Subterranean Homepage News

By Sheila Lennon

Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Fair and balanced, too!

December 10, 2004, 6:21 p.m. -- Last week's weblog

New tools: Google Suggest and eBay's Want it Now: At Goodle Suggest, start typing search terms, it guesses where you're going. It might be an interesting way to find out what Google has on a topic you're very familiar with.

And, at eBay, an obvious next step if your search comes up empty: Want It Now:

...buyers can now tell sellers exactly what they are looking for when they are unable to find it on the site. Sellers can then browse through these requests to discover buyers for their items, as well as get new ideas for what items are in demand.

It's free for buyers to list what they're looking for. If a seller has it, you'll receive an email through eBay's system, so the seller doesn't know who you are. The seller may then list the item and you bid on it as usual. More info about this.

Sellers aren't yet used to looking for buyers, so a post I made a few days ago to test the concept has no replies yet.
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Dan Gillmor leaving Mercury News for citizen news: Award-winning tech columnist, journalist-blogger and author Dan Gillmor is leaving the San Jose Mercury News next month to start a citizen-journalism project, he announced late yesterday. Dan has been covering tech and the tech business for the Merc for the last decade and is the author of We the Media, a book you may buy or read online for free. We the Media is subtitled Grassroots journalism by the people for the people and Dan is about to walk his talk.

At his blog, which appears on the Merc's website, Silicon Valley.com, Dan wrote,

I'll be leaving the San Jose Mercury News next month to work on a citizen-journalism project.

I hope to pull together something useful that helps enable -- and demonstrates -- the emerging grassroots journalism that I wrote about in my recent book. Something powerful is happening, it's in the early stages and I have a chance to help figure this out.

I'm not ready to discuss the specifics yet, mainly because I have many more ideas than I could possibly try to put into practice at this point -- and we're early in the process of working out the venture's actual form.

Keep in mind that this project is now in what's known as the seed stage. It's not an operating entity yet, though I expect it will be. But we're some time away from that, with many issues to resolve in the meantime.

A friend who knew about this ahead of time asked the question I'm sure some others will ask: "Are you nuts?" I hope not. Of course, I amleaving one of the best gigs in journalism. The Merc has been incredibly good to me. There are so many talented and good-hearted folks here.

I hate the idea of leaving. But I'd hate not trying this even more....

Many -- including me -- have left good wishes in his comments (on the headline link).

Dan started blogging in 1999, and he and I have exchanged emails over the years, although we've never met. In a note to him today, I thanked him for including me in his, book, saying, "Long after we're gone, you've made me a footnote to history."

Citizen journalism needs someone of Dan's experience and stature to give it credibility and to set the standard for good journalism. I wish him the very best.

Related: Citizen-journalist Moyers signs off At the Globe:

"I'm going out telling the story that I think is the biggest story of our time: how the right-wing media has become a partisan propaganda arm of the Republican National Committee," says Moyers. "We have an ideological press that's interested in the election of Republicans, and a mainstream press that's interested in the bottom line. Therefore, we don't have a vigilant, independent press whose interest is the American people." -- PBS's Bill Moyers

Two Veteran Journalists Critical Of Today's Media Coverage: Former 60 Minutes editor and correspondent Morley Safer and Osborn Elliot, former editor of Newsweek, spoke in Stonington, Conn.
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Weekend game: It's a Flash game called Reflex, and it's intelligent fun. At right is my screenshot of how it starts. Click on the diagonal bars to reverse their angle. The puzzles get more complex, the bars more numerous, as the game progresses.

The author, Klas Kroon of Sweden, has dozens more games at his site, OutsideOfSociety.

His bloggish site includes a useful note:

Abandonware
Found a really cool site with a bunch of old games I used to play :) Has a lot of the old Sierra adventures. Played through Space Quest II(Ega version) this weekend, great fun! I can also recommend "Pushover", under Puzzle... Go visit: Abandonia.com.

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Editor Backs Embed in Rumsfeld Incident, but Criticizes Aftermath: Joe Strupp at Editor & Publisher follows up on the embedded reporter with the Tennesse National Guard who help soldiers pose their question about armor to Secy. Rumsfeld in Kuwait. (Here's yesterday's blog item on the incident):

The editor/publisher of the Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times Free Press offered support late Thursday for his embedded reporter, who has been criticized for prompting a national guardsman to ask Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a controversial question during a visit to Kuwait.

