By Sheila
Lennon
Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Fair and balanced, too!
October 8, 2004, 7:48 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Long weekend -- thank you, Christopher Columbus. See you Tuesday.
 |
|
 |
| Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai plants
a tree at Freedom Corner Uhuru Park, Nairobi, in this Jan. 27 1999 photo.
At right,
Maathai today after learning she had won the Nobel Peace Prize, the first
African woman ever to do so. |
• Wangari
Maathai rose to prominence fighting for those most easily marginalised
in Africa
- poor women: BBC profiles the newest Nobel laureate:
A pioneering academic, her role as an environmental campaigner began after
she planted some trees in her back garden.
This inspired her in 1977 to form an organisation - primarily of women - known
as the Green Belt Movement aiming to curtail the devastating effects of deforestation
and desertification.
Her desire was to produce sustainable wood for fuel use as well as combating
soil erosion.
Her campaign to mobilise poor women to plant some 30 million trees has been
copied by other countries.
Speaking as recently as Wednesday on the BBC's Africa Live programme she said
her tree planting campaign was not at all popular when it first began.
"It took me a lot of days and nights to convince people that women
could improve their environment without much technology or without much financial
resources."
The Green Belt Movement went on to campaign on education, nutrition and other
issues important to women....
She was born in 1940 and has three children.
Her former husband, whom she divorced in the 1980s, was said to have remarked
that she was "too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and
too hard to control".
Heh heh.
• Kenyan
ecologist wins Nobel prize: About her prize..
Link
to this item | Comment
Costume Campaign: A political Halloween Photoshopping contest from
us at projo.com.
Here's the scoop: Dress up (or dress down) one or all of the Bushes,
Cheneys, Kerrys and Edwardses as they trick or treat on the eve of the election.
Photos
to work from, deadlines and more (This will pop up; all the photos are
linked, they'll come into the same window for you to save to your own hard
drive to work on.)
We don't have the upload function ready till next week, but
you can begin now. You may email
your entries to me if you like. Be sure to
include your name and city so we can properly cite you if you win; and send
an email
address and phone number so we can reach you to let you know. We'll throw them
away after the contest -- don't worry about ending up on any lists.
Link
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The
Long Tail: Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The
future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets
at the shallow end of the bitstream. In Wired:
Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how
they want to get it in service after service.... People are going deep
into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past
what's
available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble.
And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from
the beaten
path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or
as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and
a hit-driven
culture)....
Link
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Rock
Politics: at The
Week Behind in Chicago. Stump Connolly catches Pearl Jam on the Rock the
Vote tour.
Link
to this item | Comment
Zoom: Amazing
Shockwave "movie" you control with your arrow keys. A multi-dimensional mobius
strip, maybe. That's a still from it above.
Link
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Kind thoughts to bloggers Shelley
Powers and Dave
Copeland, each of whom
lost their fathers this week.
October 7, 2004, 7:08 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Kerry
documentary: 650-meg free download: Going Upriver: The Long
War of John
Kerry is still in first-run theaters, but it's also been released online,
free:
The movie is available as an mp4 video file. It should be viewable on most platforms
using QuickTime,
mplayer,
MooVId,
or any other player which supports MP4. The file is approximately 650 megabytes
and should take about two hours to download through a cable modem or a fast DSL
connection.
Please consider using a peer-to-peer file sharing application, such as eDonkey2000 or
BitTorrent,
as this will reduce the load on the FTP servers and may allow you to download
more quickly.
There's an interesting profile of its filmmaker, George Butler -- who seems
to be a cinematic Forrest Gump, present at the beginning of both John Kerry's
and
Arnold
Schwarzenegger's
careers. (Butler also made Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition and
a shorter Imax version now in theaters, Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure.
Butler was not, however, present during Shackleton's 1914-1916 trek.)
From the Toronto Star (The
filmmaker who befriended Kerry):
...In 1964, Butler was at a party when he met and hit it off with a young
Yale student named John Kerry. This is the same Kerry who is the Democratic
contender
for U.S. President...
