Subterranean Homepage News

Fair and balanced, too!

January 9, 2004, 6:20 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

Random Pats playoff predictions: My colleague Jack Perry, who's writing the Patriots blog here, leads withs, "An informal survey of national pundits shows that seven expect the Patriots to win while five favor the Titans. ..."

That inspired me. I asked the first 11 people I ran into after that for their predictions. One wondered who was playing (Tennessee!) and two said, "I don't know."

Here are the rest of the random newsroom pundits' predictions:

Mimi Burkhardt: Pats 17-14
Scott MacKay: Pats 27-24
Kevin McNamara: Pats 17-14
M. Charles Bakst: Pats 14-3
Bill Reynolds: Pats 10-6
Ken Hamwey: Titans 16-14
Sean Polay: Pats 13-10
Jack Perry: Pats 17-13

The "Who's playing?" was Kathy Devault.
The "I don't know"s were Art Martone and Joel Rawson.

I'll say Pats 21-7. But I don't know either.

Far more discussion centers on whether people with tickets will actually use them or not. We Southern New Englanders don't sit outside when the wind chill makes 5 degree-weather feel like 20 below zero. (We leave that to the northern tier folks.)

If you're tired of uninformed opinion, try some sheer gossip: AbsoluteBrady.com is a fan site for the Pats quarterback that includes a sightings page called "Tom moments" ("One fan gave him a birthday card, and shoved a piece of paper at him that already had rookie center Dan Koppen's autograph on it. Misunderstanding, he walked away with that, too. She's still thrilled.) a gallery and much, much more.
Link to this item | Comment

Jam Bands: More free, legal mp3s on the Web. Reader Bill Marsland writes,

Are you aware of the website for Jam Bands called Nugs.net.
This site has free live streams for lots of concerts from the likes of The Dead and the Grateful Dead (44 concerts) as well as Phish (51 concerts), Trey (19) and Widespread Panic (32).

They also feature several concerts for downloading, either by individual song or the entire concert, again for free. These concerts change usually monthly or so. This months list includes The Dead and WSP's 12/31/03 concerts as well as Dave Matthews 12/16/03 Boston concert and lot's more.

They have experienced a huge increase in access over the last year and now appear to be introducing a pay per download site as well as this free location.

Here's the concert list.

Please keep the tips coming. Among us all, we can create a giant listing of free mp3 sites. I'll make a blogroll section for these sites next week.
Link to this item | Comment

Fun: From zefrank.com, a virtual toy. I spent hours as a child with a protractor making circles and filling them with geometric "petals." This does that, then shows you your creation as a solid, rotating in 2-D or in 3-D. Obviously, words aren't too useful in explaining this. Just go there and play.

(And thanks to my colleague Mike Foran for passing the link along.)
Link to this item | Comment

Fashion sense? The N.Y. Times homepage this morning led with this AP photo:

Seeking Women's Votes: Gen. Wesley K. Clark has replaced his navy blue suit with an argyle sweater in an attempt to increase his support among women.

This isn't a substantive critique, but a general doesn't become warm and fuzzy by donning a sweater that's warm and fuzzy. There's some strange logic at work here.

The story includes equally baffling nonsequiturs from both Clark and an elected female supporter:

But even General Clark acknowledges he has a problem to overcome with women. "I think there's an impression that the armed forces is a male-dominated, hierarchical, authoritarian institution," he said in an interview on Thursday. "And I think they have to get to know me."

While we're wondering if it's an impression, the truth, or any different from the male-dominated, hierarchical, authoritarian institution Clark is running for, along comes Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton of Wisconsin, who was traveling with the general this week:

"I didn't want to be party to the election of one more defensive, arrogant male. What I found was that it's part of his nature to understand the lives of women."

I have no idea what that last sentence means. And that sweater wasn't even sexy in the '50s, when last spotted on a living male. I'm baffled.
Link to this item | Comment

"Pull" technology: The Spokane, Wash., Spokesman-Review has a new Ask the Editors blog -- a great idea. One of the questions asked -- and answered by Steve Smith, the newspaper's top editor -- has been floating around the conservative blogs: Why don't you report progress in Iraq? Here's the actual post:

Iraq coverage: trying to separate truth from political spin

Question: I think it is appropriate that you give considerable coverage to the service men and women who have lost their lives in Iraq. However, conspicuously missing is any significant coverage of the substantial progress that is being made daily in Iraq, including things such as schools reopening and admitting both girls and boys, hospitals reopening and being made better than ever, sanitary water supplies and sewers being brought up to date and improved for the first time in 20 years, etc.

