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Fair and balanced, too!

December 5, 2003 6:08 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

Providence Journal/Mary Murphy

Jan. 20, 2002: New England Patriots QB Tom Brady and coach Bill Belichick; the Patriots defeated the Oakland Raiders 16-13 in overtime to win the AFC championship on their way to a Super Bowl victory.

The Palm Beach Post somewhat apprehensively says Miami planning for anything as the Dolphins head here for Sunday's game against the Patriots.

Every day, Dolphins director of operations Rhett Ticconi, already in Massachusetts, phones coach Dave Wannstedt with a weather update.

The most recent forecast for Sunday in Foxboro calls for a low of 26 degrees with a 50 percent chance of precipitation, including snow showers and high winds.

"The cold won't have any bearing on what we do," Wannstedt said. "Obviously, if it's icy, if it's wet, then you have to adjust. We've talked about that.

This is all part of playing in December. You have to be physically ready and mentally in-tune to what gives you the best chance to win. Obviously the wind, the wet balls and the snow, and all that stuff is part of it.

"You need to talk that stuff through and have a plan for it. And we do."

Miami lost 38-21 at Buffalo last December, in a driving snowstorm with a game-time temperature of 25 degrees. Wannstedt recalled that snow wasn't predicted until that morning.

"It changes up there day to day and it already has," Wannstedt said. "I've heard two different reports since Monday. ...

Tomorrow and overnight into Sunday, 8 to 13 inches of snow is forecast for Mansfield Foxboro, Mass. (Illegal synapse leap: Playing ... at Tweeter. Rocknroll.) -- home of the Patriots' Gillette Stadium. Snow is predicted for Sunday, too, no guesses yet about how much.

What may help the Patriots is that it's been cold all week, and they've been practicing in it. But nobody's used to snow yet.

Related: Stokes was robbed: J.J. Stokes caught a touchdown pass last week, but the official said he was out of bounds. He wasn't, but the Patriots didn't challenge it. The Boston Herald asked about it:

Why didn't the Pats challenge an apparent touchdown catch by Stokes Sunday? Belichick said the coaches in the booth didn't see a conclusive network feed in time to notify him. Teams are basically at the mercy of the network, and CBS didn't show a clean shot of Stokes getting both feet inbounds until the Pats were lining up for the next snap.

Had the coaches been able to use a digital recording device, they would have been able to review the play in slow-motion immediately, but the NFL prohibits the use of such equipment by coaches. Also, they are not allowed to listen to the sound from the network telecast. (Phil Simms was calling it a touchdown before the video proved it.) . . .

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Ohio's electronic voting delayed: The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports,

Columbus - Ohio's sweeping review of electronic voting machines turned up so many potential security flaws in the systems that the state's top elections offi cial has called off deploying them in March.

The detailed findings confirmed what academics, computer scientists and voter advocates across the country have said for months: Electronic voting systems are prime targets for manipulation by anyone from expert computer hackers to poll workers to individual voters.

Diebold Election Systems, the Ohio-based company that has taken the most heat for potential flaws in the security of its machines, was not singled out in the review. The machines of the three other companies selected during Ohio's extensive certification process - Sequoia, Hart InterCivic, and Election Systems & Software - were also found to carry risks.

Diebold led the pack in the number of serious flaws in its systems, but the technology of the other companies also was found to be riddled with problems.

The review confirmed a laundry list of security flaws that some observers had tried to dismiss as merely alarmist. Among the findings:

Voter "smart cards" inserted in the machines could be deciphered or counterfeited and used to cast illegal votes.

Poll supervisors' passwords could be easily guessed and used to manipulate election results or end polling early. Diebold, for example, has the same password - 1111 - nationwide, and investigators were able to guess it in two minutes.

Election results could be unencrypted and intercepted during transmission.

Many scenarios exist in which someone without the proper authority could enter the systems - with the flick of a switch or the use of a laptop PC - and change results.

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Ten most embarrassing political moments: BBC requests, "Please vote for your favourite embarrassing moment suffered by a politician." You may not know all the politicians with foot in mouth, but the clips (realmedia) are a hoot -- especially Boris Yeltsin boogeying to bebop.