"I think he was doing what he felt he was embedded to do: tell the stories of the soldiers of this unit," said Tom Griscom, editor and publisher of the paper. But Griscom criticized the embed's story about the incident, which did not mention the reporter's connection to the soldier who asked the question.

The embed, Lee Pitts, sought a response from Rumsfeld about why military units in Iraq are lacking proper armor for many vehicles. A lengthy email that he wrote to a fellow reporter ended up on several Web sites, including the Romenesko site at the Poynter Institute, the Drudge Report, and E&P Online, which Griscom lamented.

"He is there to write stories, not make news himself," Griscom said of Pitts. The editor added that the recipient of the e-mail, whom he would not identify, should not have passed it along.

Griscom was communications director in the Reagan White House in 1987-1988....

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December 9, 2004, 6:32 p.m.

Secrets of Firefox 1.0: If you're a power user curious about the workings of the standalone Firefox browser from Mozilla.org, here's your crib sheet.

(The stand-alone mail client is Thunderbird; if you download Mozilla Suite, you get browser, mail, news, chat, html editor, etc.)
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Roads Gone Wild: No street signs. No crosswalks. No accidents. Surprise: Making driving seem more dangerous could make it safer. At Wired, a fascinating story about a road designer in Holland who finds that chaos leads to collaboration. (Having been to New Delhi, I was skeptical. Maybe it works better without cows in the road.):

Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn't done his job. "The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a road, they always try to add something," Monderman says. "To my mind, it's much better to remove things."

Monderman is one of the leaders of a new breed of traffic engineer - equal parts urban designer, social scientist, civil engineer, and psychologist. The approach is radically counterintuitive: Build roads that seem dangerous, and they'll be safer....

...Riding in his green Saab, we glide into Drachten, a 17th-century village that has grown into a bustling town of more than 40,000. We pass by the performing arts center, and suddenly, there it is: the Intersection. It's the confluence of two busy two-lane roads that handle 20,000 cars a day, plus thousands of bicyclists and pedestrians. Several years ago, Monderman ripped out all the traditional instruments used by traffic engineers to influence driver behavior - traffic lights, road markings, and some pedestrian crossings - and in their place created a roundabout, or traffic circle. The circle is remarkable for what it doesn't contain: signs or signals telling drivers how fast to go, who has the right-of-way, or how to behave. There are no lane markers or curbs separating street and sidewalk, so it's unclear exactly where the car zone ends and the pedestrian zone begins. To an approaching driver, the intersection is utterly ambiguous - and that's the point.

Monderman and I stand in silence by the side of the road a few minutes, watching the stream of motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians make their way through the circle, a giant concrete mixing bowl of transport. Somehow it all works. The drivers slow to gauge the intentions of crossing bicyclists and walkers. Negotiations over right-of-way are made through fleeting eye contact. Remarkably, traffic moves smoothly around the circle with hardly a brake screeching, horn honking, or obscene gesture. "I love it!" Monderman says at last. "Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each other. You can't expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design of the road."...

Sidebar: How to Build a Better Intersection: Chaos = Cooperation
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Weird Al's eBay song: It's a ballad, surprisingly, to the tune of the Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way." You can hear him sing the whole thing at the page on the link. It begins,

A used ... pink bathrobe
A rare ... mint snowglobe
A Smurf ... TV tray
I bought on eBay

My house ... is filled with this crap
Shows up in bubble wrap
Most every day
What I bought on eBay

Tell me why (I need another pet rock)
Tell me why (I got that Alf alarm clock)
Tell me why (I bid on Shatner's old toupee)
They had it on eBay...

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1:13 p.m.
Chattanooga newsman was behind questions for Rumsfeld: Jim Romenesko passes on an email from Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Lee Pitts, who is embedded with a National Guard unit from Tennessee. Here's a transcript of the troops' Q&A with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in Kuwait. (This link is only to the letters section of Romenesko's site; there's no permanent link.)

.... I was told yesterday that only soldiers could ask questions so I brought two of them along with me as my escorts. Before hand we worked on questions to ask Rumsfeld about the appalling lack of armor their vehicles going into combat have. While waiting for the VIP, I went and found the Sgt. in charge of the microphone for the question and answer session and made sure he knew to get my guys out of the crowd.

So during the Q&A session, one of my guys was the second person called on. When he asked Rumsfeld why after two years here soldiers are still having to dig through trash bins to find rusted scrap metal and cracked ballistic windows for their Humvees, the place erupted in cheers so loud that Rumsfeld had to ask the guy to repeat his question. Then Rumsfeld answered something about it being "not a lack of desire or money but a logistics/physics problem." He said he recently saw about 8 of the special up-armored Humvees guarding Washington, DC, and he promised that they would no longer be used for that and that he would send them over here. Then he asked a three star general standing behind him, the commander of all ground forces here, to also answer the question. The general said it was a problem he is working on.