To intentionally ignore the progress being made at the cost of American lives is to suggest that they died in vain and made no difference in the lives and freedom of the Iraqi people. Why do you exclude stories of progress in Iraq from your daily news coverage? (These stories are available from national and international news wires and sources.) -- Scott Schmidtman, Spokane

Answer: We don't exclude stories about progress being made in Iraq. Those stories appear from time to time. And if they don't make Page 1 it's because we have pledged to report military fatalities on the front page whenever possible lest we forget the sacrifices of our service men and women.

I think the real issue is trying to separate the truth of events on the ground from political spin. There have been some steps forward in the war zone, and I believe we have reported those, relying on the respected national and international wire services and syndicates with reporters in place. But comprehensive reading of dispatches from Iraq will tell you the situation is far more complex and even desperate than the writer's description. We would not be serving our readers, particularly those in the services or those connected to them, if we replaced fact with spin. -- Steve Smith, editor

Link to this item | Comment

I'm off to stock up for a weekend of football and family. Enjoy the games, and stay warm.

January 8, 2004, 7:22 p.m.

More free, legal mp3s on the Web: After reading Tuesday's pointer to Hundreds of songs are still available, free and legal, on the Web, Jeremy Schlosberg emailed about his site, Fingertips, which, he writes,

...exists to do just that--point people to high-quality free and legal music online...

...Fingertips is decidedly idiosyncratic -- a web site that rejects the common online approach that “more is better.” Rather, Fingertips is a discerning resource that, in its own way, harkens back to the heyday of progressive FM radio -- a time when music fans could discover all kinds of marvelous music through the idiosyncratic taste and expert guidance of individual disc jockeys.

Fingertips is free, of course, and I more than appreciate Schlosberg's extensive descriptions of the songs. Here's a recent sample from "This week's finds":

"Dirty Diesel" - Paul Westerberg
It's a train song, and come to think of it, it makes perfect sense. Having (barely) survived his rough-and-tumble days leading the Replacements, Westerberg has emerged against the odds as a traditionalist, of the Keith Richards school, holding down his own particular, goofy corner of the rock'n'roll fort. And there sure does seem to be something endlessly inspiring about trains to the traditionalists of the world. The song itself is a bluesy chugger, not all that earthshaking, but well worth hearing for Westerberg's casually brilliant guitar work, and that endearing voice of his.

This is a keeper.

More: My own labor of love, of course, is the projo.com mp3 site for Rhode Island-area bands, offering each a page for tunes, a photo, a descriptive blurb, and a place to enter their own upcoming gigs. (It's all free, although projo.com requires that you complete a free registration to get to the pages.) Every Monday, the projo homepage features one band at random, with its photo and mp3 links right on our cover; all bands that have signed up or added new songs to their pages in the past week are also linked.

We also crosslink our gig listings from the paper to the bands' pages. After nearly four years, there are about 250 bands on there now! (Here's the same list with thumbnail photos of the bands.) If you lose these links, they're always on our Music cover.

We're hoping to offer them in a virtual jukebox here by spring.

(Note to far-flung bands: Please don't sign up if you're not from here or playing here. We just don't have the space to host it all!)

We offer the same exposure to artists: The Rhode Island Collection. Artists -- even those with Rhode Island roots who are now making it in New York -- may upload their work. The links can always be found on our Arts cover.
Link to this item | Comment

Factcheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. Here's how it describes its mission:

We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit, "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.

The latest claims under its lens are the Democratic Presidential candidates' statements during Sunday's debate in Iowa.
Link to this item | Comment

Networking for shy people is a passel of links for the self-conscious. This -- courtesy of Rebecca Blood -- from Curt Rosengren's blog, The Occupational Adventure.
Link to this item | Comment

Tech Firms Defend Moving Jobs Overseas: From AP (and here's a link to the Slashdot pointer and the comments that follow):

"There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore," Carly Fiorina, chief executive for Hewlett-Packard Co., said Wednesday. "We have to compete for jobs." ...

