Subterranean Homepage News

By Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros

May 2, 2003, 6:02 p.m. - (Last week's weblog)

Providence postcards: At Providenceri.com you'll find the beginnings of a collection of old postcards from Providence, such as the view of Weybosset Street at right, and they're asking collectors to upload photos of more scenes.

The project is the brainchild of Russian native and RISD graduate Alexandra Chilikina, who's been working as an intern at city hall. We learned about this from Adam Gertsacov's The Rhode Island Weblog.
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Netflix: The Very Long Wait: Netflix is a DVD rental service; for $19.95 a month subscribers may rent three movies at a time, no late fee or due dates. They select online the movies they want to see and they arrive automatically in the mail in the order you want them -- if they're in stock.

If they're not, the wait time is indicated.

News to use: This writer, Brian L. Dear, blogging at Nettle, found out how to shake loose the backordered films.

"Very Long Wait" isn't the only delay message you'll see in a Netflix queue. There's "Short Wait" and "Long Wait" as well. In my experience, it's really quite binary: either a title is available "Now" or it isn't. Anything that doesn't say "Now" means "Forget It" in my book.

On The WELL, the suggestion has come up several times that one way of dealing with these delayed DVDs in your queue is to "flush" your queue of everything except the delayed titles. Now, when you've entered dozens and dozens of titles in your queue, erasing 90% of those titles means a lot of hard work goes down the drain. Nevertheless, I decided to give the ol' flush a try.

... Sure enough, within a day, two of the movies in the remaining list went to "Now" status! Ha! It works!

There's more. Posted April 21, this was part 8 in Dear's series about Netflix.

Part 9, posted April 23, refrences the experience of another Netflix customer:

Netflix watchers will definitely want to go read a fascinating article called An Analysis of Netflix's DVD Allocation System by someone who only goes by his email address "dvd-rent-test." His argument:

Netflix uses the number of movies you rented in your previous billing period to determine your priority in getting movies. The more movies you rented during your last billing cycle, the less chance you have of receiving a movie versus an individual who has rented fewer movies.

Very interesting. I don't think there's enough data here to confirm that this is indeed the case, and I'm still holding out that there may be other rational explanations for why things happen the way they do for individual Netflix customers. His data does pretty well match my own experience using the service since August 2002.

Slashdot has more, for those who want to outwit Netflix themselves.

Thanks (again) to The Rhode Island Weblog for the pointer.

Related: Blockbuster Decides to Go Online:

Blockbuster will be able to make use of its 5,500 stores, an advantage Netflix does not have. The plans are still in progress, but Blockbuster will probably ship subscribers an unlimited number of DVD's each month, provided customers have only three movies in their homes at any one time.

...Blockbuster said it would allow its online customers to return mail-order rentals to Blockbuster stores. And online customers who do not want to wait for a new release to arrive by mail may be able to exchange one of their online rentals for that title at the store and pay nothing.

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Political art: 98/107 is the latest work by Jon Haddock:

This piece consists of ninety-eight paper mache pulp figures representing the members of the US senate who voted for the USA Patriot Act. It premiered at the March 2003 Howard House (Seattle) show The End of Reason.

There is a "how-to" page documenting the making of these figures, here.

At first glance, these reminded me of the Chinese terra cotta warriors.

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The Crimson Hexagon: Books Borges Never Wrote. Tom Matrullo points to this site in the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges, one of authors -- and minds -- I most respect:

The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary . . . More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.

-- Jorge Luis Borges

The Crimson Hexagon: Books Borges Never Wrote
The fiction of Borges is filled with references to encyclopedias that do not exist, reviews of imaginary books by fictional authors, and citations from monographs that have as much real existence as does the Necronomicon or the Books of Bokonon. As an intellectual exercise of pure whimsical uselessness, I have catalogued here all these "imaginary" books that I could find in the stories of the "real" Argentine. I am sure that Borges himself would fail to see much of a difference. . . .

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Unrelated music rant: The aforementioned Tom Matrullo -- who was a journalist before he decided he wanted to use bigger words, then became a father, and now uses very little words -- launches a mouthful in a headline. He is truly incensed, nearly sputtering about Steve Jobs' new iTunes pay-for-music business. It's headlined, Steve, your arse was a synecdoche. Here's a link to what synecdoche means.)

Here's the most accessible part of his rant:

Here's something to ponder: the Internet, for all its vaunted wonders, has seen only one thing of truly wonder-of-the-world stature, and that was the community of shared music that came together, unbidden, by chance, driven by love, on Napster.

Related: Andrew Orlovski at the Register: Sugared water Apple censors Miles Davis. The headline is about an oddly prudish censoring of song titles at iTunes, including a rendering of the great Miles Davis's album Bitches Brew as B***ches Brew. But most of the essay is about restrictions and the "infected" (with Digital Rights Management coding) files you buy.