The great part was that after the event was over the throng of national
media following Rumsfeld- The New York Times, AP, all the major networks -- swarmed to the two soldiers I brought from the unit I am embedded with. Out of the 1,000 or so troops at the event there were only a handful of guys from my unit b/c the rest were too busy prepping for our trip north. The national media asked if they were the guys with the armor problem and then stuck cameras in their faces. The NY Times reporter asked me to email him the stories I had already done on it, but I said he could search for them himself on the Internet and he better not steal any of my lines. I have been trying to get this story out for weeks- as soon as I foud out I would be on an unarmored truck- and my paper published two stories on it. But it felt good to hand it off to the national press. I believe lives are at stake with so many soldiers going across the border riding with scrap metal as protection. It may be to late for the unit I am with, but hopefully not for those who come after....

There's a little more at the link, including some reaction in the field.

Related: 278th Prepares To Enter Iraq By Adding Armor To Vehicles -- By Lee Pitts

...Soldiers on the convoy are scrambling to craft their own armor for the vehicles they are taking into a combat zone. Stress levels rose late last week when nuts and bolts ran low.

Soldiers dug used ballistic windshields — which include bullet-hole sized cracks — out of trash bins and installed them on some vehicles.

”If it was lucky for one guy, maybe it will be lucky for us," said Staff Sgt. Allen Lewis, of Castalian Springs, Tenn., as he carted one off for his Humvee.

Spc. Kevin Nunley, 44, of Nashville, one of several wearing green coveralls over their uniforms at the makeshift armor upgrade shop, said soldiers would continue to apply quarter-inch thick sheet metal until they run out....

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Updated 4:40 p.m.
Propaganda alert: The Drudge Report is blaring the story below under the headline, "REPORTER PLANTED RUMSFELD QUESTIONS WITH SOLDIERS"

Planted is a loaded word, sinister, the fourth meaning of the verb "to plant.": Place something or someone in a certain position in order to secretly observe or deceive; "Plant a spy in Moscow"; "plant bugs in the dissident's apartment."

The embedded reporter (he's hardly a secret) was not permitted to ask questions; he's been filing stories about the troops digging through the dump for metal; the troops applauded wildly after the question was asked. If he helped his guys word the question, it sounds to me like he's helping his men far more than the superiors who are leaving them undefended.

How can you "plant" a question someone doesn't want to ask? Do troops applaud questions they don't want asked?

Why is Drudge casting aspersions from his Miami keyboard on a real journalist who's trying to help soldiers protect themselves? Does Drudge think he's helping Rumsfeld by trashing the reporter and the troops at risk in the field?

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December 8, 2004, 7:44 p.m. -- Last week's weblog

Board games: Gifts of future fun. Seattle gamer Matthew Baldwin, at The Morning News, offers his picks (The 2004 Good Gift Games Guide:). Tops is

Ticket to Ride

Days of Wonder, two to five players, 45 minutes, $40

Ticket to Ride has been racking up kudos ever since its release, even garnering the prestigious “German Game of the Year” award. So what do you care what a bunch of Germans think about board games? Well, Germany is the center of the board-game universe for sociological reasons I don’t even pretend to grok, so being named “German Game of the Year” is like being named “Japanese Inscrutable Hyperkinetic Animated Movie of the Year” or “Canadian… uhhm… Maple Syrup of the Year” or whatever. Anyway. The game board shows a map of the U.S. with cities connected by a web of train routes. Players claim routes by collecting and playing sets of train cards. But a route claimed by one player is unavailable for use by the others, forcing opponents to seek out detours. Ticket to Ride is tense and exciting, but the indirect nature of the competition is perfect for families and friends.

[ more info | purchase ]

As always, the favorite game of a reviewer with different expectations from you can land you in gamers' boredom Christmas night. So it's good of Baldwin to offer this closing paragraph,

You’re unlikely to find these games at your local Wal-Mart, but more and more stores are catering to the burgeoning board-game hobby. Popular online outlets include Boards and Bits, Boulder Games, Funagain, Gamefest, GameSurplus, and Time Well Spent, and a quick search through your local Yellow Pages is likely to reveal a specialty store in your area.

For more information about these games and thousands more, check out Boardgame Geek. Have fun!