...Even as technology companies lobby against limits on offshore employment, they are urging the Bush administration to approve new tax credits on research and development spending, spend more on university research on physical science and adjust tax depreciation schedules for technology purchases. They said they also want improvements in education, especially in elementary through high schools.

"The problem is not a lack of highly educated workers," said Scott Kirwin, founder of the Information Technology Professionals Association of America. "The problem is a lack of highly educated workers willing to work for the minimum wage or lower in the U.S. Costs are driving outsourcing, not the quality of American schools."

Related: TechsUnite.org, "exploring and organizing around issues affecting IT workers across the United States."
Link to this item | Comment

'Paper Tiger': Sportswriting When It Roared: From the Washington Post, a review that sings. The book itself -- by Stanley Woodward -- is out of print. Here's a snip:

His poor eyesight kept him out of military service during World War I, but Woodward managed to sign on with the merchant marine, which took him to "all the ports of France between Le Havre and Bordeaux," taught him "to splice and to tie a rolling hitch and a bowline-in-a-bight," and left him longing for sea duty at war's end. But his mother had liked the letters he'd written from overseas and finagled a position for him on the Worcester Gazette. He never looked back: "Never, from that time until I retired on April 1, 1962, was I willfully out of the newspaper business." He came under the tutelage of a city editor named Nick Skerrett whose "credo" was right out of "Front Page":

"A man who gets what he is sent for is a reporter. A man who gets what he is sent for and something more is a good reporter. A man who does not get what he is sent for is a goddamned nuisance and will be fired."

Back to high school: I'm a night person, so speaking at 8:30 a.m. was a shock to my system (see below), and I ad-libbed a lot until the inevitable technical glitch got fixed. Then I showed pages that demonstrate some of what I do at projo.com (it's a careers series) and some high school websites that hint at what the students might create.

The girls were great -- responsive, questioning. I hope I turned some minds on. When I was a teenager, some key adults flipped my switches (including some authors and artists whose work made a huge difference). I owe them bigtime, and going back to speak to the young women who are there now was an attempt to repay some of that debt.

The faculty and staff I met were very cool, warm people. They seem enthusiastic about getting the girls publishing on the web, and I hope we'll see some student work online soon. (And maybe some faculty blogs!)

Yes, you can go back....
Link to this item | Comment

January 7, 2004, 6:50 p.m.

Put your high school's newspaper on the web: I'm to speak Thursday morning to 9th- and 10th-graders at Bay View (the high school where I was once a 9th- and 10th-grader, too) about communications as a career.

Naturally, I'm going to urge them to publish their paper, The Bengal Beat, online. (When it was called The Bay Viewer, it was my first editing gig.)

So it was exciting to learn that ASNE (The American Society of Newspaper Editors) has a program to help schools do this affordably: highschooljournalism.org.

I emailed the project's director, Diana Mitsu Klos, to check out the program. Here's what she wrote:

More than 200 high school newspapers have signed up to be part of www.my.highschooljournalism.org, and we publish a weekly National Edition highlighting the best work of student newspapers around the country.

There is a one-time application fee of $25. That's it. There are no annual fees. And in return for the $25, ASNE sends the school an AP Stylebook, a legal guide to scholastic journalism and a primer for principals on why young people should be able to practice journalism freely!

An application form can be downloaded from the site. The system is easy to use...cut and paste content from PC or MAC platforms. No HTML needed.

In Rhode Island, only Cumberland High School has taken ASNE up on the offer. I hope that will change soon.
Link to this item | Comment

Rotten eggs for Easterbrook! NFL.com's Tuesday Morning Quarterback columnist Gregg Easterbrook has the temerity to write,

Break Up the Patriots

As if the 12-consecutive-victories, home-field-advantage Flying Elvii aren't enough -- bear in mind, they hold two first-round picks in the 2004 NFL Draft.

Is that what a team gets for becoming what every other team is trying to be? ("There's nothing at the top of the ladder, son... ")

Related: Columbia Journalism Review details the flap that led Easterbrook to relocate from espn.com to nfl.com. It's not about football. Here's this blog's coverage of the flap Oct. 21.