If you're looking for a commercial music service without the DRM stuff built into it, try Dan Gillmor's recommendation:

The site, EMusic, is well worth a visit, at the very least. It's full of excellent music, mostly from independent labels that (I hope) are a key part of the of the music business' future.

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May 1, 2003, 6:47 p.m.

May Day!

More garden blogs than you have time to read: Most have links to other garden sites and blogs, as well.

Viviculture and Pure Land Mountain come from Mark Woods (wood s lot) of Perth, Ontario.
Updated 05.02.03: Woods sends another link, to the wonderfully titled The Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl.

Cold Climate Gardening: Karen Purdy, in New York state, has a whole page of garden blog links, complete with authors and location, where they're discernible. Here's the short version she sent:

13 Labs Garden
Contra-Diction
Debby's Garden Links - Links to UK gardening related websites, garden forum and lots of
gardening tips
Garden Spot
Gardening eli-nati
GreenZoo: walks in a botanical garden
Home and Garden at Times to Come
marmalade - such a dirty girl!
Mimosa Gardening
Minnesota Gardener Moosey's Country Garden - An eccentric Rambling Country Garden
Notes From Zone 4
Outside in the garden
Pam Hernandez's Radio Weblog
PlantBuzz Home
Renegade Gardener - Garden and gardening advice about flowers and ornamental shrubs and
trees in the the northern United States such as Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the Dakotas, New England
Soul of the Garden
Talking Dirty: A Gardening Journal
The Garden Blog
Travelling eGarden Journal
True Dirt
Viviculture Weblog
Waiting for Spring: Gardening in Zone 3a
Weather or Not
Wild West Yorkshire nature diary
You Grow Girl | Everything's Gone Green
Zanthan Gardens | Weblog

Garden Geek Girl: She's in Sacramento, and has a large garden site with photos and comments about plants and techniques, a glossary, journal, a couple of years of garden plans and more. Thanks to David Grenier ("Writer. Bowler. Revolutionary.") for the link.

Karen's Garden: Karen Kolling, who describes herself as a "former and soon to be current Rhode Islander," has a page of links of "articles from my former garden column in the Palo Alto Daily News." Headlines include Organic care for lawns, Troublefree Roses, Homegrown Tomatoes and intersting combinations such as "Rose colors, Whiteflies and aphids" and "Ants, Potatoes, Old trees."

More:
You Grow Girl
The Daily Muse
The Garden of Till Hamwhich (of Buckleberry Fern)
Clearwater Landscape Designs

Finally, a colleague points to Rhode Islander Mort White's The Magic Garden. Not a blog, but perhaps useful, and local.

Not blogs: Tom Matrullo sent a link to "Wild Flowers of Castle Country -- an online reproduction of the book by Max and Vera Finley" for the sheer pleasure of it. It's page after page of stunning, large photos of Utah flora. He also points to Ketzel Levine's Talking Plants; Levine offers gardening tips on NPR.

Enough for now. I'm going to pull this out as a separate page and add it to the blogroll next week, so it'll be handy. For those of you who have registered at projo.com, its Garden site has a list of links of its own.
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Garden zones: Here's a link to a draft of the the 2003 edition of the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map (pdf ) at the American Horticultural Society. It puts Providence in Zone 7 now. (Zones are based on expected low temperatures; plant hardiness is determined by the lowest temperatures a species can withstand.)

Data from 1986 and from last year was compared to produce the changes -- but this year, winter was brutal here, and many plants that usually come back just didn't this spring. I wouldn't spend big bucks on tender perennials based solely on this data.
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Dueling columns on journalists' right to blog: At Cyberjournalist.net,

The Hartford Courant's recent move ordering a reporter to shut down his independent Weblog has stirred up a heated debate over how much control a media organization should have over its employees' outside activities (Read all about the controversy here). In a pair of point-counterpoint essays for CyberJournalist.net (springing in part from a discussion on Poynter's Online-News e-mail list), blogger and online journalism columnist J.D. Lasica argues that The Courant's decision was unfair, while University of Illinois journalism professor Eric Meyer defends The Courant's actions. Read both sides and then post your own opinions.

J.D. follows up on his own blog with the provocatively titled, "Who owns a writer's creativity?" and adding links to comments by journalist-blogger Ed Cone, Rhetorica and me.
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Eat Your Words: A guide to Menu English. At Slate, the poet laureates of the ktchen get deconstructed.

Menus are the Pavlov's bell of eating out. They are a literature of control. Menu language, with its hyphens, quotation marks, and random outbursts of foreign words, serves less to describe food than to manage your expectations. Take the description of my dish above: It promises the unconventional—crosnes!—while reassuring the unadventurous with familiar comforts—risotto, peas—then slaps a thin veneer of glamour on the enterprise with the pizazz of "black truffle vinaigrette." This menu entry doesn't merely entice, it justifies the cost of dining out.

