Subterranean Homepage News

Fair and balanced, too!

November 12, 2003 7:43 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

I'll be in Chicago at ONA for the rest of the week, but check in: I might blog from there.

Who wants to be a First Lady? Politcsnh.com is trying to find a wife for Democratic presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich. You may apply now.

It might help to be, like the bachelor candidate, a vegan who can "hear the music of the spirits."

Here's the blurb:

We're running a national contest to help him find his perfect First Lady.

We will post profiles of interested single women, and at some point we'll let our readers pick the best Kucinich running mate.

If Congressman Kucinich agrees, PoliticsNH.com will fly the fortunate woman to New Hampshire and treat the two candidates to dinner.

There are 16 entries so far.
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The Massachusetts Internet tax mystery: From Declan McCullough at News.com:

A mystery is brewing in Massachusetts over how state tax collectors learned the identities of residents who bought cigarettes over the Internet.

Since early this year, the Massachusetts Department of Revenue has been busy firing off 3,264 letters to online shoppers, ordering them to submit a check for unpaid cigarette taxes, plus interest and penalties--or risk fines and imprisonment. Like its tax-happy neighbors of New York, Rhode Island and Connecticut, the Bay State ranks in the five most expensive places in the United States to buy cigarettes. Massachusetts levies $1.50 a pack in state excise taxes, not counting state sales taxes and local taxes.

Think "Brown"?
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Make-A-Flake: Free killer app for the holidays makes snowflakes. As a child, I spent hours with folded paper, cutting small shapes out and trying to figure out how to make what my mind's eye could see.

If only I had had the undo / redo features of this addicting little online tool. Preview what you've done, save it or cut some more, and when you're happy with it, download and/or email it. (I recommend saving; the ones I emailed here to illustrate this item didn't arrive, so I just grabbed one I liked from the gallery of flakes.)

You'll have a .jpg stencil to print and cut, a one-of-a-kind background for a holiday card or just hours of discovery, no matter how old you are.

No talent required -- symmetry makes them all look pretty good.
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Iraqi blogger unveiled: Liz Donovan finds a photo of "Salam Pax," the original Iraqi blogger. He did BBC chat yesterday -- here's the transcript.
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In UP town, broadband is a priority -- and utility: Blogger-journalist Mike Wendland, writing in the Freep,

Up in the UP, the town of Gladstone has made the Internet a public utility. It's believed to be the first city in Michigan to provide wireless broadband access as a municipal service.

City Manager Brian Horst said 34 residents signed up in the first few days since the service, priced at $39.95 a month, became available last week. ...

Related: Mayberry – better known in real life as Mount Airy, NC – has gone wireless with its own Wi-Fi network. At LocalTechWire.

Via Liz, again, who has more good new links tonight.
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Non-abrasive talk radio: The link is to Twin Cities Business Journal, but the news came from radio guy Lou Josephs:

"High Ground" is the name of a new "non-abrasive" talk network based in Minnesota.
Ops Manager Paul Mock says it's "real talk radio, not attack radio," produced by the Minnesota Radio Network. Suddenly -- there's lots of interest in alternative approaches to mainstream talk radio. Sounds like the FM talk format. So you bend the environment in other ways. You still have to entertain.

Nov. 24 is the debut date.

Related: Tomorrow (Nov. 13), the Web-only Outrage Radio for liberals launches. (If you missed it, I interviewed its founders in a couple of exchanges, with other bloggers chiming in with their own questions; you can work backwards from here.)
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Need more time? Uberman's sleep schedule, discussed at Kuro5hin, promises more waking hours (and perhaps an unhappy spouse). Backing in,

...It is important to note that there are no studies as to the long-term physical or physiological impact of this sleep cycle. I really don't know if this cycle is causing long-term damage to myself or not, and if this concerns you, I wouldn't attempt the cycle. However, the benefits are fantastic. ...

