By Sheila
Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Fair and balanced, too!
May 27, 2005, 7:29 p.m.-- Last
week's weblog
Rhode Island, plant your gardens: After the deluge,
sun at last. Here are some links to get you in the mood..
Information:
Garden Web Forums:
There are hundreds of topics anyone may search and browse. In the New
England Gardening forum, you'll run into other Rhode Islanders. There's
an interesting thread running there right now, Favorite
nurseries and garden centers, what are yours??? with some local scuttlebutt,
and some recommendations that might just be worth a ride to check out.
If you want to post, registration is free.
Dave's Garden: Huge,
friendly site with lots of features, most notably,
PlantFiles, the
largest plant database in the world with 100,143 entries, 73,138 images and
43,919 comments. Currently entries are from 349 families, 3,573 genera, 21,920
species, and 67,685 cultivars. PF continues to grow through the collaborative
efforts of 10,861 gardeners from around the world,.... Any registered user
may add new plants, images, details, comments, and ZIP codes.
Registration is free.
Inspiration: I've added six new garden blogs to the Garden
Blogs list today
A
Gardening Year: This one's a treasure. OldRoses of Middlesex, N.J.
blogs "The adventures and misadventures of an heirloom gardener," including
her favorite sources of heirloom seeds and bulbs, and lots of photos of
her own garden as spring progresses.
As a bonus (to me), she lists a pair of favorite garden blogs
that aren't on this list. They are now -- the two below.
Garden
Freak: "crazygramma" gardens in British Columbia. One
of her posts cracked me up: " Name
this bush
Here is a picture of the flowering bush I cannot remember the name of...."
Her readers took her literally. Among the answers: Molly, Jacqueline,
Willard.
Snappy's
Garden Blog (aka "gardens blog"): David Hamilton of Yorkshire,
U.K. writes a stream-of-consciousness garden blog. Sample: "Gardening
is like making your own firework display, you just love the build up, but
the ecstacy is in the explosion of colours!For me the flowers lovingly
picked, tended, and watched for signs of growth."
Wooded
Paths: Gardening on a partially wooded house site, with "public" (access
to pedestrians and bicycles) and private paths into the woods. Zone 6A
Massachusetts. "dwpitelli" of Natick has lily beetles, and plans
to fumigate them with either cigarette smoke or carbon dioxide. I want
to know how that turns out. He also has a vast list of links -- I'll be
spending time there checking them out.
Hybrids: Some garden blogs share space in the author's
life with another hobby. The next two are prime examples.
The
Daily Knitter Blog leads right now with The First Harvest: Spinach
thrived in the recent rains in Chicagoland. The preceding post is about
Knitting Lace.
Karen's
Home on the Blog spans an even wider variety: "...gardening,
fiber craft, Viking Era research and just plain ol' life as it
happens" in Southwestern Ontario (Zone 5a). Right now, she's leading with
terrific photos of what's blooming. Karen found this list via The Nature Nut,
below.
She writes, " I've been visiting Rhode Island for the past
2 years (and likely this year as well!) to take part in a Viking Festival of
sorts at the Haffenreffer Museum in Bristol. I love Rhode Island, and hope
to have more time this year to become a tourist as well as a Viking Era re-enactor.
Bonus blog to bookmark: The
Green Cutting Board. Not a garden blog, but a vegetarian blog, with photos
and recipes of what to do with all you're going to grow this summer. via The
Nature Nut.
Link
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Broadband
Properties Magazine: Eric Lilius, my "Canadian correspondent," sent
this along with the comment, "This issue seems like a pretty good
airing of the Municipal broadband debate to me."
I think universal access and computer literacy is important to our society,
and wi-fi appeals to me as the way to go. An fellow former BBSer and I have
been discussing this via email. He's plumping for cellphone access instead.