Not every menu manipulates you in the same way. Different kinds of restaurants use different strategies. Here's a guide to some of the most popular. ...

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Flashback is back: At LevitateCNN,

In the spirit of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and the peace protesters of 1967 who levitated the Pentagon, we propose a mass levitation and exorcism of CNN Center in Atlanta, GA on Memorial Day Weekend May 24-25. This orderly, festive, non-violent approach to the media may result in a general liberation of all United States citizens from the oppression of hawkish propaganda.

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Creative feedback: Most eBay feedback is boring. "Great eBayer***," "Fast payment," "Good communication!" Not what this guy posts.
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Exit Mundi: There's a whole site devoted to collecting end-of-the-world scenarios.
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Why You Should Switch to the Mozilla Firebird browser. At mozilla.org.
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You may now play solitaire online with the Iraq "most wanted" deck.
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April 30, 2003, 7:30 p.m.

The Yes Men: Pranksters surface again: Yesterday's item, Playing Card Deck Shows Way to U.S. Regime Change, was brought to you by friends of those cyberpranksters who freaked out Wal-Mart with the Re-Code.com site (Shades of Abbie Hoffman in pranksters' barcodes site, April 17).

Briefly, "The activists drew the ire of Wal-Mart Inc., the world's largest retailer, with a Web site that encouraged people to 'name their own prices' by offering hundreds of substitute bar codes."

The Re-Code crew identified themselves as members of the Carbon Defense League and Conglomco.org. The Carbon Defense League is described elsewhere as "a tactical media arts and engineering collective."

This time, similar cybersurrealists plopped their version of the Iraq "most wanted" playing cards -- featuring the faces of Bush administration luminaries, corporate tycoons, right-leaning media figures, GOP politicians, foreign leaders, the head of The Carlyle Group, defense contractors, Supreme Court justices and a photo of the President himself (the four of clubs) silhouetted against the seal in such a way that it looks like a halo in an illuminated manuscript -- all on a parody of the World Trade Organization site at http://www.gatt.org/

My former colleague Julia St. George emailed to say, "The forgery is pretty good ... as clicking certain links (such as "THE WTO" at the top) will take you to the actual web site for the WTO, http://www.wto.org/.

Steven C. Den Beste sent an email this afternoon containing a copy of the "WhoIs" results on that domain, indicating that it's registered to one Andy Bichlbaum; Den Beste also included a link to a January 9, 2002 story from Fortune:

"An American living in France, Bichlbaum, 35, belongs to the Yes Men, an anti-globalization group devoted to "representing the WTO more honestly than they represent themselves." Two years ago the group took control of the Web address gatt.org, where it put up a home page nearly identical to the WTO's. Because it is easily mistaken for the real thing, the Yes Men receive a steady stream of e-mails intended for the WTO--including speaking invitations. Bichlbaum is only too happy to oblige."

The Yes Men describe themselves:

The Yes Men are a genderless, loose-knit association of some three hundred impostors worldwide. Their feeling today can be summed up in one simple phrase: That Management Thing.

I emailed Andy Bichlbaum.

Mike Bonnano replied, saying "Howdy! I answer for Andy, he's out at (the) moment..."

Bonnano, who lives in Loudonville, N.Y., outside Albany, was described by AP as "not among activists who created the (Re-Code.com) site but was willing to risk being its legal owner." He confirmed that he had hosted the Re-Code site for awhile.

Bonnano wrote, "Of course Abbie Hoffman is always an inspiration!"

Small world, eh?
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Baffling Resistance to SARS: Seeking clues in AIDS patients. This "backwards we speak headline" tops a Newsday story:

...Amid the mounting (SARS) toll, Newsday learned that a select population in Guangzhou, the southern Chinese city where the epidemic apparently began in November, appears to have resisted infection. At the peak of the outbreak there, in January and February, patients with the then-mystery illness were kept on the second floor of one hospital. The floor was already in use as an AIDS ward.

Guangzhou authorities divided the floor of People's Hospital No. 8 in half, putting SARS patients on one side of the elevator bank, and AIDS patients on the other. Health care workers walked back and forth between the two sides of the floor, and some of those doctors and nurses contracted SARS.

Yet not one of the several dozen AIDS patients or their visitors, some of whom were also HIV positive, developed the disease.

"I am wondering why there was no SARS virus co-infection in the AIDS cases,” Dr. Zhang Fujie, director of AIDS treatment and care for China, said Tuesday in an interview. "We are exchanging information with Hong Kong on this. We will continue to try to understand that.”

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Added to yesterday's Ashleigh Banfield item: Full text of her speech.

