fonda photoshops -- that the Kerry people turned the whole Democratic convention
into celebration of the Vietnam War. Nobody even remembers being against
Vietnam anymore. The next Vietnam movie will be a buddy comedy starring Tom
Cruise and Brad Pitt, and all they're going to do is kill Charlie and win
medals and dance with beautiful girls. It'll make $300 million on the opening
weekend. They're going to tear down that bummer memorial in Washington and
put up a 1,000-foot statue of a smiling American soldier proudly standing
on a stack of golden skulls. You morons have made Vietnam the Democrats'
favorite memory and greatest victory. Then you scream hooray when a gang
of addled old Nixon bagmen show up in a teevee commercial to bitch about
Kerry fighting in Vietnam, and once again the normal people with lives only
remember, again, that Kerry fought in Vietnam and the Bush campaign is upset
about it."
"But," Tim sputtered, "He clearly claimed he was in Cambodia
several days before he was in Cambodia. It was seared--"
"Stop that," I said, poking his neck with the corkscrew worm. "Listen
to yourself. What are you doing, again? That's right, you're reminding people
that the other guy fought in Vietnam....
Link
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Unmediated "is
a group blog that tracks the tools, processes, and ideas being used to decentralize
media production and distribution."
Definitely one to keep an eye on. This needs a spot on the blogroll, which
is at best dusty.
Link
to this item | Comment
I-Neighbors: "Your
neighborhood's home on the Internet." Here's the blurb:
It is FREE to Start a New I-Neighbors Community for Your Neighborhood!
Use I-Neighbors to:
# Meet and communicate with your neighbors.
# Find neighbors with similar interests.
# Share information on local companies and services.
# Organize and advertise local events.
# Vocalize local concerns and ideas.
Here's the list of
U.S. neighborhoods participating so far -- none in Rhode
Island yet.
This is an obvious concept, one that I wrote about years ago. But I'm a little
hesitant. I value my privacy, the sanctuary of my own little plot.
I don't
want to see one of the "neighborhood photos" be a thinly veiled attempt to
harass
someone
whose
yard
is untidy,
as determined
by the
neighborhood neatnik with too much time on his hands. Vigilante grass-height
cops could organize way too easily this way. Battles between the elf people
and
the pink flamingo people would be tedious, too.
Here's the FAQ. Let's see how it goes.
Link
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Voting for...: Yesterday,the same Jeff
Jarvis cited above wrote,
"I'd rather vote for someone than
for change."
Floridian Dan Foreit extends the idea:
...How come I can't have a larger selection of presidential candidates to
vote for? Why can't John McCain, President Bush, John Kerry, John Edwards and
half
a dozen more candidates be on the ballot in November. Why just two choices?
You have to go to the polls and choose the Evil of Two Lessers! ( I stole that
from my cousin - I like the way it sounds)
As long as America has only two strong political parties this will never
change. The Party system will continue to give us a highly polarized election.
Your two candidates will be neatly packaged and sold so you are forced to choose
from two extremes, Liberal or Conservative; Pro Choice or Pro Life; Less Taxes
or More Welfare and so on.
Anyway, I have made up my mind. The limited selections for the upcoming election
do not excite me. I am a registered Republican and I will not vote for George
W. Bush. Therefore I have to vote for John Kerry.
Therefore John Kerry Sucks Less.
Check Out: The Top Ten Reasons Why John Kerry Sucks Less
Link
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Stained Glass
Windows at Harvard. Amazing. via plep
Link
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Drift
Seeds And Drift Fruits: Seeds That Ride The Ocean Currents. And
where each came from. An amazing niche. via Cardhouse,
a blog full of amazing things..
Link
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The
Conscience of Joe Darby: At GQ. Magazine writing, slower, textured,
about the family of the man who blew the histle on the abuse at
Abu Graib:
...Coming back was like parachuting into a jungle with only glimpses of
what lay below. What would people think? The military had been kind to him;
but
then, the military knew the truth. It was easy to be kind when you knew the
truth, when you knew what else happened at Abu Ghraib, how far the abuse
had gone, how much farther than all those photos in the news, farther than
all
the rumors and gossip, farther than almost any decent person could imagine.
It was easy to be kind when you knew the depths of the depravity he had found
in that cold concrete prison with the fresh coat of yellow Coalition paint
and the slow fans chopping overhead. But the public didn't know all that.
The public didn't know the truth. Oh, they knew about the piles of naked
prisoners,
and the hooded figure attached to electrical wires. They knew about the inmates
being forced to imitate sex acts, and being terrorized by attack dogs. But
how would they feel when they knew the rest? That was the real question....
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Walter Cronkite: Let's
give peace department idea a chance. I'm going to miss this man, whose
yearlong contract as a weekly syndicated columnist is
over tomorrow.
Rogers Cadenhead won't, though: Walter Cronkite Spit in
My Web
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August 16, 2004, 6:35 p.m.
 AP /Joel
Page |
| Phish finale:
Keyboard player Page McConnell, left, guitarist Trey Anastasio, drummer
Jon Fishman,
and bassist Mike Gordon hold hands after bowing to
the crowd near the end of their final set of
the final day of the Phish festival in Coventry, Vt. |
Farewell to Phish: Brent Hallenbeck, leading the Burlington (Vt.) Free
Press's coverage
of its hometown band's
final concert, writes,
COVENTRY -- Sunday came down to this: The final sets of the band called
Phish.