I don't buy it. "You're breaking up" and "No service" are
still too common, and that Verizon CEO's comment to
San Francisco Chronicle editors (blogged
earlier) is still ringing in my ears:
"Why in the world would you think your (cell) phone would work in your
house?" he said. "The customer has come to expect so much. They
want it to work in the elevator; they want it to work in the basement."
Related: Some
musings on the future of wireless technology Perfect timing. J.D.
Lasica points this out:
Over at the Media Center's morph blog, Dewayne Hendricks, who is on the
FCC’s Technology Advisory Board, is starting a conversation on wireless
technology and the future.
Link
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The
state of podcasting: At the Seattle PI, blogger Brian Chin reports,
Eight weeks into SeattlePI.com's first experiments with podcasting, I can
say this much: It's still a little too complicated -- both for the audience
and the podcaster.
Let's start with the audience. Despite the
explosive growth in podcasting, growing use of RSS feeds and booming
iPod sales, we've found that knitting all three together can confound
even those who consider themselves technically savvy, let alone "average" Net
users.
BusinessWeek sums
up the situation quite nicely in its special
report on podcasting:
It's the paradox of podcasting. The new technology, designed to let average
Joes and Janes create and distribute homemade radio programs over the Internet,
is too difficult for the average person to use. Despite hundreds of "how-to" files
floating around the Web, even listening to podcasts is still a several-step
process, requiring links to special "podcatching" software, checking the
feeds, and then listening to the files with a separate MP3 player or on
your computer.
Since food editor Hsiao-Ching Chou started her weekly On
Food podcast, we've received numerous queries from people about how
to listen to it and what the heck they're supposed to do with that
XML file we keep pointing at. As a result, we've revised our instructions
and explanatory language several times to try and make everything clearer....
Link
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Comment
Rave
game review of Psychonauts for
PC/Xbox at NoMansLand
network -- "Tim Schafer is the game designer behind such LucasArts
classics as The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge,
Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango" -- with nice
screenshots (the photo at right is a detail from one):
At first Psychonauts may seem like your standard platformer, but after only
half an hour or so of gameplay you'll come to realise just how original this
game is in many respects. It really is a breath of fresh air.
Seeing as a psychonaut's job is to take care of problems within the heads
of troubled (or just completely deranged, like ArcticWolf) individuals, that's
where much of the action takes place.
Naturally, no two minds are alike, and you really have to sit back and marvel
at the creativity of the development team. It's an awesome feeling venturing
into someone's psyche and seeing what makes them tick, especially if they're
as downright bonkers as the members of this cast.
'I Am Bored -
Sites for when you're bored.' Very bored.
Link
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May 26, 2005, 7:45 p.m.-- Last
week's weblog
Working on some projects here, and the East Bay bureau has just moved in
at my elbow after a phone and server-link failure, so just a few links tonight...
No
training wheels needed: New trike bike could take fear out of junior's first
solo ride. AP. The photo's too cool.
Who can forget the thrill -- and terror -- of that first solo bicycle ride:
Mom or Dad letting go, the magic of two-wheeled freedom and, inevitably,
toppling over in a knee-scraping crash?
Three Purdue University industrial designers who tapped into memories of
their own childhood cycling misadventures have built a bike that ditches
the training wheels but keeps rookies stable.
Called SHIFT, it slowly transforms from a tricycle to bicycle configuration
as the rider pedals faster, then returns to trike formation as the rider
slows down.
Lead designer Scott Shim hopes the design, which won top honors recently
at an international bicycle design competition, can help children slowly
gain the skill and courage to pedal off on their own...
Link
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At
least 8,000 treasures looted from Iraq museum still untraced. The Independent.
(U.K.).
Evidence of how quickly and irretrievably a country can be stripped of its
cultural heritage came with the Iraq war in 2003.
The latest figures, presented to the art crime conference yesterday by John
Curtis of the British Museum, suggested that half of the 40 iconic items
from the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad still had not been retrieved. And
of at least 15,000 items looted from its storerooms, about 8,000 have yet
to be traced.