There's also an
interview with Butler in the San Francisco Examiner
Antiwar rally, undated, from Going Upriver.
Review? One of the most interesting might
be from someone whose review doesn't ooze "walking a tightrope with a hot potato"
-- the
unbylined, first-person review at
Ain't
It Cool News. It begins,
It is a fascinating time for the documentary. I’ve never seen such a
time in film history / political history where feature length film documentaries
centered around the two political figures that the nation would have to decide
between in November were being made. Recently – I’ve been being
deluged with them regarding this upcoming election. Most of the documentaries
are fairly aggressive anti-Bush films. Films centering on alleged scandals
and misconduct. I’ve got what seems like a whole shelf of this stuff.
They’re filled with hints of conspiracy, unanswered questions and a
whole lot of depressing views about what has been going on in recent history
here
in the last 4-10 years in the United States.
When I received the tape of GOING UPRIVER: THE LONG WAR OF JOHN KERRY, I
wasn’t
really certain what to make of it. I assumed it would begin with his early
life, take me through his Vietnam experiences, the protest movement against
that war and finally his political life as a Senator. I figured, this would
be a campaign film.
Instead, what director GEORGE BUTLER has made is a fascinating documentary
about a transformation in a man caught by the Kennedy dream of “ask what
you can do for your country,” signed up to fight the communists in Vietnam,
began to see the truth of that war and felt that his duty to his country and
fellow soldiers was to try and help end the war. Basically – that’s
what this documentary is about....
The movie opened Oct. 1 and is still playing at the Showcase Seekonk, if you
prefer a big screen.
Eventually, we'll have big screens at home, of course, and will download anything
from the big database in the sky to watch when we want to. There's no reason
to have to be home at 8 p.m. to watch a taped show on TV, anyway.
Link
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Professor
Who Said CBS Memos on Bush Might Not Be Fakes Is Pilloried by Critics Who
Want Him Fired: (Why would mobs of keyboarders anywhere get to
decide
who's
fired and who's not?) The Chronicle of Higher Education reports,
Just when the nation seemed to have wearied of debates about kerning and proportional
fonts, the controversy surrounding apparently forged documents about President
Bush's National Guard service has flared anew -- this time, on a university
campus. Conservative activists have begun an informal campaign to pressure
Utah State University to censure or fire a scholar who has argued that the
documents might be genuine.
Three weeks ago, the scholar -- David
E. Hailey Jr., an associate professor
of English at Utah State -- posted a
report (.pdf
version) about the documents on the Web
site of the university's Interactive Media Research Laboratory, of which
he is the director. In the report, Mr. Hailey argued that the disputed documents,
which were originally described by Dan Rather on a CBS News broadcast on
September
8, were almost certainly created by a typewriter or other mechanical device,
and not by a modern-day word processor. The documents might indeed be forgeries,
he wrote, but if so, they were not crude, obvious forgeries, as many of CBS's
critics have charged.
Mr. Hailey has no direct experience in forensic textual analysis, but he
has taught courses in textual design and digital archiving for many years. "I've
been up to my eyeballs in text since 1966," he said in an interview
on Monday....
... Mr. Hailey was not among the typographic experts consulted by CBS before
it broadcast its report on the purported Bush documents. But if he had been
approached by CBS producers, he wrote in his report, he "would have
advised them that there is nothing physical in the memos implying that they
are not authentic."...
It's entirely possible the memos are authentic; if they aren't, I hope the
CBS investigation uncovers who created them. Who knows what happened to the
set that Marian Carr Knox says she typed for Lt. Col. Killian? (That question
is not entirely rhetorical.)
Related: Wrath
of the Webloggers: Shelley
Powers (aka Burningbird) nails what's
bothering me about the mob:
I don’t care for many of the articles about weblogging, but this one
(Prof Pursued by Mob of Bloggers) by Wired magazine on the mob mentality of webloggers should be required
reading – in
particular by every political weblogger.