My days of playing Risk! are behind me, conquering the world is too much work, and I learned early (but a little too late) that playing chess on a first date sets a competitive tone in a relationship. So it would take a special game to lure me much beyond the occasional Scrabble evening. Only one of his choices appeals to me:

Buy Word

Face 2 Face Games, one to four players, 45 minutes, $25

The tiles from Scrabble and the money element from Monopoly are combined into a title that Games magazine heralded as the best of 2004. You acquire letters by spending cash; you make money by creating words. What makes it tricky is that you can get a Q or a K on the cheap, but an E will cost you a pretty penny. Word games are a holiday staple, and this is one of the best in a (sorry!) spell.

[ more info | purchase ]

At House Full of Games, where you can hunt for games of different sorts and for different ages, I saw a couple that sound interesting:

10 Days in Africa

You have 10 Days in Africa - touring by plane, car, and on foot. Chart your course from start to finish using destination and transportation tiles. With a little luck and clever planning, you just might outwit your fellow travelers.
The first traveler to make connections for a ten day journey wins the game.

and its newer companion, 10 Days in the USA.

I like the attitude at their Kids section, which begins,

Games that can be played by younger players. (Which is not necessarily the same thing as games designed for children.)

Are You Game is another site with games sorted by interest and age, and it boast stocking-stuffers, too.
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Holiday cookies: Christmas cookie recipes from this and other years of Journal food sections: 2003 / 2004 / Earlier. This is a full-service blog, after all.

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Congressional forum on voting in Ohio: It's on the C-Span site for viewing online (House Forum on Ohio Election Voting Procedures (12/08/04)) and is to be broad ast again tonight at 10. Here's a brief AP report of today's forum:

Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, convened a hearing to examine accusations of voting problems in Ohio. Many of the election complaints, such as disparities in vote totals and a shortage of voting machines in Democratic-leaning urban precincts, have already been cited and explained.

Conyers promised that Democrats on the committee will review each problem even though the Government Accountability Office has said it will study the 2004 election. He plans to hold a session in Columbus, Ohio.

I watched some of this, and was impressed by Cliff Arnebeck, a Columbus lawyer who heads Common Cause in Ohio. He referred to computer voting irregularities.

Some participants statements are available. There's a little more at Ms. Magazine. I hope to fnd a transcript soon.
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Clark Kent, Lois Lane laid off: Forrest Brown of the Charlotte Observer sends a copy of the memo we've all been dreading to Romenesko:

DATE: Dec. 7, 2004
FROM: Perry White
TO: Staff of the Daily Planet
SUBJECT: Maximizing shareholder investment

To the most wonderful staff in newspapers:

Our fictional world has been no more immune to the recent economic turmoil than our real-world counterparts. Regrettably, the Daily Planet has made the decision to separate itself from 50 newsroom employees.

Understandably, many of you want someone to blame, and many of you blame our new publisher, Mr. Luther, for these cutbacks. I can assure you Lex Luther only has the longterm interests of the Daily Planet, its readers and all of Metropolis at heart. The shareholders' investment must be maximized if the Daily Planet is to remain relevant in the 21st century. (Some of you have asked if Mr. Luther is majority shareholder, and those people are no longer employed by the Daily Planet).

Though our staff will be smaller in 2005, our journalism will be better. Not only can real-world journalists do more with less, I have every confidence my fictional staff can also produce better journalism with fewer resources. In fact, as fictional characters, we have advantages real-world workers can never match (for instance, we never have to go to the bathroom).

Additionally, we will be closing our Gotham City and Smallville bureaus to focus on our core Metropolis product. This will improve our overall paper. Sadly, our special Axis of Evil team has also been disbanded, as Clark Kent, Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen will no longer be the investigating trio. Food Editor Cora Apple has volunteered to spend a few hours a week checking in on General Zod, Ursa and Non when she's not producing the Food section. Your assistance in compiling recipes will be appreciated.

I look forward to the best year in the Daily Planet's history in 2005.

Perry White

P.S. Please attend the health benefits meeting next week. Our new insurer and accountant, the venerable Gotham City firm Oswald Cobblepott and Associates, reports premiums could rise 125% next year.