Better related: My colleague Jack Perry is doing a Patriots blog here in the stretch. We hope it will be a long stretch, of course. We've updated our annual Super Bowl recipes page, and put it up early with a "Patriots Playoff Party recipes" label, for those who'll be gathering this weekend. If all goes well, we'll rename it Patriots Super Bowl recipes eventually. But that's not waiting in the wings; we'll make it fresh if the Pats make it through the eliminations.

With temperatures Saturday night in Foxboro predicted to be in the single digits, it may come down to whose fingers freeze first.
Link to this item | Comment

Righteous Brother died of cocaine-induced heart attack, autopsy says: From WWMT, Channel 3 in Kalamazoo, Mich.

(It doesn't look as if their stories are archived, and this one is well down in the page now, so here's the whole thing.)

By Mark Albert News 3 Reporter
January 6, 2004 - 9:26AM

KALAMAZOO (NEWS 3) - Singer Bobby Hatfield, half of the Righteous Brothers duo, died in Kalamazoo when cocaine strained his already-partially clogged arteries, triggering a fatal heart attack, according to the final autopsy report obtained Monday by News 3.

The six-page forensic report also indicates that neither Hatfield's family nor friends apparently knew about the heart disease that eventually led to his death on Nov. 5, 2003.

"I'm sorry to hear it," commented the group's longtime agent, Rob Heller of the William Morris Agency in Beverly Hills, California when reached by News 3 Monday night. "It's the first I'm hearing of it.”

News 3 requested the autopsy from the Kalamazoo county Medical Examiner's office in November under the Freedom of Information Act. Officials said they waited until Hatfield's wife, Linda, could be notified, before releasing the report.

Linda Hatfield's son, Kalin, told Orange County Register reporter Richard Chang that his mother had suffered several strokes since learning of the news Dec. 27 and was hospitalized at Hoag hospital in Newport Beach, California. She was scheduled to be released Tuesday, after her condition improved, though her speech is still slurred, according to Kalin Hatfield.

The Orange County Register newspaper is owned by Freedom Communications, which also owns WWMT-TV, News 3.
A fatal combination

The autopsy on Bobby Hatfield, 63, details what medical examiners describe as a "sudden, unexpected death." The official cause is "acute cocaine toxicity.”

Dr. Patricia Newhouse, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy, notes that "per friends and family, decedent had no known medical issues." But the autopsy showed there was an advancing and threatening cardiovascular disease, which had already blocked up to 95% of the left anterior descending coronary artery, a key source of blood and oxygen for the heart.

Dr. Richard Tooker, chief medical examiner for Kalamazoo County, told News 3 that cocaine along with the pre-existing heart condition would be a "fatal combination." Dr. Tooker notes that, "cocaine alone probably would not have been fatal.”

A patient with Hatfield's heart diagnosis, Dr. Tooker reasoned, would probably need a coronary artery bypass immediately. The toxicology tests were performed at Sparrow Regional Laboratories in Lansing. Also found in Hatfield's system was the sleeping aid, "Ambien" and some caffeine, along with other prescription substances.

Investigation

Hatfield's body was found in his room at the Radisson Hotel in Kalamazoo Nov. 5, just minutes before he was scheduled to perform at Miller Auditorium nearby. Officers from the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety had to force their way into Hatfield's room, where they found the singer deceased.

Monday, KDPS chief Dan Weston told News 3 that there is no investigation underway as to where Hatfield obtained the cocaine. Nor, Chief Weston said, does he intend to launch one. "It is not productive to do so," he said, explaining that if no drugs or evidence are left at the scene, there is little information for investigators to go on.

The medical examiner's report lists the manner of death as an accident. There are no other known investigations into Bobby Hatfield's death.