About 4,000 of the objects taken from the museum had been recovered in Iraq.
But illustrating the international demand for such antiquities, Dr Curtis
said around 1,000 had been confiscated in the US, 500 pieces had been impounded
in France, 250 in Switzerland and 200 or so in Jordan.
Other artefacts have been retrieved from surrounding countries such as Syria,
Kuwait, Iran and Turkey. None of these objects has yet been sent back to
Iraq.
Other items had been destroyed or stolen from enormously important archaeological
sites such as those at Nimrud and Babylon. "Some of them resemble minefields
there are so many holes," Dr Curtis said....
Link
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Yikes: Oil:
Caveat empty in the current Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; Alfred
J. Cavallo
Without any press conferences, grand announcements, or hyperbolic advertising
campaigns, the Exxon Mobil Corporation, one of the world's largest publicly
owned petroleum companies, has quietly joined the ranks of those who are predicting
an impending plateau in non-OPEC oil production. Their report, The
Outlook for Energy: A 2030 View, forecasts a peak in just five years....
...Meanwhile, average consumers have taken their cue from the market, where
rising prices have always been followed by falling prices, leading to the assumption
that this pattern will continue forever. In truth, the market price of crude
oil is completely decoupled from and independent of production costs, which
average about $6 per barrel for non-OPEC producers and $1.50 per barrel for
OPEC producers. This situation has nothing to do with a free market, and everything
to do with what OPEC believes will be accepted or tolerated by the United States.
The completely affordable market price--what consumers pay at the gasoline
pump--provides magisterial profits to the owners of the resource and gives
no warning of impending shortages.... "
via Robot Wisdom
Link
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Don't
Call It Live Aid II: At FMBQ,
a radio industry site:
For months, rumors have persisted that a 20th anniversary sequel to Live
Aid was in the works. Recently, Bono has strongly hinted at U2 concerts that
fans should be thinking about Live Aid as the Fourth Of July weekend gets
closer. Now, Live Aid founders Bob Geldof and Midge Ure have told reporters
that they are planning a major concert event, but refuse to call it "Live
Aid 2." At the U.K.'s Ivor Novello awards, the two confirmed there would
be a concert tied into the G8 summit this July....
Link
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Time's
Up, Einstein: His paper rocked the physics world - and the space-time
continuum. Not bad for a college dropout who critics say may not even exist. Interesting
stuff, even for a liberal-arts major like me. At Wired:
...One night he (Peter Lynds) was watching the movie I.Q., with Walter
Matthau as Einstein, Meg Ryan as his ditzy-yet-brainy niece, and Tim Robbins
as a lovesick mechanic. When Robbins moves in on Ryan for a kiss, she attempts
to fend him off with a 2,500-year-old paradox known as Zeno's dichotomy:
Moving from point A to point B requires that you first cover half the distance,
then half of the remaining distance, and so on - an insurmountable infinity
of almost-theres that keeps you from point B. Robbins crashes through Zeno's
logic by kissing Ryan anyway.
It was just the thing to get Lynds off the couch: What if Zeno's real lesson
isn't that movement from point A to point B is impossible (obviously it isn't),
but rather that there is no such thing as a discrete slice of time?
He went back to school that fall with the fervor and the audacity of the
converted. During an office-hours argument with physicist David Beaglehole,
Lynds pointed at the professor's coffee mug and demanded to know: At what "instant" would
the mug not be moving if he dragged it across the desk? Exasperated, Beaglehole
suggested that Lynds try to get his theory published, thinking that rejection
from an academic journal would put the matter to rest....
Link
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Ask
Jeeves to be re-branded? here's the item at CNet, by Margaret Kane, in
its entirety:
Search engine Ask Jeeves, which was acquired by Barry Diller's InterActive
Corp. in March, may be getting a new name.
Diller said at a conference this week that he was considering re-branding
the site.