Webloggers consider themselves the ultimate fact checkers, but lately they’re
not satisfied to just fact check; they also want to be judge and executioner,
demanding that people be fired or be arrested or unleashing hordes of
howling semi-demented readers on whomever is the current target du jour.
As this
Wired article demonstrates, the chilling effect of all of this is to actually
suppress
speech as more and more people become less and less willing to publish
opinion online because they risk the wrath of the webloggers.
An example is the professor detailed in the article, who wrote a paper about
how the so-called “CBS Document” could have been typed by typewriters
of the time. If this professor wrote a bad report, attack the report, not
the professor. Demands that he be fired from his school sends a message that
if a person writes something we don’t agree with, a swarm of angry
gnats with a computer are going to do everything in their power to wreck
the person’s life, from now until the end of time. What’s particularly
sick about the whole thing, is these same people will then gloat about their
power, and if you even suggest that perhaps they need to do a little fact
checking themselves, they pompously sneer that they’re …webloggers,
they don’t have to check their facts....
Good stuff. Shelley's first rate.
Link
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Guest blogger on political bloggers: 'I can't relate
to the intensity': My projo.com
colleague Frank Carnevale mentioned the other day that he'd finally made it
through the
New
York Times
story on
bloggers,
and
asked
if
I'd read
it. (No.) After he'd begun to tell me what he thought about it,
I asked him if he'd expand his thoughts into a blog item.
Here it is:
I finally read through the New York Times Sunday magazine (Fear
and Laptops on the Campaign Trail, Sep. 26, 2004) on bloggers at the
Republican and Democratic national convention and -- you
know
what? I don't care what these guys and girls are furiously posting to their
blogs. I read the entire article (8+ pages) and in the end didn't really
care about the featured bloggers or the other bloggers that attended the
conventions. I guess part of it was that I felt the conventions were a
non-event staged by the parties. The bloggers attended -- great -- but
did they really
disseminate anything worthwhile? Or were they -- the bloggers -- the story,
playing into the parties' attempts to capture their audiences?
The main reason, though, for not caring is that I feel that I can't relate
to the intensity of some these bloggers. They seem to be on a quest -- or
crusade -- to change things: linking to stories, digging up old news, spreading
rumors.
I really can't pay attention to all the items they post and wonder any of
this information adds up to anything.
I work in the media business, so I do read a bit of the news, and I need
to keep up with current events and what the bloggers are saying, so I try
to,
but I'm not a big fan. The whole culture of online communities seems so clique-ish
and self-important.
So these comments are a bit odd -- posted on a blog -- but I guess the trick
is to think that no one's going to read it anyway. Maybe that's how bloggers
cope.
Related: NY
Times hatchet
job against left-wing bloggers at Daily Kos -- one of the blogs featured in the
story.
Link
to this item | Comment
Updates:
-- Eric Lilius sent a short note pointing to the site of Polish artist Zdzislaw
Beksinski. I zeroed in on a different part of the page, entirely missing what
had enthralled
him:
This is the site I was referring to. It's the webdesign, and the haunting
music that make this site so remarkable. Hover over the dots connected by strange
string to see the other pages. Switches from Polish to English for me. Mozilla
1.7 on this machine.
There's a lot of Flash animation here.
I never saw the "masterlist" page which is totally different.
It's only the prints.
The colour images are amazing.
-- I got a nice note from Alan Taylor, author of the nifty Amazon
Light 4.0 (blogged here earlier in the week; scroll down, or check the permalink to
see its features).
Alan has now added the statewide Providence Public Library to the Library
Lookup list -- if you see a book on Amazon, you can configure your settings
to let you find it at the library, where you may request it.
Link
to this item | Comment
October 6, 2004, 5:40 p.m.
Short blog -- I'm speaking to a colleague's journalism class at Providence
College, and have to run...
Cheney's
Slip-up Sends Net Surfers to Anti-Bush Site -- here's the backstory: AP
reports,
A slip of the tongue by the vice president during Tuesday night's debate with
Sen. John Edwards led Web surfers to a site run by George Soros, a billionaire
who makes no secret of his opposition to the Bush administration.