For more

Link to this item | Comment

Wesley Clark meets the bloggers: Democratic Presidential candidate Wesley Clark is chatting live right now with left-leaning bloggers on this page, where I hope it will all be archived for you to see. (Later note: It's there, but acting strangely in my browser. If you want to read the whole thing, define it all [Ctrl-A] as soon as you get to the page, and copy it to a text editor.) Current samples:

<Clark04.com> - talkleft (Jeralyn Merritt, "TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime") asks: You have criticized the Patriot Act. Which portions of the Patriot Act would you ask Congress to repeal and why? As President, how will you protect our civil liberties while trying to ensure our safety?
< Wes Clark> - I will suspend the portions of the Patriot Act that have to do with search and seizure law, and we'll go back to old way with probable cause and judges and warrants, and then we'll take the whole act back to the Congress for legislative review. We will have all the authority we need to protect the country from terrorists, but you can't win the war on terror by giving up the very freedoms we're fighting to protect. Wes

<Clark04.com> - Kevin K. (Kevin Kraynick, "Tooney Bin") asks, "What's your favorite salad dressing?"
< Wes Clark> - I like balsamiac vinegarette...and creamy parmesan. Wes

The chat seems to have lasted only a half-hour -- not long when you're typing, not talking. At 5:30 Clark typed,

<Wes Clark> - Thanks to alll of you who joined me...we're off to another meeting. Come to our web site and see our tax calculator and further updates.

Link to this item | Comment

Interesting interview with cyberpunk Bruce Sterling at reason. Here's a snippet:

reason: Nowadays the political lines seem increasingly blurry, but there were periods in the 20th century when it seemed you could draw some lines.

Sterling: Right now, the Republicans are the party of reckless spending, and the Democrats are the party of responsibility and the balanced budget.

reason: Not many of us saw that coming.

Sterling: In the 17th century, the guys with short hair were the radicals and the guys with long hair were the royalists. The signifiers move, and the issues move from place to place, but there are certain psychological aspects to human social organization that -- I wouldn’t call them timeless, but they are commonalities.

I also like to experiment with them. I like to experiment with the media. I’d like to see what people can do with the Internet that they cannot do on paper. And there are certain things one can do that are not worth doing. Like I can set up a discussion group that’s open to everybody! And that is not worth doing. It’s sort of proven that it immediately turns into a cesspool because it’s badly designed.

Link to this item | Comment

Long-Term Coffee Consumption Significantly Reduces Type 2 Diabetes Risk, says the Harvard School of Public Health.

Boston, MA— A study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital has found that participants who regularly drank coffee significantly reduced the risk of onset of type 2 diabetes, compared to non-coffee drinking participants. The findings appear in the January 6, 2004 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

More than 125,000 study participants who were free of diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease at the start of the study were selected from the on-going Health Professionals Follow-up Study and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital-based Nurses Health Study. Some 41,934 men were tracked from 1986 to 1998 and 84,276 women from1980 to 1998 via food frequency questionnaires every two to four years to assess their intake of both regular and decaffeinated coffee.

Link to this item | Comment

January 6, 2004, 6:56 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

Hundreds of songs are still available, free and legal, on the Web: Here are links to many of them:

... Strewn across the Internet, free, legal MP3 downloads can still be found. They are tucked away on bands' Web sites as promotional calling cards, handed out on Amazon.com like a dish of penny candy at the sales counter, posted as free samples by independent record labels, and included on a handful of free sites, such as Bay Area-based Epitonic.

Some tasty treats lurk out there -- R.E.M. remixes unavailable anywhere else, some fine, obscure Tom Waits tracks, early compositions by Green Day and the Donnas, new music by Radiohead, Beck, White Stripes. The hip, tech savvy bands seem to like having a promotional MP3 floating around.

Following the lead of the Grateful Dead, many jam bands allow MP3 downloads on noncommercial sites. Mostly fans break up entire concerts into semimanageable files, but some go to the length of cutting the files into individual songs and post the files that way.

The Chronicle pop music team scoured the Internet for just such free downloads and this what we found. Help yourself.

Link to this item | Comment

Thunderbird Model J: Did the 'J-Bird' cost a CEO his job? From Auto Week,

Confidential AutoWeek sources embedded deep within Ford Motor Co.’s design department last week revealed a production prototype that may have hastened the 2001 departure of former CEO Jac Nasser. At the time, seasoned industry observers attributed his departure to falling profits and the Firestone tire unpleasantness. The real reason may have been a six-wheel pink Thunderbird.

Codenamed “Flying Clap” (Birds fly, thunder claps. Get it?), the sports-luxury-touring car featured three wheels on each of its two sides and would have been marketed as the Thunderbird Model J or the “J-Bird,” say our moles. ...