Here on Friday afternoon, George Bush is winning at 26 percent, for Stumped, in which he says the new leader of Pakistan is named "General" and, when pressed, doesn't know the name of the president of Chechnya or of the Prime Minister of India.
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Assemblage 100:12 artists from around the world were invited to be part of an exhibition in New Zealand to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Joseph Cornell on Christmas Eve 1903.

At right is a piece from the show titled Lost in the Forbidden City by Virginia artist Peggy Earle.

via art blogger Judy Watt
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Electability and the Masculine Mystique: At Open Source Politics, "Part I of Dysfunction Nation, a series of essays on our national neuroses, delusions, and character disorders; in other words, Why America Is Screwed. "

The adolescents are so much in charge that they've taken over the media. Compare the mature media voices of yesteryear -- e.g., Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite -- with the pubescent trash-talkers and potty-mouths who hog national conversation today: Limbaugh, the MSNBC weeknight lineup, Fox News all the time.

via wood s lot
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"Long Night Moon" Monday: Here's a map of the sky around the position of the full moon Monday night.
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Children's books you will never see...:

You Were an Accident

Strangers Have the Best Candy

The Little Sissy Who Snitched

Some Kittens Can Fly!

And many more...
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U.S. Programmers at Overseas Salaries: "Rather than send IT work to India, a Boston startup sought locals at the same money. The result: plenty of applicants -- and a lot of questions," Business Week reports.

(Can they get Delhi housing rates too?)
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December 4, 2003 7:46 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

Got a new computer here today, that should eventually have me filing an hour earlier. (The old one was really that slow.) But for now, still fetching the apps and stomping the "anomalies." Please let me know if something looks strange.

The snow globe you always wanted. If you watch it long enough, the snowman ... nah, just watch it.
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Tom's excellent China trip: Tom von Alten (Ft. Boise's blogger) spent 16 days in China last month, and writes a travelogue that doesn't leave out the tedium and hassles of traveling. I'm saving most of to savor at home, but I'll pass it on so you can get started, too.

Shibaozhai is the site of a Taoist temple built in the 1700s, perched on a squareish chunk of rock. One way up is a wooden pagoda leaning against the rock, comprising 9 floors, because it's good luck (or 11 or 12, if you actually count them). The other way up (or the way down if you follow the "A route") is not so dramatic, down the sloping backside, but still a fair number of stairs involved. When the lake reaches its final level, Shibaozhai will be an island, but with enhanced moorage and roadway connections planned to keep the tourist thing going.

In between the gangplank and the temple, there is a gauntlet to run, or as described by the ship's nightly itinerary newsletter, "a small bazaar, with an array of Chinese goods!" On the way up, we were a more or less intact tour group, not to be greatly distracted by shopping. On the way down, we couldn't use that excuse, and I did finally enter into the spirit of commerce when I spotted a copy of Mao's little red book in German. The opening offer was $20, Jeanette was pretty sure it could be had for one-tenth that, and we worked our way down. I was prepared to walk away, so $15, ¥100, $10, and so on were not interesting proposals. We settled on ¥20, which by the vendor's reaction was just barely past disgusting, some sale better than no sale. (Who owns all the inventory, I wondered more than once? The vendors, or some invisible third party? It often seemed that the sellers were more intent on cash flow than breaking even on any particular item.)

... Back at the bazaar, a new tourist group was on its way up as we came down, but these were Chinese tourists. I stopped to let the group pass, and watched to see how the vendors interacted with them. It was amazingly different. No "Hello! Hello!", no in-your-face proffering of the merchandise, no touching or grabbing. They stood quietly as the visitors walked by, all in silence. One tourist tossed out a comment to a vendor who replied chattily; nothing to do with buying or selling, just a comment on the day, the white guys in the neighborhood, whatever. Interesting. Once the group was by, and I continued down, the Hello! chatter resumed.