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Mammography, air power, and the limits of looking: Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. This story is far-ranging -- it opens with a report on high-tech cameras used in the first Gulf War -- but includes information that can be useful to women to know. There's a lot more here, but I'm skipping a lot here to deliver the gist:

...“If you have a cat scan of the chest, the heart always looks like the heart, the aorta always looks like the aorta,” Dershaw said. (That's David Dershaw, head of breast imaging at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York City.) “So when there’s a lump in the middle of that, it’s clearly abnormal. Looking at a mammogram is conceptually different from looking at images elsewhere in the body. Everything else has anatomy—anatomy that essentially looks the same from one person to the next. But we don’t have that kind of standardized information on the breast. The most difficult decision I think anybody needs to make when we’re confronted with a patient is: Is this person normal? And we have to decide that without a pattern that is reasonably stable from individual to individual, and sometimes even without a pattern that is the same from the left side to the right.”...

...Gilbert Welch, a medical-outcomes expert at Dartmouth, has pointed out that, given current breast-cancer mortality rates, nine out of every thousand sixty-year-old women will die of breast cancer in the next ten years. If every one of those women had a mammogram every year, that number would fall to six. The radiologist seeing those thousand women, in other words, would read ten thousand X-rays over a decade in order to save three lives—and that’s using the most generous possible estimate of mammography’s effectiveness....

... In a major study of mammography’s effectiveness—one of a pair of Canadian trials conducted in the nineteen-eighties—women who were given regular, thorough breast exams but no mammograms were compared with those who had thorough breast exams and regular mammograms, and no difference was found in the death rates from breast cancer between the two groups. The Canadian studies are controversial, and some breast-cancer experts are convinced that they may have understated the benefits of mammography. But there is no denying the basic lessons of the Canadian trials: that a skilled pair of fingertips can find out an extraordinary amount about the health of a breast, and that we should not automatically value what we see in a picture over what we learn from our other senses.

“The finger has hundreds of sensors per square centimetre,” says Mark Goldstein, a sensory psychophysicist who co-founded MammaCare, a company devoted to training nurses and physicians in the art of the clinical exam. “There is nothing in science or technology that has even come close to the sensitivity of the human finger with respect to the range of stimuli it can pick up. It’s a brilliant instrument. But we simply don’t trust our tactile sense as much as our visual sense.”

Worth reading in its entirety.
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I Want Media is tracking media layoffs at real news organizations: 750 yesterday at AOL, 10 Monday at the Hartford Courant -- the day the Courant Reader Representative Karen Hunter published (All The News That Fits The Budget),

...In the newsroom, complaints continue to come in from readers in towns The Courant once covered diligently but now covers sporadically because of staff reductions. And that change in the delivery system also resulted in earlier deadlines, which have left more than a few sports fans disappointed that some West Coast scores are absent from the newspaper.

As I write this column, there is a lot of speculation in the newsroom about how many will be laid off. In addition to individual concerns about the prospect of not having a job next year, there has been plenty of talk - at least in my office - about The Courant's ability to give readers the same level of service with fewer people. I have no doubt The Courant will continue do to great journalism, but readers tell me they want it all - the great and the routine.

A business is a business. We read about job reductions every day - at Phoenix, Electric Boat, CIGNA. I know budget-conscious minds understand better than I do what it takes for the newspaper to realize the efficiencies that provide Tribune shareholders with the returns that make them happy.

But it's during times like these - when news obligations and budgets collide - that I can't help but wonder exactly whom the newspaper really serves. I wonder if the newspaper will continue to meet the expectations of readers and the staff, expectations of a Courant that delivers meaningful investigative stories, thoughtful reflections on our lifestyles and pastimes, and the essential reports on events that color Connecticut's distinct communities.

The returns of journalism are far more than money. It contributes to an informed citizenry, a government that is accountable, ultimately, to a safe, uplifting and enlightened society. I don't know how you determine the profit margins of that.

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Place the state: Just like a puzzle of the United States with pieces shaped like the states. Drag and place.

If you're wrong, the proper place turns red and you drag the state there.

Unless your first piece is a coastal state with an obvious shape, it's hard to get that first one right. But it gets a lot easier as you go along.
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Matt Haughey at PVRblog: Ten Questions with TiVo's Director of User Experience, Margret Schmidt. Here's one:

MH: As I've watched TiVo over the years, I've seen it morph from a company that challenged Hollywood to one that was eventually embraced it. Have there ever been problems weighing what users are asking for, and what TV studios are comfortable with? I would imagine the upcoming TiVoToGo features would be a good example.

MS: It is actually pretty easy to balance the needs of the two groups, because in general they have the same goals.  Users want to watch quality programming when, where, and how they want to.  Studios want their programming enjoyed by the masses.  TiVo simply empowers users to control their TV consumption within the guidelines of fair use.  We have strong security system called TiVo Guard(TM) that protects the interests of the studios.  We don't support the inappropriate distribution of copyrighted content, and our users aren't asking for it.