It's way wierder than Springsteen's pink Cadillac.
Link to this item | Comment

Greenback slides on lack of Fed worries: (Greenspan's) remarks back speculation rates will not rise. From Peter Morton, Washington Bureau Chief, in today's National Post of Canada:

WASHINGTON - The U.S. dollar fell again yesterday in the wake of comments from a U.S. Federal Reserve governor that there is no dollar crisis, another hint the White House is quietly pushing for a weaker currency.

Ben Bernanke, a Fed governor, insisted the risk of a weakened U.S. dollar is "quite low."

"Looking at movements of the dollar against a single currency can be misleading about overall trends,'' he said in a speech to the American Economic Association in San Diego, referring to the slide against the euro.

"For now, I believe that the Federal Reserve has the luxury of being patient," he added, noting the U.S. dollar's decline is still not putting any inflation pressures on the U.S. economy even though imported goods will soon be more expensive.

Although the administration officially supports its strong U.S. dollar policy, there is widespread speculation in currency markets that Mr. Bush wants to see a weaker dollar to make it easier for U.S. exporters to sell abroad.

Meanwhile, our buying power in Europe is sinking, as this Travel Q&A from Sunday's Washington Post indicates:

...With the Euro hitting all time highs every day I wonder if currency rates are having much effect on the travel industry. Are people still going to Europe and just gritting their teeth as they buy their Euros or are people starting to avoid travel to Europe and elsewhere because it's so much less affordable? How worried is the travel/tourism industry about our decreased buying power?

The Flight Crew: Arl, we don't have any hard stats on this but it's our gut feeling that the dollar's performance IS beginning to affect travel to Europe. We hear this anecdotally, in questions such as this, and from friends and colleagues as well. And all indications are that the dollar is only going to do worse. For our part, we're researching a special issue on non-Euro destinations. Any nominations? -- KC

Link to this item | Comment

Waiting to inhale: The Times finds the smoking light lit in lots of bars, late at night when only the regulars are around, despite the mayor's smoking ban. Smokeasies, you might call them.
Link to this item | Comment

Fetish guitars is an Italian site with great photos.

Here's its creator's astonishing guitar collection.

Few, if any, of them -- including the Meazzi OldJazz at right -- seem to hail from the U.S.A.

Is there a copy editor lurking inside you? You might want to help the all-volunteer Distributed Proofreaders put more free texts online for Project Gutenberg:

The first step to take to help us out would be to register to be a new proofreader... After you register be sure to read over both the email you receive as well as FAQ Central which provides helpful resources on how to proofread. FAQ Central can be reached here or by clicking 'Help' at the top of any screen. After you have registered & read through some of the intro documents choose an interesting-looking book from our Current Projects and try proofreading a page or two.

Remember that there is no commitment expected on this site. Proofread as often or as seldom as you like, and as many or as few pages as you like. We encourage people to do 'a page a day', but it's entirely up to you! We hope you will join us in our mission of 'preserving the literary history of the world in a freely available form for everyone to use'.

Link to this item | Comment

"Beyond The Beat Generation archives and publishes the entire, long forgotten 'wild' musical gems out of the great years of the sixties (1965-1969) to a bright audience by using today's technology as we call 'Stream Radio'.

"We broadcast 24 hours non-stop through the Internet the music formerly known as: Hippie music, Underground, 60's punk, Flower Power, Mod, Free-Form-Freak-out, Garage music, Psychedelia or Teen Beat, the weirdest, the worst, the most powerful and nastiest ever recorded."

Shoutcast stream, instructions provided. Doesn't work through the firewall here, or maybe it's the time of day.
Link to this item | Comment

In Medical Mystery, A Hint of Smallpox: Fascinating story in the Washington Post about antique scabs found in a book, and the still-potent smallpox they might harbor:

Librarian Susanne Caro was leafing through an 1888 book on Civil War medicine when she spied a small, yellowed envelope tucked between the pages. Freeing it, she read the inscription "scabs from vaccination of W.B. Yarrington's children" in the corner, with the signature "Dr. W.D. Kelly," the book's author.

Embarking on some quick research, the 23-year-old Santa Fe, N.M., woman soon decided not to open the envelope. "The only thing I could find connected with it," she said, "was smallpox."

After a cross-country relay involving the FBI, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick and the District's Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the envelope rests in a freezer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, awaiting a battery of tests.