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Backtracking 1: Augmenting Tuesday's link to Stump Connolly's Does Anyone Here Understand Medicare?, Tom von Alten's Medicare Drug Benefit Algebra starts from a narrow question, whether or not the Medicare prescription drug benefit makes sense for an individual, given the premiums, payouts and deductible.

As an exercise in high school algebra, I posed this question to our niece: you pay a $420 premium, have a $250 deductible, and 75% coverage up to $2250 worth of drugs. How much do your yearly drugs have to cost before you break even with the Medicare drug benefit?

... The algebraic expression for breakeven is:

420 + 250 + .25*(x - 250) = x

and the answer is $810. If you need $810 worth of prescription drugs, $67.50 a month, you'd break even with this plan: $420 premium, $250 deductible, and 25% of (810 - 250), or $140 in copayments. That's more than I -- or we -- have ever spent, but then we had an employer-paid prescription drug benefit for some time. Still, I don't think either of us have ever had $420 worth of medication prescribed in a year, let alone $810. Which is not to say that it won't happen some time in the future; drug costs are going through the roof and physicians seem ever more inclined to prescribe drugs for medical treatment.

There's more, but that's the bottom line. FDR is rolling in his grave.
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Backtracking 2: Doc Searls, in another Tuesday post titled How radio can unsuck itself, had an epiphany after a four-hour drive marked by a search for a good radio station:

Old Fashioned Broadcasting — AM, FM, TV, Shortwave... — is railroads. Internet Radio, by individuals and small organizations, is cars. We still have railroads, of course. But what cars did was give us a way to make our own transportation. To go where we wanted to go, in our own way, thank you very much. The same thing will happen, has to happen, to radio.

...What radio needs is choice at both ends of the supply/demand relationship. The NPRs and music stations of the world need more program, content and talent sources to choose from, and the listeners need more choices about where and how to listen to those choices.

... Why shouldn't radio be like the Net? By which I mean: every station, every source, is available everywhere the Net reaches. Local is still local. Hog prices in South Dakota will still be interesting only to people who are local to that topic. If I'm driving through South Dakota I might want to hear something else. Why not make it available?

It's a long, interesting, link-filled post, well worth giving your attention to.

(Meanwhile, when I hopefully clicked the "Listen" link at Doc's beloved "KPIG, which remains the Best Radio Station on Earth," here's what greeted me:

As you know, the music industry shit-canned our free stream. RealAudio can be a huge pain, but if I'm far away and want to listen to the Pig, it's the best way and the quality is quite good, better even than FM rado. -Wes

KPIG is pleased to announce the return of real live CyberPork. To listen, you need to subscribe to RealOne RadioPass at $5.95 per month. ...

Grrr....
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Related (okay, it's a different medium, but...) Two Minor Retreats on Paid Content: Vin Crosbie (Digital Deliverance) reports the beginning of a trend we all knew would kick in eventually: Readers decide they can live without paid content, and managers clueless enough to think they would find themselves job-hunting.

We notice that Ireland.com, the Web site of The Irish Times of Dublin, has begun putting more stories in front of its paid content gate. Is this a bit more of a retreat from its paid access content model? A way to increase the pageviews and ad banner exposure counts that Ireland.com lost when it converted from free to paid access.

When it then converted to a paid access model in mid-2002, Ireland.com's monthly pageviews dropped from 30.4 million to between 6.5 million and 7.1 million, which had a direct effect on its banner advertising revenues.

Although Ireland.com as a free access site had 2.3 million monthly unique users (of whom between 1.2 million and 1.5 million used the site at least several times monthly), the site has managed to signup less than 10,000 users as paying users, a one percent conversion ratio.

More than 80 per cent of those subscribers chose to pay the site's €79 annual subscription fee, rather than the €14 monthly or €7 weekly subscription fees. Minus VAT, this yielded an average subscription revenue of about €60, or less than €600,000 annually for Ireland.com.

But that paid subscription revenue wasn't enough to compensate for the loss of pageviewed banner ad revenues caused by the switch to the paid access model. That loss in pageviews also caused Ireland.com to breach its advertising network contract with DoubleClick. The Irish Times Trust, which owns both newspaper and Ireland.com, last year noisely sacked Ireland.com's chief executive, the architect of the switch to paid access.