"It probably won't be called Ask Jeeves," Diller said at the D3
All Things Digital conference, adding later that the new name "might
be one of those words without the other."
Um... do you think it will be called Ask? Or Jeeves?
Link
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May 25, 2005, 7:57 p.m.-- Last
week's weblog
Nude X-ray photos at airport security? We beat back
groping by airport screeners in December, but the apparent attempt to kill
airline travel continues.
Joe
Sharkey, writing in the New York Times yesterday (Airport
Screeners Could Get X-Rated X-Ray Views), lays it all out:
Stand by, air travelers, because the Homeland Security Department is preparing
to install and test high-tech machines at airport checkpoints that will,
as the comic-book ads promised, "See Thru Clothing!"
Get ready for electronic portals known as backscatters, expected to be tested
at a handful of airports this year, that use X-ray imaging technology to
allow a screener to scan a body. And yes, the body image is detailed. Let's
not be coy here, ladies and gentlemen:
"Well, you'll see basically everything," said Bill Scannell, a
privacy advocate and technology consultant. "It shows nipples. It shows
the clear outline of genitals."...
The unfortunately named Rapiscan Secure
1000, one of several manufacurers of the low-dose X-ray scanners known as backscatters,
boasts of high-resolution images (the company's demo photo is above) and this
bit of doublespeak:
Rapiscan Systems has also developed techniques to protect the privacy of
the person being screened while enabling effective detection of threat items.
In a recent study, 19 out of 20 persons preferred a Secure 1000 scan to an
invasive pat-down physical search.
The company does not say whether these people were informed that someone would
be looking through their clothing at their nude bodies when they "preferred" the
scan to a pat-down.
Susan
Hallowell, the director of the Transportation Security Administration's security
laboratory pictured in the AP photo at right, agreed to be X-rayed by the 'backscatter'
machine at the Transportation Security Administration nearly two years ago
while wearing a dark skirt and blouse, a gun and a bomb. Here's that photo.
(Sorry, Susan.)
Dr. Hallowell is to lead a discussion
on Privacy versus Security late this summer in Switzerland.
The photos will also show the scanners colostomy bags, evidence of mastectomy
or penile implants, urinary protection pad, synthetic wig and bra inserts.
(From MSNBC: "It
can detect metal, as well as anything inorganic — from a polymer gun
to plastic explosives.")
People fat enough to have folds of flesh can still hide contraband between
them, so these folks can expect to be singled out for manual searching.
Q: What is the operating principle of the SECURE 1000?
A: A narrow, low energy x-ray beam is scanned over the body surface.
The reflection or backscatter of the beam is detected, digitized and computer
stored. The data is then enhanced, using state-of-the-art imaging techniques
to create a display of the person and any concealed objects.--
Rapiscan FAQ
No mention of webcam connections, but it's not unreasonable to expect to see
your fuzzy (but high-rez) naked photos sold to porn sites on the Web, if you're
at all famous or, er, exceptional.
Q: Can the SECURE 1000 images be saved?
A: The images acquired with the system can be saved on the system's hard
disk or transferred to floppy disk for training and legal documentation.
The stored images can be recalled and viewed on the system monitor or on
any IBM compatible personal computer with color graphics. --
Rapiscan FAQ
Does this seem unlikely? This week it
was revealed that bank workers were allegedly paid $10 per account to
steal financial records of 60,000 Bank of America customers across New England
that were then sold to debt collection agencies. And, as the Washington
Post reports today, 56-year old Betty Ostergren of Virginia posts online
the social security numbers of CIA Director Porter J. Goss, former secretary
of state Colin L. Powell, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and House Majority Leader
Tom DeLay to draw attention to how easy identity theft is. Undoubtedly, activists
could and would do the same with Rapiscans of celebrities and even government
officials who volunteered to show the public they're willing to expose themselves
in the name of "safety."