In answering a question about his involvement with Halliburton, Cheney meant
to direct people to FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan site run by the University
of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center. He urged people watching
the debate to go to the site for facts countering Edwards' statements about
the corporation Cheney used to run.
But Cheney cited FactCheck.com, a for-profit advertising site based in the
Cayman Islands.
The company decided to redirect traffic to the Soros site after it became
inundated with hits -- about 100 a second after the debate, John Berryhill,
a Philadelphia lawyer for FactCheck.com, said Wednesday.
"This was to relieve stress on the service and to express a political
point of view," said Berryhill, who spoke with the site's administrators
shortly after the debate ended.
They picked Soros not only for his political views, Berryhill said, but
because the billionaire could afford the costly deluge of hits the site would
receive
in the wake of the debate. Plus, the site administrators didn't want to point
surfers to a candidate's site that was asking for money....
The FactCheck.com domain is registered to Name Administration Inc., Grand
Cayman,
Cayman Islands B.W.I.
Here's some backstory: Messages in a thread titled Cheney
gives web link during debate that leads to George Soros site at Democratic
Underground.com, from philaguy, who signs his posts JB and says he's Name
Administration Inc.'s lawyer. (AP spoke to lawyer John Berryhill of Philadelphia
for the story above.):
Factcheck.com was registered quite some time ago by Name Administration Inc.
Name Administration often registers expired or abandoned domain names which
comprise generic or descriptive terms
The staff at Name Administration have been through some difficult times
lately, due to the impact of hurricane Ivan on Grand Cayman, and they were
delighted
to have been given this opportunity by Vice President Cheney....
Name Administration Inc. received no payment, inducement, or any communication
from George Soros or any political organization for re-directing the domain
name. It was purely a volunteer gesture....
Please don't send thank you emails. Traffic volume in the first hour alone was on the order of 48,000 unique visitors.
If
you feel compelled to do anything, please make a donation to rebuild
Bodden Town, Grand Cayman, which was hit very hard by Ivan:
http://www.turtlenestinn.com/hurricane_ivan-HI2.htm
That's Bodden Town pictured at right, from that site. I have emailed Berryhill
and await confirmation that he did write these posts.
The AP story reports that Soros did not know of the switching until today.
Link
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Small Town Library Takes On The Feds:
WHATCOM COUNTY, Wash.- The FBI wants to know who checked out a book from
a small library about Osama Bin Laden. But the library isn't giving out names,
saying
the government has no business knowing what their patrons read.
The library in Deming isn't much larger than a family home. Located in rural
Whatcom County, it hardly seems the site for a showdown with the feds.
"I think we all figure it's places like the New York Library System that's
going to be one of the first we hear about," said the attorney for the
Whatcom County Library System, Deborra Garret.
At the center of the issue, a book titled "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared
War on America."
The FBI confiscated the original book after a patron reported than some
one hand wrote a bin Laden quote in the margin that read: "Let history
be witness I am a criminal."
The FBI demanded to know the names and addresses of everyone who ever checked
out the book.
"Libraries are a haven where people should be able to seek whatever information
they want to pursue without any threat of government intervention," said
Director of Whatcom County Library System, Joan Airoldi....
Link
to this item | Comment
Zdzislaw Beksinski: Eric Lilius, my Canadian correspondent, writes, "I have
spent the last hour wandering through this strangely beautiful and disturbing
website. I never
heard of this artist. "
My system has a problem with the English-language link off the homepage.
Try this one if you do, too.
Link
to this item | Comment
Where
to Find Digital Lit: A guide to book blogs in the Times.
Link
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October 5, 2004, 6:26 p.m.
Cox Internet offers remote dialup access: Cox Communications
has launched a remote dialup access service nationwide that lets its high-speed
Internet
customers access the net via 56k modem
-- a boon for travelers stuck in a hotel
without a
net
connection. The pricing makes it more practical for fetching your email than
for surfing the Web.
A Cox rep summed
it up in the Cox HSI (high speed Internet) forum
at broadbandreports.com.