Another newspaper Web site that has been retreating a bit from the paid access model is the Jerusalem Post. JPost.com recently undid its requirement for new users to register (and retain cookies) to read its Latest News section, the busiest part of the site, and placed its Editorials, Op-Ed peices and columnists' content in front of its paid access gate.

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Backtracking 3: In the light of Shelley Powers' twist on the blog awards concept yesterday, I've come up with some new categories. Nominations accepted here for blogs that best embody these qualities:

Best uninformed opinions
Best snark
Best promotional vehicle
Best self-promotion
Best blog opera
Best face on a corp.
Best hysterical patriot
Best impenetrable writing
Best poison pen
Best cheap lit
Best daily horoscope
Best smarter-than-thou blog
Best week-old links
Best warmonger

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Tapestries for the 21st Century: Cory Doctorow points to Something Awful's photoshopping contest to create medieval tapestries with modern themes.

Patriots-Dolphins: Three out of four experts at ESPN pick the Pats.

December 3, 2003 7:07 p.m.

Grass-roots Iraq movie screenings Sunday: Move-On.org has organized screenings of Robert Greenwald's Iraq war documentary Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War, (reviews) (trailer, links to bios, clips, screenings) hosted by individuals and groups throughout the country this coming Sunday, Dec. 7.

As of late Wednesday afternoon, 2,401 screenings are planned. There are six within a 25-mile radius of this newsroom. (This page lets you search for one in your neighborhood, wherever that may be.)

Related: Salon does the history of MoveOn.org (click an ad for a free day pass):

Bill O'Reilly wants its nonprofit status revoked. Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie sees it as part of the "Democrat plan to subvert campaign finance laws." House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's office plays phone pranks on its staffers. A piece in David Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine worries: "It could bypass the mainstream media, sneak around campaign spending limits, and become its own powerful channel for Leftist communication, indoctrination and mobilization."

Clearly, MoveOn.org has arrived.

A great bit of trivia: MoveOn's founders, Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, created the famed Flying Toasters screensavers.
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Meet the punter: Patriots.com has these facts and a story about new punter Brooks Barnard, who'll replace Ken Walter. (Coach Bill Belichick had known Walter since he was a ball boy for the Cleveland Browns, so letting him go yesterday couldn't have been easy. Walter's 18-yard punt Sunday during the Colts game probably sealed his fate. His 37.9 yards per punt average was the worst in the entire National Football League.)

Barnard, photographed today by AP during practice at Gillette Stadium, has no NFL experience. None. But...

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. - The New England Patriots announced the signing of rookie punter Brooks Barnard today. He will wear number 8.

Barnard, 24, was a two-time all-ACC punter during his career at Maryland (1999-2002) and graduated as the school's all-time leader in punting average for a career (43.7 yard average), single season (44.7 in 2000) and single game (53.8). The 6-foot-3-inch, 195-pound punter finished his career as the fourth-leading punter in ACC history and was a two-time semifinalist for the Ray Guy Award. Last season, he punted in all 14 games for the Terrapins and finished the season with a 43.2-yard average. He signed with the Chicago Bears as a rookie free agent on May 1, 2003. He was waived at the end of training camp on August 25.

Related: Rumbles in Miami. The Miami Herald sportswriters are warming up the crowd for Sunday's 4:15 game against the Patriots. It might be our first snowy weekend of the year, which nobody is used to.

Headlines: Victory over Pats is a must; Talking smack: Randy McMichael continues his hard-hitting duel with Patriots safety Rodney Harrison on Sunday.

Dang, it's gonna be a drag when Knight-Ridder sites go under registration and we won't be able to link to them any more.
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Best Blog with a Female Spirit: Brilliant and funny response by Shelley Powers (Burningbird) to...

this newest of weblog awards, the 2003 Weblog Awards. Normally I find these events to be, well, rather uninspiring except for the fact that the creator has created a Best Female Authored Blog award, as compared to we can only presume, Best Blog's almost guarantee of male winnership.