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IBM Discloses Details Of PC Business Sale: So much for The Register's speculation that IBM might partner with Apple. They sold the PC division to Lenovo, a Chinese firm.

It's official: The company that helped start the PC market in the early 1980s is exiting the business. Under a blockbuster deal disclosed late Tuesday, IBM will sell its personal-computing business unit to Chinese manufacturer Lenovo Group Ltd. Under the deal, Lenovo will pay IBM $1.75 billion in cash and stock. About 10,000 IBM employees, most of them already in China, will join Lenovo. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2005.

Lenovo, which was founded in 1984 and has become a pioneer in the Chinese PC industry, will establish its worldwide headquarters in New York, assume control of IBM's PC operations in Raleigh, N.C., and conduct most of its manufacturing operations in Beijing. IBM will hold an 18.9% equity stake in Lenovo and provide the company with a range of IT services. Lenovo also retains the right to use IBM trademarks, including the widely successful ThinkPad laptop brand, for the next five years. ...

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December 7, 2004, 5:50 p.m.

Missing John Lennon: Tomorrow, John Lennon will have been dead 24 years. The photo at right, dated only December, 1980, was one of the last before Mark David Chapman fatally shot Lennon outside his home in The Dakota apartments on New York's Upper West Side.

Howard Cosell announced Lennon's death (RealAudio) on Monday Night Football.

John Lennon was born Oct. 9, 1940. Had he lived, he would be 64 now -- a magical number in Beatles lore due to Paul McCartney's ditty, "When I'm 64." (Paul himself won't get there until June 18, 2006.)

john-lennon.com is full of photos, songs, stories; there's more at Working Class Hero, at Bagism at Instant Karma, Today would be a good day to spend some time browsing around.

Overlooked on election day, a new Lennon album was released, Acoustic. Of its 16 tracks, mostly demos and live performances, nine are reissues. At Amazon, you can hear the usual brief clips, but these snippets are especially unsatisfying for these tunes. NPR did a nice audio piece on the album Nov. 5, and links on that page to an interview last year with John's widow, Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono and the 'Lennon Legend'

As a teeny-bopper, John was not my favorite Beatle. Brooding George Harrison was more my type.

But he rescued me from teachers who'd hear my name the first day and ask, "Like the Lennon Sisters?" I couldn't stand those saccharine starlets of the Lawrence Welk Show, I would fire back, "Like John Lennon"-- the generation gap in action. Years later, I came across a book of Irish genealogy. The Lennons have always been poets, priests and musicians.

Later, of course, John became the "substantial" Beatle. Imagine (RealAudio) borders on the sacred; versions by Neil Young and Eva Cassidy are heartfelt, but don't match the power of the original.

Working Class Hero remains an anthem, although it was seldom heard on the radio because it contained a word forbidden by the FCC. Its lyrics speak still.

"War is over if you want it" (mp3) seems painfully poignant now. John insisted on hope, and hearing him now brings home how much we've lost since then.

Vietnam may have been tearing us apart, but our leaders weren't insulting us by insisting, "They hate us for our freedom." Woman -- "you're the other half of the sky" -- seems a long way from the bitchspeak of gangsta rap. How did we devolve into brutish ignorance? Kennedy, King, Kennedy, Lennon -- one by one, those who offered us a vision of our better selves living in peace together were snuffed.

The John Lennon Memorial Grilled Cheese Sandwich on eBay looks nothing like him. Anything for a buck.

John's impact was on us, on how we still view the world and the possibilities of our own lives.

Tributes large and small continue. In Evanston, Ill., Veterans for Peace plans Lennon Night, its fifth annual; in the Twin Cities, Curtiss A, as he has for the past 24 years on the anniversary of Lennon's death, plans to gather a dozen or so musicians for a tribute (7 p.m., First Avenue, 701 1st Av. N., Mpls. $10-$12. 612-338-8388.) In Lexington, Ky., a club called The Dame at 156 West Main St. hosts its second annual John Lennon Memorial Hootenanny, with 10 bands playing two to six Lennon tunes each. Admission is $5 or a toy for the Marines' Toys for Tots program.

How did John Lennon's music affect you? Post your tribute. | Read others' tributes

Related: Today, Playbill reports, Lennon Musical to Include Unknown Songs by Beatle:

The Broadway-bound musical Lennon, due to land at the Broadhurst Theatre in July 2005, will contain two melodies never before heard by any fan of The Beatles or John Lennon.