Remote Dial Access (RDA) is available to every CHSI customer; all you have
to do is activate it. Please bear in mind that Value and Preferred customers
are charged a one-time $9.95 activation fee, which is waived for Premier folks.
The number of included hours depends on your CHSI package, too:
• Premier: no activation fee, 20 hours of usage per month, $4.95 for bucket
of 5 additional hours
• Preferred: $9.95 activation fee, 5 hours of usage per month, $7.45 for
bucket of 5 additional hours (most customers have Preferred access)
• Value: $9.95 activation fee, no included hours of usage, $7.45 for bucket
of 5 additional hours
...You authenticate with your primary CHSI username/password, and all RDA
charges show up on your Cox bill. BTW, Remote Dial Access is available in
the 48 contiguous
states only.
Here's the link for basic info and
instructions: About
Remote Dial Access. You can sign
up online and activate
your dialup account here. If you've been online long enough to have set
up dialup connections before, the modem
setup instructions might trigger
a wave of nostalgia. The
FAQ has more.
If you're in a hotel with no net access, you can use the phone in your room
to connect to a single toll-free number using any standard 56k modem connection,
most likely a laptop with a modem card. (You may have to use a prefix to get
out, which you add to the modem string during setup, and you might inquire
about hotel phone rates, even to an 800 number. Check with the desk about rates. More on this)
If you didn't know there were different access levels, you probably have
Preferred access.
The Value plan
is a new service aimed at competing with Verizon DSL -- its connection
speed is 256 Kbps.
The Journal's Tim Barmann wrote about it (Cox
unveils low-cost broadband service) August 14. At the same time,
according to Tim,
The company has increased the download speed of its "preferred" Internet
access service, which most of its customers subscribe to, by 33 percent.
Top download speeds are now 4 Mbps, up from 3 Mbps, the company said.
That service costs $49.95 a month, or $39.95 for customers that also subscribe
to another Cox service.
Cox upped the speed of its "premier" service to 5 Mpbs from 4
Mbps. The cost is $59.95 a month for customers who subscribe to another Cox
service.
Upload speeds of the two higher-price plans have also been increased...
Dialup access has had little publicity, although it's been around for several
months. Leigh Ann Woisard, spokesperson for Cox in Providence, confirmed today
that it's available as a convenience to subscribers who may be traveling.
As a convenience, the one-time, $9.95 setup charge and five hours of free
access per month is worth not being locked out of your Cox webmail in Podunk.
As a full-time dialup connection, it makes no sense.
Link
to this item | Comment
Sign feud: Kerry-Edwards and Bush-Cheney supporters in Cleveland today, warming
up for tonight's debate near the set of a television show. (AP)
GOP
Campaign Urges Post-Debate Spin: Although
the headline pins this on the GOP, the call has gone out to supporters
on both sides. Here's AP:
Washington (AP) - The assignment: go forth and spin. The objective: win
the battle of the post-debate polls. The Bush-Cheney campaign is urging supporters
to go online after Tuesday's debate between Vice President Dick Cheney and
Sen. John Edwards in hopes of defeating what
it calls the "Kerry campaign spin machine."
Operatives for Democratic candidate John Kerry "managed
to mask their candidate's flip-flops on the war in Iraq" after last
week's presidential debate, Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman wrote in a
letter to
supporters.
"If we plan to win the election, we must fight back against their spin
and make sure our friends and neighbors get the truth," Mehlman said....
... DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe wants 10 minutes of would-be spinners'
time.
"It is important that we double our efforts from the last debate, because
the Republicans are now copying our strategy," McAuliffe said in a letter.
Both campaigns are asking supporters to vote in online polls, conducted
by most major networks after the debate, write letters to the editor and
spread the word, including the e-mailed call-to-arms.
At Free Republic,
the big GOP message
board, and in the forums at Democratic
Underground, its Democratic counterpart,
the troops are ready to "Freep" and "DU" the polls.
Right now, at Free Republic, a headline shouts, "Rate
the Cheney/Edwards Debate in Real Time...Freep this poll tonight!" Commenters
offer suggestions for other polls to weigh in on.