...Among all the nominations there would seem to be one criticism, whereby the author wrote that the award struck them as a Pretty Good Blog...For a Chick award.

... Rather than join in the voices raised in consternation at the seeming sexism apparant in this award, I want to congratulate the creator because, in my opinion, he hasn't created an award to differentiate women's writing from best writing -- he's created an award to recognize that which epitomizes the female spirit in our writing, regardless of our gender.

Or at least, that is how I seek to view it, and based on this I would like to offer some nominations of my own of weblogs who best demonstrate the spirit of Women's Writing:

Her nominees are all men, some of whom blushingly accept in the post's comments section.
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The Economy as Viewed From Main Street: No Recovery Yet. So says pollster zogby.com.

The optimism of a rebounding economy hasn’t yet trickled down to Main Street, USA, where 20% still say they are afraid they or someone in their immediate family will lose a job within the next year. And 21% say they are working at a job that pays less than an immediate previous job.

The telephone poll of 1,001 likely voters nationwide was conducted November 17-19, 2003 by Zogby International. ...

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Click the Vote! is not what it sounds like. It has three issues:

Legalize music sharing that rewards creators
Defend open computing and open standards
Democratize the electromagnetic commons

News.com has more: Group seeks political power for P2P

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The Marvelous Mashuga: Patrick Blake (aka Ye Olde Phart) suggests you visit this photographer's site:

Meet Mashuga, whose Fotolog devoted to portraits and stories of the homeless is beyond words.

"Mashuga" is the nom de lens of Gary F. Clark, a Professor of Art at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches Computer Art and Drawing. He's been there since 1972 and for the last six months he's been creating a fascinating online collection of portraits and stories of homeless persons, mostly in New York City....

... I make a point of visiting Mashuga every day. As I do his other Fotolog, Anything Great. Let me know what you think of these sites and if you agree with me that he's a true genius of the camera, let him know, too.

Here's a thumbnail page. The images are flattened, but when viewed full size they unfurl normally.

Related: Tom Mangan writes, "Kevin Fagan of the (San Francisco) Chronicle gets unnervingly close to a band of homeless people. Much of it is too sickening to read, but it should be read anyway."
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December 2, 2003 7:55 p.m.

New Year's Eve radio worldwide, now and then and live again: Lou Josephs has put together more than 250 links to events around the world, from among the more than 4,900 TV and radio stations worldwide that are webcasting. (Unfortunately, CARP fees -- royalty payments per song per listener -- killed most live U.S. radio streams.)

Here's how it came about:

Several years ago, Kim Elliott at the Voice of America spent his New Year's Eve listening to how the world celebrated using short-wave radio to hear international and domestic stations ring in the New Year. Kim used to host Communications World every weekend on the Voice of America.

We have assembled a list of webcasters (stations who transmit programs over the Internet) and webcams (cameras that take a photo every few seconds) who will usher in the New Year 2003. To get you started here is a twenty two minute audio clip from WABC, it features Cousin Bruce Morrow (now at CBS FM in NYC), Guy Lombardo via remote and Charlie Greer (deceased) following on the overnight. Suddenly it's 1965.

Moving forward a few years, NBC Radio's Ben Grauer reported the arrival of the New Year from Times Square in New York. He did this for several decades (and you thought Dick Clark was the first to do it?) This is one of his last live reports, on New Year's Eve 1971. It's the last clip on the page.

There are tons of links and photos, a sad reminder of all we're missing here without web radio. Here's how Lou describes it all on his blog:

Finished the New Year's Eve ultimate joy ride, three pages full of stations that webcast. Some surprises as well. The history of this was when Kim Andrew Eliot started this by listening to how the world welcomes the New Year in on Shortwave. I started the web site five years ago with the idea that streaming would allow you to do the same thing. Boy does it ever. Ok kick the tires, have fun. The site will mirror here over the New Years. And I will update it it in real time.