Before the email pours in saying, "I'll do anything to be sure I'm safe
from being blown up in the sky," I'd ask you to think about whether these
low-level x-rays will actually make you more safe.
I doubt it. Those with something to hide will simply secrete their contraband
-- uncut diamonds, drugs, explosives, James-Bondian mini weapons -- in bodily
orifices, safely tucked behind their own flesh.
Q: Will SECURE 1000 detect objects in the body?
A: No, the x-rays penetrate only about 1/10 (0.1) inch of the skin. Any
object that would be deeper than that level would not be detected. Under
current regulations generally body cavity inspections must be performed
by high dose medical x-ray systems in the presence of a medical professional
or body cavity searches must be performed manually by trained enforcement
personnel. --
Rapiscan FAQ
But a more interesting question, one to which I hope you will reply, is, "How
much privacy will you give up for the illusion of safety?"
Will you agree to disrobe and submit to a search of your body cavities secure
in the knowledge that everyone is being similarly searched?
Will you wait in 3-hour lines to be searched before you enter the boarding
area? 6-hour lines? 12?
You already take off your shoes. Will you remove your wig in public to prove
you're not hiding anything there?
And wouldn't it seem easier for terrorists to find somebody to attack a plane
they're not aboard, anyway?
The Director of the ACLU's Program on Technology and Liberty, Barry Steinhardt, calls
this X-ray scanning technology an "electronic strip search." In
the Times story, Steinhardt's view has a well-placed ally:
Steve Elson... is mighty skeptical. A former Federal Aviation Administration
investigator, Mr. Elson led the agency's red team of undercover agents who
poked around airports looking for - and finding - holes in security.
"Backscatting has been around for years," he said. "They
started talking about this stuff back during the protests when they were
grabbing women. Under the right circumstances, the technology has some efficacy
and can work. That is, provided we're willing to pay the price in a further
loss of personal privacy."
He isn't. "I have a beautiful 29-year-old daughter and a beautiful
wife, and I don't want some screeners to be looking at them through their
clothes, plain and simple," he said....
...He does see one virtue, though, for some airport screeners if backscatting
technology becomes the norm. "They'll be paid to go to a peep show," he
said. "They won't even need to bring any change."
Wags have noted that there'll be a boom in people lining up for these jobs.
Volunteering, even.
We're smarter than this, aren't we? If we aren't, I'll drive to my next vacation
spot.
Link
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"Freedom fries" N.C. congressman now believes
war had "no justification": (The story -- Jones
sails a contrarian course, scolds Bush, bucks GOP leaders -- was originally
published May 15 by the News & Observer of Raleigh, but I can't find
it on their site.)
The
words "freedom fries" are still on the menu in the U.S. House cafeteria,
and are likely to appear in the first line of Walter
Jones' obituary, perhaps with their lesser-known cousin, freedom toast.
...Jones led the fight to rename fries and toast at the Capitol in protest
of the French leading opposition to the war in Iraq.
Ask him about it now, and he lays his cheek in his left hand, a habit he
repeats dozens of times a day when lost in thought or sadness.
"I wish it had never happened," Jones said.
...Jones now says we went to war "with no justification." He
has challenged the Bush administration, quizzing Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld and other presidential advisers in public hearings. He has lined
the hallway outside his office with "the faces of the fallen."
Jones represents the state's most military congressional district, running
from Camp Lejeune along the coast through Cherry Point, up to the Outer Banks.
"If we were given misinformation intentionally by people in this administration,
to commit the authority to send boys, and in some instances girls, to go
into Iraq, that is wrong," Jones said. "Congress must be told the
truth."
Jones is no favorite of the White House these days...
Link
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Plumber is
a pipe game. No, it is not like the old "worm" games where you had
to outrun something. This is about rotating parts till you can get them to
hold water.
It is not as hard as it looks, despite all the pieces you'll see..
Hint: You don't have to use all the pieces. Just find a route from the faucet
to the outlet that works for the water.