Researchers believe the scabs found in March are either from smallpox vaccine patients or from victims, whose scabs were used in an early inoculation procedure. At the very least, inoculation scabs would shed light on the historic development of American vaccines for smallpox, which though eradicated a generation ago has returned to public consciousness as a potentially devastating weapon for bioterrorists.

There's also a slim chance, researchers say, that the scabs could yield live smallpox virus -- believed to reside in only two laboratories in the world -- and provide valuable information on the deadly plague.

Link to this item | Comment

Despite Best Efforts, Doughnut Makers Must Fry, Fry Again: Low-Fat Version of the Treat Proves Hard to Roll Out; Mr. Ligon Lands in Hole. Those wags on the headline desk at the Wall Street Journal are at it again. This is a bizarre story (NO reg. req.) about a food exec who went to jail for lying about the fat content of his firm's low-fat doughnuts. (That's donuts, to you.)

Robert Ligon, a 68-year-old health-food executive, is scheduled to begin serving 15 months in a federal prison Tuesday. His crime: willfully mislabeling doughnuts as low-fat.

Exhibit A: The label on his company's "carob coated" doughnut said it had three grams of fat and 135 calories. But an analysis by the Food and Drug Administration showed that the doughnut, glazed with chocolate, contained a sinfully indulgent 18 grams of fat and 530 calories.

Mr. Ligon's three-year-long nationwide doughnut caper -- which involved selling mislabeled doughnuts, cinnamon rolls and cookies to diet centers -- began to crumble when customers complained to the FDA about how tasty his products were. ...

There's fascinating doughnut chemistry, and the shocking news that Ligon is not the first to land in the pokey for this crime, before we get to the specifics:

The doughnut ring of Mr. Ligon, a former weight-loss-center franchisee, began in 1995, the FDA says. That's when he started a weight-loss product company, Nutrisource Inc., to sell protein shakes, nutritional bars and baked goods to diet centers. According to Rudy Hejny, the FDA agent in charge of the investigation, Mr. Ligon bought full-fat doughnuts from Cloverhill Bakery, a Chicago company, and repackaged them as diet doughnuts. It was a lucrative operation: Mr. Ligon would buy doughnuts for 25 cents to 33 cents each and then resell the mislabeled versions for a dollar each.

Customer complaints to the FDA started rolling in, questioning whether these were in fact low-fat doughnuts. So did one from a packaging company Mr. Ligon hired to label and distribute the doughnuts. Key evidence: One of its employees gained weight after eating Mr. Ligon's doughnuts.

Link to this item | Comment

Alter Ego: What if you could live your life over again? (If Only," mutters Judy Watt, on whose blog I spotted this.)

This is a quiz. You answer a few questions about yourself and your attitudes, then you're "born" with an infant's choices.

I am still a toddler (in the game!), so I can't tell you much, but I did smile at grandma; the game suggests that was a good move because I'm now her favorite grandchild, which will come in handy later in the game (and in life). I have also avoided death by poisoning, so I have some survival skills.

The best clues, besides that you can start over, or return to the game later at the point you left it, come from the "Known bugs" section:

The game may not always be correctly keeping track of children's names if you have more than one. Weddings are far far too likely to go disasterously. It's possible to go to senior prom but not be done with high school. The game may forget if your parents die or get divorced.

Link to this item | Comment

How I Met and Dated Miss Emily Dickinson: An Adventure on eBay by Philip F. Gura at Common-place.org:

This is the story of how I stumbled on something rare almost beyond comprehension. On April 12, 2000, I purchased in an eBay online auction what may be the second known photograph of Emily Dickinson. In the last ten seconds of the eBay auction I placed a very high maximum bid on what was called a "Vintage Emily Dickinson Albumen Photo" and won the item far below that amount. But the story had only begun. Over the next six months I experienced what it really meant to possess, and be possessed by, a picture that may show Emily Dickinson at the height of her creative powers.

Link to this item | Comment

My $42.00 hour at a T-Mobile Hotspot Starbucks: "Parse that sign" is a lesson Anne P. Mitchell learned the hard way -- and she's a lawyer. From Anne's bon mots, rants & more,

As any sentient being in the United States is aware by now, Starbucks has partnered with T-Mobile to offer wireless "hotspots" in most of the Starbucks throughout the United States.