At DU, there's even a handy link list of news site polls to bang on, under
the headline, HIT
THESE POLLS AFTER THE DEBATE... AND FIND MORE POLLS!
This may gladden your heart, give you the warm glow of participating in the
process, but all you're really doing is generating hits for the news sites.
If your candidate has momentarily massed more bees to swarm the polls, that
will be noted by Freepers or DUers, and an equal and opposite reaction will
ensue.
At projo.com and other Belo sites, if you want to praise your man tonight,
you'll have to type your thoughts into a comments form. We no longer solicit
votes on news issues.
Link
to this item | Comment
Blogger burnout: The blogroll loses a name. I've held off on
this -- blog buddy denial -- but I have to face that the strain of daily blogging
has felled some of the best:
Patrick Blake -- Ye Olde Phart -- packs
it in here with,
I've retired from the blogging business. It's been fun but I'm damned if
i can see what difference it has made to have indulged in so much blather.
Ignore earlier links. They're dead and gone. May they rest in peace.
I enjoyed Patrick's "blather" -- and his links -- a lot, for what it's worth.
Link
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Kissing up to
Kissinger - The reporters
who loved Henry and what they said. By Jack Shafer at Slate,
During his years as national security adviser and secretary of state, Henry
Kissinger wooed the Washington press corps with the flowers and chocolate of
flattery and access. As Walter Isaacson writes in his 1992 biography, Kissinger,
opinion columnists and the reporters who covered the State Department or the
White House grew especially captivated by his charms....
...All this love Kissinger spent on journalists did not go
unreciprocated, as we now learn from the transcripts of his telephone
conversations his secretaries and aides made in secret for Kissinger
while listening in on another phone. Thanks to a Freedom of Information
Act request by the National
Security Archive,
transcripts of 3,568 conversations between Kissinger and President
Nixon, U.S. politicians, world leaders, ambassadors, Hollywood stars,
and a score of journalists are now available at the State
Department Electronic Reading Room.
Amazing stuff. There are no secrets. It all comes out eventually.
Link
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What if you didn't qualify for Social Security and Medicare until you were
73 years old? That's the lead of a USA Today story about Social Security
(Solutions
for debt crisis go far beyond tinkering: Needed changes could trigger
other problems).
This story can stop right there.
What if you didn't qualify for Social
Security and Medicare until you were already dead? That's the ticket!
Back when I was debating in high school, the experts we cited swore that the
Social Security system would be bankrupt by 1990 and desperately needed to
be fixed. Still broke, still debated.
Don't go there. Angry grannies are a force to be reckoned with.
Link
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October 4, 2004, 7:08 p.m.
The
Vote for Change tour: Concerts are pro-Kerry, but many go only for the
music. Detroit Free Press produces a package for those not
in the swing states.
Here are the last two paragraphs of the overview-- the first for the hard
info, the second because the Bush supporters at the concerts must swallow hard
when deciding whether the chance to see the music is worth the "price."
...The Vote for Change tour kicked off a week ago in Seattle and reached
full steam this weekend, with six concerts Friday night in Pennsylvania venues,
followed by a similar blitz Saturday night in Ohio.
Music lovers who bought tickets also became linked to the advocacy group's
voter education strategy, receiving daily e-mail reminders about voter registration,
how to pitch the Democrats to undecided friends and reminders to watch and
talk up the presidential debates. Their ticket purchases were treated as
political donations, and buyers submitted names, addresses, occupations and
employer identifications in keeping with federal regulations tracking political
contributions.
The story has sidebars, reports from individual concerts, linked from a box
inset in the text:
About 40,000 fans had tickets for the six shows in Michigan, including the
Dixie Chicks at the Fox Theatre, Dave Matthews Band at the Palace of Auburn
Hills, Pearl Jam in Grand Rapids, John Mellencamp in Kalamazoo, and Jackson
Browne and Bonnie Raitt in East Lansing.
Here's
the skinny from the Springsteen show
at Detroit's Cobo Arena.