Link
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Consciousness: These two seem to go together:
Scientists
told: reduce animal experiments. The Guardian (U.K.) reports,
Alternative ways of conducting medical research should be found to spare
animals being used in experiments, an influential group of scientists and
ethicists says today.
Was
Your Meat Smarter Than Your Pet? ABC News reports,
...Hamlet the pig is a computer wiz. He gets a reward every time he uses
a joystick designed for a chimp to move a cursor into a blue area on a computer
monitor. A Jack Russell terrier couldn't achieve such a task after a year
of trying.
In other words, pigs are smarter than dogs.
"They're very curious, and they'll charge off on their own," said
John Webster, a professor at the University of Bristol in England. "They
will investigate the world with their noses down and batter through like
a small boy."
New research shows that chickens can be taught to run the thermostat of
the chicken coop, and that even the lowly cow has a surprising inner life.
Cows have been known to form lifelong friendships, and one recent study
found that they actually show excitement when they've learned something new "as
if they're saying, 'Eureka, I found out how to solve the problem,' " said
Donald Broom, a professor at the University of Cambridge....
Paradox hurts my brain.
Link
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May 24, 2005, 7:44 p.m.-- Last
week's weblog
100
Pieces: Did you find something
on the beach today? Nova Scotia artist Margaret
Nicholson writes,
In April of 2005, I placed 100 pieces of clay sculpture along the coastline
of Nova Scotia. Lost or found, they will be left to nature or chance. Hopefully
for someone to find. The sculpture is all figurative fragments or small busts.
Each piece is fitted with an identity tag directing the finder to this web
site which will then describe the origins of the piece that they have found.
I put these sculptures in places that would not be inaccessible but not immediately
obvious. Many of the pieces are designed to blend into their environment.
The project is monitored over time and open ended. There is no precise way
to determine the end point.
Why did I do this?...
There's a map of what's been found -- 27 of the 100 pieces, so far. Finders
drag an X to the spot on the map where they found the objects, and leave a
little note that displays when your mouse rolls over the X.
This would be wonderful adventure if it were done here in The Ocean State.
100 Pieces is a lovely site, made not with Flash but with javascript, so
I was able to show you the photo above. Thanks to jenett for
the link.
Related: Flickr has switched from Flash to DHTML for display purposes
on photo pages, so you can now right-click an image and save it.
Link
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Firefox Tip: Multiple
Home Pages: From "Dylan's blog" at MBoffin.com,
I just figured out that you can have multiple home pages in Firefox. As
with all browsers, you can set a page to be the page that loads when you
first load the browser. I just figured out that you can set Firefox to load
several pages, each one in a tab when you start up.
Go into the Options, then the General section, and then to the text box
to choose a home page. Type the web addresses of the pages you want to load
when you start Firefox (or click the Home button), each separated by a |
character (Shift-Backslash). For instance, to set MBoffin.com and Google
as my home pages, I would type:
http://mboffin.com|http://google.com
This would load these two pages, in that order, in tabs when I start Firefox
or click the Home button.
Link
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Happy
birthday, Bob: Dylan is 64 today, but the photo at right is from '63
(AP).
Expecting Rain deals
the headlines and tunes:
In hometown Hibbing, Minn., there's now a Dylan Drive. (photo)
The Wallflowers are on Letterman tonight - (CBS)
The Fourth Annual Bob Dylan Birthday Bash On Radio SNHU
Radio SNHU is pleased to announce that its resident Dylanologist Dave Cox
will be hosting his Fourth Annual Bob Dylan Birthday Bash on Tuesday, May
24, from 7 to 10 pm eastern standard time. As usual, he will be playing an
assortment of classics, rarities and well chosen live tracks from his collection
of over 400 Dylan compact discs. Featured material will include songs from
the March/April tour of the USA and the sing-a-long songs from last summer.