Sleeping Hours
The Uberman's sleep schedule revolves around forcing yourself to rely on six twenty to thirty minute naps spread throughout the day for your daily dose of sleep. I stuck to thirty minute naps, currently having them starting roughly at 2 AM, 6 AM, 10 AM, 2 PM, 6 PM, and 10 PM every day. ...

If you try this, let me know how it goes. I could use a 30 hour day.
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The Farber Gravestone Collection ...

...is an unusual resource containing over 13,500 images documenting the sculpture on more than 9,000 gravestones, most of which were made prior to 1800, in the Northeastern part of the United States. The late Daniel Farber of Worcester, Massachusetts, and his wife, Jessie Lie Farber, were responsible for the largest portion of the collection. This online version of the Farber Gravestone Collection is sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society. The Web site and online image database have been created by David Rumsey and Cartography Associates.

Via Judy Watt.
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Coming into focus: A look at one failed surgery and how new LASIK technology might fix such mistakes. Here's an interesting, harrowing tale with a happy ending from the S.F. Chronicle:

When Dr. Edward Manche tells the story, he changes the names to protect the privacy of his patient. The only problem is it sometimes starts out sounding as if it might be the setup for a bit of ophthalmological black humor:

Lady goes into a clinic for laser eye surgery. Afterward, the doctor comes over and tells her, "Congratulations, Miss Jones. Everything went fine." She looks at him, puzzled, and not only because she can barely see his face. "That's good," she says, "but I'm Miss Smith."

It's no joke.

"Miss Smith," in this case, turns out to be Gena Steward, a crime lab technician for the Livermore Police Department, who is now being treated by Manche. He hopes he can repair the damage done by another surgeon, who performed someone else's LASIK procedure on Steward's eyes. ...

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Hunter Thompson's Rum Diary goes to Hollywood: Frank Griffiths of AP reports, in an authentic gonzo voice,

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - It was 1959. Fired for kicking in a candy machine at a small-town newspaper, Hunter S. Thompson fled to Puerto Rico, where his vagrant journalist lifestyle inspired his first novel, "The Rum Diary."

Thompson's boozy year marked by cockfights, bowling alleys and pursuit of the governor's daughter is now being made into a movie, starring Johnny Depp (news), who first portrayed the legendary cult writer in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

"I didn't know Johnny Depp could act until he played me," said Thompson, 66, during a telephone interview from his home in Woody Creek, Colo.

Puerto Rican native Benicio Del Toro (news) makes his directing debut, and Nick Nolte (news) and Josh Hartnett (news) co-star. Shooting is scheduled to start in December.

According to Thompson, he was working at the Middletown (N.Y.) Daily Record when the candy machine cheated him of a nickel. After he smashed it and was fired, he moved to New York's Adirondack Mountains to begin a novel, living off unemployment checks.

Then a sports editor opening at The San Juan Star grabbed his eye. Thompson was rejected by managing editor William Kennedy, who went on to win a Pulitzer in 1984 for his book "Ironweed." But Kennedy predicted that Thompson would write "the great Puerto Rican novel."

Thompson then covered cockfights on the outlying Puerto Rican island of Vieques for El Sportivo, which was billed as the Caribbean's Sports Illustrated but turned out to be little more than a doomed bowling tabloid. ...

Here's Chapter One here; there's also a Rum Diary webring, called rumring, with more links.

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November 10, 2003 7:18 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

(Eclipse photos are at the bottom of this page)

Speaking truth to power: I'll be speaking at the Online News Association conference in Chicago later this week as part of a panel on weblogs. The speakers list on the two-day schedule reads like a Who's Who of web news today -- I'm easily the least distinguished journalist among them. I can only provide the view from the newsroom trenches, and hope to learn a lot.

The Online Journalism Awards will be presented there at a Saturday night banquet; Projo.com is a finalist for our Station Fire coverage in a category called "Creative Use of the Medium."