The songs, "India, India" and "I Don't Want to Lose You," were written by Lennon in his last years, the New York Times reported. Lennon's widow Yoko Ono has given director Don Scardino the go-ahead to use them.

"They're very appropriate for the periods they are showing," Ono said. "People would say to me, `What are you going to do about all of John's unreleased songs?' And I've always sais, `I will put them out, but I have to find ways to present them in the right way. For these songs, I thought the musical would be a very effective, beautiful way to do it.'"

Lennon will have its world premiere at San Francisco's Orpheum Theatre and then a stint at Boston's Colonial Theatre before coming to Broadway....

... The musical will feature 10 actors portraying John Lennon at various stages in his life backed by an onstage 10-piece band. Twenty-seven songs from the substantial Lennon oeuvre will be featured in the musical, among them "Imagine," "Instant Karma," "Give Peace a Chance," "(Just Like) Starting Over" and "Whatever Gets You Through the Night."

Performance schedules and ticketing information for all venues will be announced at a later date. For more information, visit www.lennonthemusical.com.

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C-Span to broadcast Ohio vote forum: On C-Span 1, the main channel, 10 a.m. tomorrow:

Forum
Voting Irregularities in Ohio
U.S. House of Representatives, Conyers, J. (D-MI)
John Conyers Jr., D-MI
The beginning and end of this live program may be earlier or later than the scheduled times.

It's expected to last about two hours. These are the participants:

Members: Rep. John Conyers, Jr., Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Rep. Robert Scott, Rep. Melvin Watt, Rep. Linda Sanchez, Robert Wexler

Witnesses: Rev. Jesse Jackson, Founder Rainbow Push Coalition; Ralph Neas, President, People For the American Way; Prof. Robert Fitrakis, Editor, The Free Press; Cliff Arnebeck, Arnebeck Associates; Steve Rosenfeld, Senior Producer, Air America Radio; David Cobb, Green Party Nominee 2004 Presidential Candidate; Jon Greenbaum, Director, Voting Rights Project, Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights Under Law; Ellie Smeal, Executive Director, The Feminist Majority; John Bonifaz, General Counsel, National Voting Institute; Prof. Steve Freeman, University of Pennsylvania; Shawnta Walcott, Communications Director, Zogby International.

Rep. Conyers is soliciting your questions at this link, if you read this before the hearing.

Related: Two Candidates Request Recount in Ohio. AP. Today.
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Apple of IBM's Eye? Cormac O'Reilly of The Register speculates that IBM and Apple will get... cozy:

Opinion As the IT world digests the fact that IBM has, according to the New York Times, put its PC division up for sale, another set of speculation revs up.

No, not the fact that the rumored potential buyer is Chinese company Lenovo, nor the cruel related joke that many old IBMers caught in the sold PC division would quickly will appear on a Chinese take-away menu, thereby helping fix IBM's embarrassing pension funding problems.

Instead, an even better and more audacious speculation is that once publicly free of the PC division IBM will either buy, or form a close joint venture with Apple to sell its PCs, which coincidentally are now built around IBM's PowerPC chip.

Selling its PC Division would also pave the way for such an IBM move to be approved by the FTC. To add even more heat to already hot gossip, it turns out that Apple is not among the published list of early companies signing up for IBM's PowerPC consortia - a rather strange gap given Apple's now absolute dependency on that microprocessor range....

And the beef goes on...: Apologies Not Accepted is the beginning of a site in the same family as Sorry Everybody, where people who didn't vote for George Bush hold up signs apologizing to the world. At Apologies Accepted, the world holds up signs expressing... that.

But some people are not taking "sorry" for an answer. Chris and Gabriel, an Englishman and his infant son, are the first two to balk. Their signs read, "Sorry isn't good enough" and "I want more," respectively.

Others are slowly following suit.
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December 6, 2004, 5:50 p.m.

"I don't know how I got to write those songs. Those early songs were almost magically written....I did it once, and I can do other things now. But, I can't do that." -- Bob Dylan on CBS' 60 Minutes last night.

World Heritage — a World Wide Panorama, June 19-21, 2004:

On the Solstice weekend, June 19-21, more than 110 photographers in 32 countries around the world created VR panoramas with the common theme of World Heritage. This site showcases the results of their efforts.

The event was sponsored by the Geography Computing Facility at the University of California Berkeley. This site is hosted by The Geo-Images Project. This is a non-commercial project, done simply to create enthusiasm for VR photography, and provide an outlet for our collective creativity.