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Winners of pro.com's photoshop contest:

Third prize: Kenneth S. Parker, Attleboro, Mass.:

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Words that cut: This story by Orange County Weekly rock critic Jim Washburn is actually about Righteous Brother Bobby Hatfield who, in the days before his recent death, sent a note to a friend that showed he was still smarting from a slap by that paper in June.

It's headlined, We’ve Lost that Self-Righteous Feeling: A few final words on Bobby Hatfield, and a few from him. But this is what it's really about:

I once slagged off Steve Goodman in a review, mocking his "perennial opening act" status. What I didn’t know was that he’d risen from his sickbed to do that show as a favor to the promoter when another act cancelled at the last minute. Goodman was in pain, dying of leukemia, was soon dead, and my review was the last one he ever got.

People can drop dead at any time, and that’s no reason to gild their talents. But it should make us more cognizant of what we write, and whether we do it to be truthful or because being snide might make you look cool. Again speaking from personal experience, being a rock critic is a pretty unhip job, and there’s a tendency to want to seem hipper by dumping on other people, or at least distancing yourself from things that may be even less hip than you.

Steve Goodman wrote the train song City of New Orleans, which sped up the charts for Arlo Guthrie in 1972 and won a Grammy for Willie Nelson in 1984, the same year Goodman died. Others who recorded it: Johnny Cash, Judy Collins, John Denver, Mark Dvorak, Ronnie Gilbert, The Limeliters, C.W. McCall, Holly Near, John Prine, Pete Seeger, Seldom Scene and Hank Snow and many others -- Amazon lists 194 results for the song title. It even spawned a parody.

On November 13, 1997 some of these performers gathered in Chicago for a Tribute to Steve Goodman. You can hear clips from it at Amazon.com; clips from many of Goodman's own albums are at his label, Red Pajamas.

It may have sounded bright and clever at the time, but for the rest of his life Washburn will wince at the memory of his cheap putdown of a man who mattered.
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Does Anyone Here Understand Medicare? Stump Connolly tries to explain it to us.
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Hack the vote: Paul Krugman on e-voting in the Times.
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December 1, 2003

Sorry about missing Friday. Illness in the family kept me away.

E-voting firm Diebold drops legal case against free speech advocates: The Mercury News reports,

SAN JOSE, Calif. - In a major victory for free speech enthusiasts on the Internet, Diebold Inc. has agreed not to sue voting rights advocates who publish leaked documents about the alleged security breaches of electronic voting.

A Diebold spokesman promised in a conference call Monday with U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel and attorneys from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that it would not sue dozens of students, computer scientists and ISP operators who received cease-and-desist letters from August to October.

Diebold also promised not to file lawsuits against two Swarthmore College students and a San Francisco-based Internet service provider for copyright infringement, according to a motion that company attorneys filed Nov. 24 in San Jose's federal court.

Diebold did not disclose specifics on why it had dropped its legal case, but the decision is a major reversal of the company's previous strategy. North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold, which controls more than 50,000 touch-screen voting machines nationwide, had threatened legal action against dozens of individuals who refused to remove links to its stolen data.

"This is a huge victory that shows we have weapons on our side to protect free speech from overbearing copyright laws so that the Internet remains a forum for public discussion," said EFF staff attorney Wendy Seltzer. "We're trying to hammer home that you can't go around making idle threats that aren't backed up by the law."

The Harvard Crimson reports that "At least 87 people, most of them college students—and two of them Harvard undergraduates—have made the documents available on university-hosted websites in a growing movement aimed at highlighting alleged flaws in Diebold’s electronic voting machines."

Links to the sites hosting the memos, and excerpts from the memos themselves are gathered here, on a site run by a Swarthmore student.