The photo: Thomas Ondrey of The Plain Dealer caught Springsteen at Cleveland's
Gund Arena Saturday night, and moved it on the AP wire.
More: Vote
for Change: Rocking the White House: NPR's Mike Pesca covers the first
political fundraising concerts by Pearl Jam, Death Cab for Cutie, R.E.M.,
Springsteen and friends. Click on the "Day to Day audio" to pick
your audio player.
Link
to this item | Comment
Happy hurricane story: My brother-in-law lives in Florida, and his
wife was admitted to the hospital for gall-bladder surgery as hurricane Frances
bore down on
them.
The morning she was admitted, the hospital
was to be locked down -- nobody in, nobody out -- at 2 p.m.
He got her settled
into her room, drove to their doctor's office and borrowed a set of green
scrubs and a stethoscope, gathered a shaving kit, his toothbrush and a book
from
home, and bought a half-gallon of vodka.
At 1:30 p.m., dressed in scrubs, he hid in her shower.
At 2:30, he emerged and settled into a reclining chair by her bed. When the
first startled nurse asked him what he was doing there, he said, "I'm her caregiver,
and she
can't be without me."
He spent the next six days with her, enjoying air-conditioning, television,
and chilled Bloody Marys -- all the comforts home didn't have.
Her surgery went fine, and except for some dicey hours at the height of the
storm when the beds were pulled away from windows that might have shattered,
his worst memory of Frances is hospital food.
(I'm not naming the hospital, to protect his collaborators.)
Link
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Richard
Avedon: A slideshow of his photographs for The New Yorker, at that
site.
Link
to this item | Comment
Amazon Light
4.0: An alternate, no-frills interface to Amazon.com from Alan
Taylor at Kokogiak.com. It's dandy, because it's more than a low-bandwidth
alternative.
Primarily using Amazon.com's Web Services API, Amazon Light 4.0 is an exercise
in tying together various Web Services into a whole, adding content, context
and some useful tools to the Amazon shopping/browsing experience.
When viewing an item's Information Page, you'll see links in the left column,
some links in the middle of the page, and a suite of tools (buttons) on the
top-right side. Using these tools, one can:
• Buy the item from Amazon.com
• Add the item to an Amazon.com Wishlist
• Send URL to a friend with GMail
• Set up a DropCash Campaign
• Send URL and Title to your Blog on Blogger
• Send URL and Title to your Del.Icio.Us Account
• Lookup a book at your Local Library
• Find the same item at Netflix (DVD/Video)
• Look up an Artist on iTunes (Music)
Also,
• Google Print Excerpts - If a book happens to have an excerpt on Google
Print, a link to that excerpt is included in the description. (Example here)
• Wishlists - Search for a person's wishlist by email or name
• GiftLists - Based on a given wishlist, a list of suggested gifts
• Relevant Links (from Yahoo & Google) - Related News and Websites (not
ads)
• Subcategory Filtering - narrow your search from "DVD" to "DVD/animation"
• Settings - Choose an Associate ID, a Library near you, and more
The Library Lookup libraries for Rhode Island do not include the statewide
Public Library System access I worked out (it's above the blogroll on the
right), but updates are welcomed, so I sent it along.
Blissfully missing: "Suggestions" based on items I've bought for other people,
and that ridiculous Gold Box that wants to sell me jewelry, power tools and
expensive teakettles. (Despite the prices, it feels like a flea market.)
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to this item | Comment
In the Senate, Raising a (Quiet) Republican Voice Against the Administration: The
Washington Post today profiles Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI).
Link
to this item | Comment
Urballoon:
Urballoon is an urban media space: a balloon equipped with a projector
and wireless connection to the web that enables people to submit content
online and broadcast it in public spaces.
The balloon is located in open urban spaces frequented by pedestrians at sunset
and night (e.g. plazas, parks).
The ball is tethered and floats at a height
of approximately 3 stories. The images and text submitted via this site
are projected directly below it.
By accessing www.urballoon.com people can send text or images which will be
queued and shown by the balloon in the order received onto the street.