For a partial list of the playlist, click
this. There will be free stuff to win and no commercials, so don’t
miss it! You can email questions or requests to d.cox@snhu.edu
Related: In
the spirit of the Dylan of my youth, here's a video clip of Bright Eyes --
that's Conor Oberst at right -- on Jay Leno doing, "When
the President Talks to God." It is a free download at the iTunes music
store.
(You may also download the song at Saddle
Creek, Bright Eyes' indie label, see the clip there, and comment, too.)
Dylan was disturbing once, too.
Link
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Reincarnation press: Jason Fry of the The Wall Street
Journal reports (Bloggers
Take Center Stage, Publishers Discuss Changes In Newspaper Business) that
Washington Post CEO Donald Graham, speaking at WSJ's "D:
All Things Digital" conference, said,
In the blogging world, there's "one person who's Ben Franklin and
100,000 people who think they're Ben Franklin."
(Yeah, I'm Ben, of course. Who are the rest of you and what do you want?)
In the same story, Mena Trott (co-founder of Six Apart, which created the
TypePad service and Movable Type software) offered this "advice for established
media: ...start small and go slow in adapting to the blogging world: For example,
let readers join the conversation in areas away from politics that are of interest
to them, such as dining."
Mena, that's a bulletin board, and nearly every news site already has them.
The core of blogging is not the optional discussion. (Mena's own blogs, Not
a Dollarshort and, at SixApart, Mena's
Corner, do not have comments enabled.)
WSJ pointer via Romensko,
whom Jeff Jarvis is dissing because
Romenesko doesn't consider himself a blogger. (A content management system
with permalinks dropped on him, but he's still doing what he always did, even
before Poynter picked
him up, back when his site was called Media
Gossip (The link goes to the earliest Romenesko collected by the Internet
Archive, Oct. 4, 1999.)
Meanwhile, Jarvis himself has quit
his job as president of Advance
Net for a passel of other ventures, including advising the New York Times
about how to mobilize the more than 475 "Guides" of About.com,
which the Times bought in February for $410 million. Jarvis:
About.com can be a platform for distributed media and I'm eager to explore
all the great things that will come of that. But first, I'm looking forward
to working with the amazing army of About guides, who have created a great
resource of content and service online. I'm doing this part-time, as a consultant,
so I'll be free to continue blogging and doing other things...
Link
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Two
hurt in mock light sabre duel: BBC. "Two Star Wars fans
are in a critical condition in hospital after apparently trying to make
light sabres by filling fluorescent light tubes with petrol." The
force will not be with you if you don't think for yourself.
Link
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May 23, 2005, 7:15 p.m.-- Last
week's weblog
The
Choirboy: Lawrence Lessig and John Hardwicke Fight Sexual Abuse and
the American Boychoir School. New York Metro details a case far different
from what Stanford
Law professor Lessig, founder of Creative
Commons, is known for.
...During
his work on the case, Lessig has been asked more than once by the press
if he had experiences at the school similar to Hardwicke’s. And Lessig
has replied, “My experiences aren’t what’s at issue here.
What’s at issue is what happened to John Hardwicke.”
The answer is appropriate, politic—but it’s not entirely true.
For Lessig has told me that he too was abused at the Boychoir School, and
by the same music director that Hardwicke claims was one of his abusers.
Lessig is by nature a shy, intensely private person. The fact of his abuse
is known to almost no one: not the reporters covering the case, not the
supreme-court justices. The fact of his abuse isn’t even known to
Larry Lessig’s parents.
In taking this case, however, Lessig has cast aside his caution about
a secret that haunts him still. And while his passion about his client’s
cause is real and visceral, Hardwicke isn’t the only plaintiff here.
Lessig is also litigating on behalf of the child he once was....
There are insights into abusers, as well:
...One evening near the end of Lessig’s final year at the school,
he went with Hanson for a walk around the grounds. As darkness descended
on Albemarle, Lessig finally, tentatively, gave voice to his gathering
misgivings about Hanson’s behavior.