The Burlington-based band ended not with a wild jam or a silly ditty, the
sorts of songs that built Phish's reputation.
The band ended with a dreamy tune called "The Curtain," chosen
because it was a song band leader Trey Anastasio wrote when he and his three
bandmates
really started becoming a band in 1987.
The last notes drifted off, the blue stage lights flickered like stars, and
the band bowed before walking off the stage wordlessly.
It was 12:25 this morning and Phish was no more.
If you've never heard Phish, you can listen
online at their site. Lots more AP
photos are here.
Exactly 35 years after another
era ended with a concert in the mud, it happened again. (Phish
goes out with a splash, Brattleboro Reformer; )
Footnote: A blonde CNN newsreader yesterday reported it was the 35th
anniversary of Woodstock, and inaccurately chirping that "Many of
those who attended
are now
eligible
for
Social Security."
If you're 65 now, you were born in 1939 and raised on Frank
Sinatra, Patti Page and Rosemary Clooney (all dead), not on rock'n'roll. The
"baby boom" was a literal population explosion beginning in 1946 after millions
of
Americans returned from WWII to spouses who hadn't seen them
for years.
Pretty much nobody at Woodstock was over 30 except Wavy
Gravy, who's
now 68.
Phish may reunite, its fans may funnel from freedom into real jobs,
mortgages and babies, get grayer, take lumps, get grandkids and unmentionable
disorders, and the newsbots of the future will be chirping that Phish
played at Woodstock.
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Old guard keeps little guy out of Google IPO: So
much for Google letting "the little guy" buy into the IPO. Michael
J. Martinez
had
an assignment and $1,000 cash
money
from AP
to spend
for
five shares
in the
name
of George
Plimpton-style participatory journalism.
His hopeful lead in his first story was, "I want in. And for once, it looks
like I might actually get in." After being turned away at several brokerage
firms that will be handling the IPO, he was allowed to open
an account at Ameritrade and then he registered
at Google and received a bidder ID. Friday, he was ready. Then...
I wanted in. But, at least for now, I'm out.
I've been participating in the run-up to Google Inc.'s widely publicized initial
public stock offering, or IPO, to give people insight into how the company's
auction process works. It's been billed as an IPO for the average investor,
circumventing the Wall Street insiders to give the little guy a shot at getting
pre-market shares of the hottest IPO of the 21st century.
It hasn't worked out that way, at least for me. According to my broker,
I'm not eligible to participate in the Google auction. The underwriters'
definition
of "average investor" for this IPO apparently includes above-average
knowledge, experience and money. At best, I have two out of three.
I'm willing to bet that many people who were hoping to get in on Google will
likewise be disappointed, since it's been little publicized that brokers will
have the final say on who can participate. It takes more than simply opening
a trading account.
But Martinez isn't quite out yet:
I can still use my Google bidder ID with another broker, so I'm pulling
my money out of Ameritrade and plan to open an E-Trade account. I'll still
answer
E-Trade's questionnaire truthfully, and wouldn't recommend that anybody
fudge their answers simply to get in on Google — you could get in serious
legal trouble doing that.
If I still can't get in, I'll tell the stories of other investors who are
eligible to bid. After all, this is still a unique IPO and, if successful,
could indeed change the way companies offer their stock.
How much change, exactly, remains to be seen.
Related: From Reuters, Google Could Make Its Market Debut Wed.
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Merger, San Francisco style: From The
Register's story on last week's announcement
that eBay had acquired 25 percent of craigslist, how's this for attitude?
Some of craigslist's finer moments come near the end of the month when women
and men look to offer up their "services" in order to cover monthly
rent. Other exciting posts go along the lines of "I'm seeking a man that
enjoys being dressed in lacey panties, likes panty hose, wears thigh highs
and heels.....and getting a good dose of makeup on before going out to play....
Bisexual men are so sexy to me, be my girlfriend ok?" You get the idea.
Like eBay, craigslist helps people move their unwanted gear. It doesn't use
an auction format but instead allows users to post what they are trying to
sell and an asking price. It's then up to the various parties to seal the deal.
It's touching to see a willing auction site find the community portal of its
dreams.
Indeed, many of the complaints on Craig's blog about these seem to focus
on loss of anonymity that's likely to come with eBay's involvement.
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Create
your own tartan: It's part of the site for a exhibit
by British fashion designer Vivienne
Westwood at London's Victoria and Albert
Museum.
The show closed last month, but you can still make a plaid.
via
Ye Olde Phart
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XP
SP2 SNAFU: "Some
programs seem to stop working after you install Windows XP Service Pack
2": SP2 makes significant
changes to Windows in the name of increased security. At Microsoft:
SUMMARY
After you install Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), some programs
may seem not to work. By default, Windows Firewall is enabled and blocks
unsolicited connections to your computer. This article discusses how to make
an exception
and enable a program to run by adding it to the list of exceptions. This
procedure permits the program to work as it did before the service pack was
installed....
Furthermore...Hunt
for XP SP2 flaws seen in full swing from IDG News Service:
While users are testing Service Pack 2 for Windows XP to prevent compatibility
problems, hackers are picking apart the security-focused software update looking
for vulnerabilities, security experts said.
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