Last weekend, it was in the entrance of City Hall Park in New York as part
of the Spectropolis event (October 1- 3, 2004).
This would seem like a natural for a Providence WaterFire event.
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to this item | Comment
Decision
2004: Our Candidates, Our Choice: Women's
eNews touts its campaign coverage. It may not be what you expect. The
three most recent headlines:
Anti-Choice
Dems Say Its Their Party Too
By Bhatia and Hindery
Anti-choice Democrats are fighting for inclusion in their party and say they
should not be ignored as Democrats battle for control of the House and Senate.
Run Date: 10/01/04
Stem
Cells May Swing Voters
By Molly M. Ginty
Embryonic stem cells have the potential to cure devastating diseases. With
women more likely to support further research on stem cells, the issue may
also have the potential to widen gender gap this presidential election. Run
date: 09/30/04
Campaign
Coverage Ignores Women's Concerns
By Sheila Gibbons
Campaign coverage is largely ignoring the issues that matter most to women.
To correct that, Sheila Gibbons offers reporters a look at what women want
from a president and advice on chasing down the story between now and Election
Day. Run Date: 09/29/04
Link
to this item | Comment
'iPod
users are music thieves' says Microsoft CEO Ballmer: Silicon.com
reports,
Speaking to an exclusive gathering of press in London on a number of issues,
such as security, Steve Ballmer didn't pass up the opportunity to take several
digs at his company's arch rival Apple.
At the heart of the debate is Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology
which will let content providers such as record labels and movie studios
keep control of their intellectual property (IP) - or at least ensure all
royalties are paid and copyright observed.
Billing Microsoft as the good guys and Apple the villains of the piece -
at least as far as corporate America, rather than users, is concerned, Ballmer
said: "We’ve had DRM in Windows for years. The most common format
of music on an iPod is 'stolen'."...
Tony Smith at The
Register (U.K.) begs to differ:
Ballmer conveniently ignores not only that there are many non-Apple music
players out there, on which there are probably as many, if not more "stolen" songs.
He singles out the Mac maker for attention because - wait for it - "we've
had DRM in Windows for years". The implication is that DRM hasn't been
in the Mac OS for a similar duration, and that's what's allowed all those
stolen tracks to seep through onto the web.
Windows has, of course, also had Napster, Grokster, Streamcast, Aimster,
Kazaa full and lite, et al for years, but - again - none of that Windows-only
music theft apparatus has registered on Mr Ballmer's radar screen, it seems.
No, there's no music piracy on Windows, and that's because Windows has had
DRM for so long. People haven't been ripping CDs. They haven't been sharing
the songs using Windows-based P2P software. And other folk haven't been downloading
and transferring them to portable players. Clearly, all those shared tracks
have just popped out of nowhere.
Actually, it's a wonder Ballmer didn't accuse Apple of offering them itself....
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Coming
apart at seams: Bills' comedy of errors no laughing matter (I
know Drew Bledsoe's a really good guy, but I'm glad he's not ours any more.)
From the Buffalo News:
The decisive play of Sunday's football game defined the sorry state in which
the Buffalo Bills find themselves three games into the NFL season.
Drew Bledsoe was supposed to run around left end on a bootleg run on fourth-and-3
from the New England Patriots' 17-yard line.
However, Travis Henry got the play wrong and ran left instead of faking a
run straight into the hole in the middle of the line. And even if he did run
straight, the Bills missed a blocking assignment on the left side of the line
that would have caused Bledsoe to get tackled well before the first-down marker.
So Bledsoe got lambasted by Pats linebacker Tedy Bruschi, who instead of running
straight into Henry broke free up the middle. Bruschi didn't simply make the
tackle but also caused a fumble that Richard Seymour returned 68 yards for
a clinching touchdown.
Mistakes piled on top of mistakes doomed the Bills in their 31-17 loss to
the Super Bowl champions. ...
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Strange leftovers:
BBC: Bomb
alert over 'break-wind' dog
Are You A Democrat
Or A Republican? Stupid. Game?
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