“Is this really right? Should you really be doing this?” Lessig
asked.
“You have to understand,” Hanson replied, “this is essential
to producing a great boychoir.” By sexualizing the students, he explained,
he was transforming them from innocents into more complicated creatures,
enabling them to render choral music in all its sublime passion. “It’s
what all great boychoirs do,” Hanson said....
This is more than worth reading. For parents of younger children, most especially.
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Public radio when you want it: Even if you don't
own an iPod, Public
Radio feeds makes a nice index. You can always just download the mp3
and listen to it through your computer speakers.
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The
picture of everything by Howard Hallis is an illustration so
dense that clicking any section leads to more detail to click. The site
is full of fun links, and some details, such as the cartoon of Hallis
himself, below. ("Howard Hallis: Wrong Dimension Boy" is a
cartoon worth pondering.)
...I decided to try and draw as many super heroes as I could in one picture.
Soon
I began to think of super heroes that were cartoon characters, such as
Blue Falcon and Dynomutt and Hong Kong Phooey. If I started drawing cartoon
characters, why not add all the cartoons I could think of as well? And
aren't The Beatles cartoons? Then why not all the rock stars?! And movie
stars! And space ships, fantasy buildings, historical figures and places!
And why not all the religious figures and iconography? Think about all
the famous vehicles from movies and TV, you have to put those in... And
video game characters!
Soon I had all the modern and ancient wonders of the world, 157 Pokemon,
reproductions of Alex Grey, MC Escher and other famous artists works (not
easy to draw, let me tell you!), and as many space ships, religious figures,
cartoon characters, historical figures and places, imaginary buildings,
super heroes, famous vehicles, movie stars, rock stars, corporate logos,
flags of the world, and robots that I could think of in one giant picture.
I even included my friends and family in there for good measure. You can't
leave them out, now can you?
The picture was done on 8.5 by 11 inch pieces of regular typing paper,
held together by scotch tape and separated into four massive sections.
These sections were each approximately 76.5 inches in width and 44 inches
in length, bringing the completed picture to 76.5 by 176 inches. The drawing
was done with colored pencils and Sharpies. The original is now framed
in 4 sections....
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Supermodels:
Where are they now? The Scotsman does thumbnail sketches of Linda
Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Lauren Hutton, Beverley Johnson, Christy
Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Jerry Hall, Imam and more.
Here's "Twiggy," back
when she was the toast of the Carnaby Street 'Mod' fashion scene:
Twiggy, real name Lesley Hornby (not a good start for a supermodel), became
the "Face of ’66" aged 16, when she first appeared in the
Daily Express. She was ahead of her time in achieving international fame
beyond the fashion merry-go-round, and, at 55, with unglittering forays
into acting behind her, is married to Leigh Lawson and again has become
a role model for her generation as the face of the charity Age
Concern. "Maturity and confidence have a unique beauty of their
own," she has said.
Here's Twiggy Lawson's
site today.
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Oops: The link to Summer
Guide on last Friday's blog had a typo in it, as I learned Saturday
night from a reader I ran into at the annual Dylan Night gathering. Apologies
to all for sending you somewhere you really didn't want to go, and thanks
to readers who emailed about it, too.
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Roadcasting: "Roadcasting
is a system that allows anyone to have their own radio station, broadcasted
among cars in an ad-hoc network. It plays the songs that people want to hear
and it transforms car radio into an interactive medium."
Rogert Lowenstein in Sunday's NY Times: Turn
on, tune in, drop out and start the computer revolution, a look at
John Markoff's account of the early years of the computer era in What
the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer.
via J.D. Lasica
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'Digital postcards for the people by the people...': At delivr.net, you
may use Flickr photos
(including your own) to send digitalpostcards.
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Blogger's last post fingers his slayer: Here's Simon
Ng's last entry. Stories here, here and here.
The comments section became a condolence book, with hundreds of comments.
R.I.P., Simon Ng.
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