They offer 3 different plans, all of for which you can sign up on the (hot)spot: $29.95 per month for unlimited access, or one of two "pay as you go" plans - either the $9.95 for a 24 hour "day pass", or the ".10 cents per minute with a 60 minute minimum" pass.

Be *very* careful! Don't be lulled into thinking that if you use the .10 cents per minute pass judiciously, such as by logging in, grabbing email, and logging out, you can keep your usage low, incurring only the minimum $6.00 fee if you are quick and careful.

The 60 minute minimum is *per* log in. If you log in, grab email, and log out, you will have incurred a $6.00 charge. When you check your email again a half hour later, you will incur an additional $6.00 charge, and so on.

Link to this item | Comment

January 5, 2004, 6:34 p.m.

Dream come true

7-year-old gets stuck in stuffed animal game machine: A 7-year-old boy watches as firefighters try to figure out how to get him out of a Sheboygan, Wisc., supermarket's stuffed animal game machine after he managed to crawl into the game while his father talked on a pay phone three feet away Saturday.

Willie Nelson sings for peace, Kucinich: By John Nichols in The Nation. Perhaps more interesting, Doug Moe of the Wisconsin Capital Times recalls Chet Flippo's attack on the Dixie Chicks. (Flippo is editorial director of Country Music Television):

Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines had recently told a London audience the following: "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."

Flippo wrote a harshly critical column on the CMT Web site: "Maines seems afflicted with chronic foot-in-mouth disease. ... She could not have made a stupider mistake. ... Country music fans are largely conservative and patriotic - as is well-known - and the U.S. was only days away from a possible war. What do you expect country fans to say when a country star dumps on the president?"

..."Memo to Natalie Maines," Flippo wrote. "You're an artist? And you have a message? Hey, put it in a song. We'll listen to that. But, otherwise - shut up and sing."

Well, the artist who decided to put it in a song was Willie Nelson. ...

Link to this item | Comment

Pollsters can't connect with cellphone society: From the Arizona Republic (light, WP-style reg. req.):

Public opinion polls are tripping over telephone wires that aren't there.

Increasingly, polls results are at risk of being skewed not only by normal margins of error but by a "plus or minus cellphone" factor.

As marketing surveys and polls for the 2004 election ring phones across the nation, one of the hottest topics among pollsters is their inability to reach cellular phone customers who are dropping home phone lines in favor of going entirely wireless.

"At this point, we're in a muddle trying to understand what to do," said Mark Schulman of New York, past president of the American Society for Public Opinion Research. Cellphones are all but off-limits for polling organizations to call.

For a decade, Federal Communications Commission regulations have restricted pollsters from using modern dialing equipment to call cellphones. And even if they dial by hand, another rule prohibits them from phoning anyone who would have to pay for the call.

Polling results are likely to be skewed as a result -- half of young people, for instance, are cell-only.

If you're wondering why this matters, the famous 1948 Dewey beats Truman headline happened in part because telephone polling had skewed the results: More Republicans had telephones than Democrats. Poor people, who voted Democratic in the wake of FDR, were not counted.
Link to this item | Comment

stealitback.com is a police auction site called The Property Room. The idea expressed by the URL seems more accurate, though. (The Times wrote about this last week.)
Link to this item | Comment

UFO Evidence: You can find Mars everywhere today, but what about Martians? This site hasmore than 130 photographs of... something.
Link to this item | Comment

Morons in the News: Top 10 Most Moronic Stories of 2003 as chosen by readers of morons.org. They range from Ann Coulter deciding that blacklisting witch-hunter Joe McCarthy was a Great American Hero who should be revered to the blacklisting of the Dixie Chicks for anti-Bush comments.
Link to this item | Comment

What you can't say: By Paul Graham, who made what became Yahoo!Store:

(This essay is about heresy: how to think forbidden thoughts, and what to do with them. The latter was till recently something only a small elite had to think about. Now we all have to, because the Web has made us all publishers.)

Link to this item | Comment

Penguin Warehouse sells penguins as pets, bizarre as it seems. They're a coupla grand, and require a salt-water swimming pool.
Link to this item | Comment

Rebootik: Cool small online game.
Link to this item | Comment

Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com