Any suggestions of great gritty blues bars in Chicago?
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The Station Fire Weblog has been updated. It includes a link to a new bloglet tracking issues of special concern to survivors and victims' families, especially about any future memorial at the site of the Feb. 20 nightclub fire in West Warwick that killed 100 people.
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Fighting big media: 1,600 attend conference here. Capitol News in Madison, Wis., reports,

As hundreds of activists gathered in Madison for the first day of the National Conference of Media Reform, the message was clear: Nothing less than the future of democracy is at stake if the concentration of media outlets continues unchecked. ...

Thanks to J.D. Lasica for the link.

Related: Cronkite fears mergers threaten democracy by John Nichols.
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Come Together: John Lennon's artwork is coming to Providence again this weekend, but it's not quite the same show you might have seen before. Journal music writer rick Massimo reports (Lennon's art in a new light, reg.req.),

Lennon's artwork was last seen in Rhode Island in 1997, and this show has a pair of elements not seen in previous Lennon shows in these parts.

One is a suite titled "Real Love" -- a batch of drawings that Lennon did for, and in some cases with, Sean in the last year of Lennon's life.

The other is color -- in some of Lennon's older drawings and in the "Real Love" section. ...

The Lennon show is in the lobby of the Rhode Island Convention Center, at 1 Sabin St. in downtown Providence. The works will be for sale, and a $2 donation will be asked at the door. Money raised will benefit Adopt-a-Classroom, which provides resources and materials for teachers and students.

Hours are Friday 5-9 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m.-7 p.m. and next Sunday 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Call (401) 458-6000 for more information.
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pic wrth 1k words: But it does need one word to make sense of it: Economists.

Eric Lilius of Eagle Lake, Ontario, emailed the link, pointing to this source.
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Dueling: At Online Journalism Review, Donn Friedman of the paid-subscribers-only Albuquerque Journal crows that

In remote places, charging for news online can work, the logic goes, because readers don't have another place they can easily go to get the content and service you provide.

Vin Crosbie at Digital Deliverance calls him out with The Albuquerque Journal as a Bad Paid Content Model:

Any business model that converts one percent of the site's users and forsakes the other 99 percent, isn't something that should be recommended industrywide.

And Friedman's later statement is simply a restatement of the 'if you build it, they will come' fallacy. 'If you charge for it, they will pay." No, if you do stop giving it away for free, unfortunately less than one percent will pay for it.

I'm with Crosbie. From a blogger's point of view, the sky could fall and I couldn't link to the story about it.

More importantly, in Albuquerque, informing the citizenry -- the civic responsibiity of journalism -- is only for people who pay. Unlike print, which boasts 2 1/2 readers for every subscriber, paying news sites demand that each reader pay for a ticket. There's no way to leave today's website on the counter for the next guy.

Tthere'll be lots more to say about this in Chicago.
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Inscrutable logos: I was watching Tennessee cream Miami on CBS yesterday, but at halftime I slid to Fox, where the Giants were playing against... a smudge. Fox uses team helmet logos rather than city names on its scoreboard bar at the top of the screen, and the Giants have "NY" on their helmets; but who were they playing? The opponents seemed to have a Pontiac logo. Joe guessed Tampa Bay. We were rescued by an announcer: Atlanta and New York are tied ...

Sorry, those franchises have not burned their smudges into instant recognition for me.

No big deal on TV, but I wonder how many people just stared in bewilderment at this and went away rather than click to donate. I almost did, the first time I was there.
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Lorraine is president of Skyscrapers Inc., the Amateur Astronomical Society of R.I., which owns and operates Seagrave Memorial Observatory on Peeptoad Road in North Scituate. More of his photos of this eclipse at different stages are here.

Here's a much larger image (312k) -- shift-click to download it. For comparison, here's Dan's photo of the mooon before the eclipse began. There's a much larger image of that, too (145k).

According to Space.com, "The eclipse of Nov. 8-9 was one of the brightest in recent memory, with the Moon lit orange by sunlight refracting through Earth's atmosphere."

More: Reuters offers several nice photos; BBC has a story, photos and graphics. Most news sites that noted the eclipse used the AP story; this link is to it at CNN, because the CNN page also has a video.

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