Background: Timeline of events at Swarthmore; Diebold E-Voting Case Page at Stanford Law.
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Will the Broadcast Flag Break Your TiVo? Paul Boutin in Slate:

Television fans accustomed to recording shows and watching them later are still trying to make sense of the Federal Communications Commission's Nov. 4 ruling, which says digital TV sets built after July 2005 will need to include an anti-piracy system called a broadcast flag, meant to keep high-definition digital broadcasts from instantly becoming Internet bootlegs. Broadcast-flag technology works like this: Digital TV signals that are broadcast over the air, rather than transmitted via cable or satellite, will include an invisible data tag—the broadcast flag—along with the picture and sound. By FCC fiat, any digital TV tuner built after July 1, 2005, must refuse to allow broadcast-flagged programs to be recorded in such a way that they can be redistributed in their high-definition format. You'll be able to record Letterman tonight and watch him tomorrow but you won't be able to e-mail a copy to your friends.

Thanks to JD Lasica for the link.
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Song Sung Purple: Prince's 'Darling Nikki' Gets a Second Chance. The Foo Fighters have recorded the song, and Hank Stuever has written a helluva story.

The song was a soulful limerick from the "Purple Rain" days of Prince, whose voraciously fey Jheri-Curl Lothario act worked its spell even on the most suburban set. It was, at the time, the dirtiest song we knew.

And the world might have been a slightly different place if an 11-year-old Karenna Gore could have prevented her mother from listening to her "Purple Rain" cassette: "Darling Nikki" has the near-mythological honor in pop trivia of being the song that compelled Tipper Gore to co-found the Parents Music Resource Center with other congressional wives, who in 1985 successfully pressured big record companies to create a warning-label system for pop records.

...Last heard from, Prince was going door-to-door, witnessing for Jehovah. Karenna Gore Schiff is 30, married and has two kids of her own. Tipper seems, in hindsight, less like the evil queen of censorship and more like some kind of prophetic genius, even if parents are still helpless to ward off all that Nikki wrought. ...

...Nikki was originally supposed to suggest something coarse, scurrilous, vulgar. Prince used to surround himself in Nikki-equivalents -- women in lingerie with names like Vanity and Apollonia -- and when he decided they were used up, he moved on to Sheena Easton. (Vanity and Apollonia both have made appearances in VH1 retromentaries about the '80s; both have found Jesus.)

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Mr. Picassohead: Drag squigglies to the canvas, color them or not, and you'll have a portrait of ... Dali.
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The Patriots make us limp again: Usually good for late rallies, the New England Patriots took an early lead Sunday, getting us comfy at our indoor tailgates.

Fred Kirsch, patriots.com: It looked like the Colts would escape to halftime down only a touchdown but on the ensuing kickoff lightning struck by way of Bethel Johnson.

Johnson took the kick up the right sideline, cut to the middle of the field and was gone. The touchdown was reviewed to see if Johnson stepped out of bounds but the play stood and New England had a 23-10 lead.

When you live on this right-now edge, at every moment it's about to fall apart but somehow it never does.

Michael Marot, Associated Press: For the Colts, it was yet another wild game in which Peyton Manning brilliantly rallied them from a 21-point second half deficit. But this time, after completing 29 of 48 passes for 278 yards and four touchdowns, Manning's late-game heroics ran out.

He moved the Colts 47 yards on their final drive, getting three chances to win it from the 1-yard line in the game's final 37 seconds.

But the Patriots stuffed James on second-and-goal and Manning couldn't connect with Aaron Moorehead on third-and-goal. After a timeout, the Colts called a draw play to James, but McGinest blew it up by tackling the back for a loss.

Manning walked backward and smacked the ground in disgust.

The Patriots made their stand on the one, and held that line.

The moment held. Life didn't fall apart. 38-34.

Check out the misery in Indianapolis.
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Yahoo! Sets Up Christmas Tree With Internet Receiver: NY1 reports,

First cell phones, then the Internet, and now even Christmas trees are going wireless.

Yahoo.com has set up a Christmas tree in Herald Square with a wireless Internet receiver on top.

New Yorkers walking by with a laptop can set it down and log on via the tree’s receiver. Or they can use one of the computers set up next to the tree. It's meant to help holiday shoppers compare prices. ...

The concept is great, but that last sentence is a little boggling. Whose "Today only!" sale prices are on the net?
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The 12 STDs of Christmas: Sung, but since it's British, they call 'em STIs -- sexually transmitted infections. It's a public service announcement.
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com