Here are the thumbnails. (The one above is by Stephan V. Bressensdorf - (400 k / 1.9 MB Full-Screen)
of The Zurich China Garden in Zurich, Switzerland.) Use your arrow keys to move your vantage point on the panoramas.
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Yesterday's draft dodgers help today's war resisters: Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports,

VANCOUVER, B.C. -- War can turn strangers into brothers. It's true if they're fighting it, and it's true if they're resisting it, as Vietnam War resisters resettled in this Canadian province know.

In an American era of "love it or leave it," they left. Now a number have joined to help peace activists here form a new "underground railway" for resisters to the Iraq war, providing food and shelter and transportation north.

The new generation of resisters includes AWOL airborne soldier Jeremy Hinzman, 25, who seeks refuge in Canada. His Canadian immigration hearing, which begins today in Toronto, has inspired activists in the national War Resisters Support Committee to organize vigils throughout Canada.

Hinzman's fate will set the tone for a half-dozen other American soldiers seeking asylum in the face of the Iraq war. Activists are expecting a denial in Hinzman's case, and a long appeals process.

But they're in for the long run.

"The committee's focus is to make sure, if there is a mass influx of war resisters, that Canada is at least as welcoming as it was in the '60s and '70s," said Peter Prontzos, a political science instructor at Langara College in Vancouver and a Vietnam-era draft dodger.

That could be trickier this time around. Discrimination against Americans could be a problem, warns Vietnam War resister Juergen Dankwort. "We should treat them as we have treated other immigrants."...

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Satire wrap:

The Onion: New Social Security Plan Allows Workers to Put Portion Of Earnings On Favorite Team

WASHINGTON, DC—President Bush signed an ambitious Social Security plan into law Monday that will allow citizens to bet a third of their payroll taxes on their favorite sports teams

"It's time we gave the American people the chance to make some real money for retirement," Bush said, speaking from the new Office of Social Security and Pari-mutuel Wagering Building. "Some naysayers think the average citizen doesn't know how to handle his own money. When spring training starts next year, it's up to you to prove them wrong."

"It's your money," Bush added. "You earned it. You should be able to bet it on whatever team you want."

Under the new plan, participating citizens will be asked to list their favorite teams on their W-2 forms. At the start of each major sports season, program participants will visit their local Social Security booking offices to review point spreads and sample playoff trees. Citizens' team selections will be subject to approval by their employers, who contribute a percentage of wages to the employee Social Security Earned Benefits Fund, or "pot," under the new system....

The Borowitz Report: Nader Offers To Lead Ukraine.

Plans for a rerun of Ukraine’s controversial presidential election were thrown into turmoil today as perennial third-party candidate Ralph Nader threw his hat into the ring, saying that he and only he was qualified to heal the bitterly divided nation.

In Washington and Moscow, where officials had been hoping for an orderly solution to the roiling crisis, Mr. Nader’s decision to run for election in Ukraine, a country he has never visited, raised more than a few eyebrows....

Today's entry: Families Ask Ex-Cabinet Members To Spend Less Time With Them

John Scalzi: The Ten Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time. Including Ayn Rand's A Selfish Christmas (1951) , A Muppet Christmas with Zbigniew Brzezinski (1978) and Noam Chomsky: Deconstructing Christmas (1998).

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Trashing music heroes: The Guardian (UK) lets its rock reviewers spew how they really feel about the greats (Don't believe the hype).

I agree with some of it, and so will you, I suspect: (But don't dump on Bob Marley, please. There's nothing like arriving in Jamaica all hot and tired -- especially before the road to Negril was finished -- and having a Mellow Mood at the beach bar at FootePrints surrounded by the sounds and photos of Marley.)

The dissed: The Strokes, James Brown, The Clash, Pet Sounds, The Stone Roses, U2, Neil Young, Elvis Costello, David Bowie, Elvis, Bob Marley, Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart, Prince, Nirvana, The Rolling Stones, Jim Morrison, The Beatles -- and the album What's Going On, by Marvin Gaye, although his last name is not mentioned. You're just supposed to know.

Related: Five Mistakes Band & Label Sites Make: Too much Flash tops the list. Great comments at the end by readers. via MetaFilter.
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How to wrap a gift: There are always newcomers to this. Here's e-How's take.

Of course they're serious. Pictures too:

These instructions are for a rectangular gift box, but they can be applied to any size or shape of box.

Then there's How To Wrap A Gift (With Help From Your Furry Friend...
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The Quiet World: Nice.

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