That's all she wrote: Well, not exactly, but my computer went nuts, crashing, trying to reboot, whimpering as it struggled to rise, and fell, and finally spasming into a frenzy of flashing lights and a high-pitched whistle that would make dogs howl.

By the time the crazed backup power supply was surgically extracted, I was late for dinner, and the next five carefully crafted blog items were gone. Now the inbox is rebuilding all that spam.

BoingBoing and J.D. Lasica have lots of good stuff today. Go read them.

Time for the garden again, where the squirrels in the apple tree throw things at us.

Thanks again to all who've sent garden blog suggestions. Keep 'em coming and we'll put them out there tomorrow.

Happy May Day.

April 29, 2003, 7:52 p.m.

I was unexpectedly off yesterday. I'm sorry if you came looking for an update and left disappointed.

Country song lurks in a sad Pa. tale: Man kills new wife, self, eight hours after wedding: From Mill Hall, Pa.,

State police at Lamar said Frank W. Shope II, 34, married Lori Ann Spangler, 35, on Friday afternoon, but they began to argue during a small reception in a bar in Mill Hall, Clinton County.

The dispute escalated after they returned to their home in the Camelot Estates Trailer Court in Mill Hall, and a concerned neighbor called police.

Shortly before officers arrived, Shope got a .38 caliber revolver from his vehicle parked in the driveway and shot his new wife in the doorway of the mobile home at about 12:30 a.m. Saturday, police said.

He then shot himself in the head, they said.

...Shope started dating Spangler about five weeks ago after ending a 16-year relationship with another woman, friends and neighbors told The Patriot-News of Harrisburg. The two worked at the Clinton County Country Club, and Shope also worked at a service station in Mill Hall.

What do you think they were fighting about?
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Open competition for the World Trade Center memorial: Anyone over the age of 18 may enter a design. You must register for the competition by May 29 and include a $25 submission fee. Final designs are due June 30.

Among the judges is Vietnam Veterans' Memorial designer Maya Lin, whose advice to appplicants is,

"You enter a competition not necessarily to win but to say what you truly believe needs to be done there. ... What could a memorial be here? Is it a place? Is it an object? Does it frame the site? But again, I hope we get submissions from people who just believe that their solution is right and they need to say it for them, and that's very important."

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Worth repeating from last week:
Free ice cream today AND tomorrow: Today is Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry's stores (from noon-8 p.m.; you get ice cream too, not just a cone), and tomorrow is Free Scoop Night at Baskin-Robbins: "Visit one of our participating stores on Wednesday, April 30, 2003, from 6 to 10 p.m. and get a FREE 2.5 oz scoop of ice cream. Choose from any available flavor."

What a week to be a kid -- free ice cream two days in a row, followed by a free comic book Saturday.
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The Unholy Army of Catholic School Girls: It's a digital paper doll site. In case that link doesn't work with your browser, this one probably will.
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GeoURL ICBM Address Server: GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. Find your neighbor's blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you.
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Who do you think you are, lady? Those dazzled by embedding were not amused by Ashleigh Banfield's analysis of war coverage. Added 4.30.03: Full text of Banfield's speech.

April 24: MSNBC's Banfield: Media filtered realities of war: From the Topeka (Kansas) Capital-Journal,

MANHATTAN -- War's sobering realities never reached American TV screens during the recent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, according to NBC News correspondent Ashleigh Banfield.

"We didn't see what happen when Marines fired M-16s," Banfield said during a Landon lecture appearance today at Kansas State University. "We didn't see what happened after mortars landed, only the puff of smoke. There were horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism? Or was this coverage?"

On the other hand, she said, many U.S. television viewers were treated to a non-stop flow of images presented by "cable news operators who wrap themselves in the American flag and go after a certain target demographic."

"It was a grand and glorious picture that had a lot of people watching," Banfield said, "and a lot of advertisers excited about cable TV news. But it wasn't journalism, because I'm not sure Americans are hesitant to do this again -- to fight another war, because it looked to them like a courageous and terrific endeavor."

Audio: Hear the Landon Lecture delivered by Banfield

April 29: NBC's Banfield Chided Over Criticisms

NBC insiders said few people took Banfield's comments seriously because of her lack of experience -- she is largely working for MSNBC these days, and her primetime show on the network failed last summer. "I don't think people look to Ashleigh Banfield to set the standards of journalism," one person said about the reaction inside the department. "People were sort of rolling their eyes."

Reporters who have returned from Iraq have defended the networks' lack of blood-and-guts video, saying it was impossible to film much of it because of logistical reasons. They also noted that embedded reporters did not see action much of the time in Iraq.

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'A licence to kill? Oh heavens, no!' "Daphne Park does not look like James Bond, but she was the true face of British Intelligence for 30 years." From the Telegraph (U.K.):

As one of MI6's most senior controllers for more than 30 years, she ran agents in Moscow during the Cold War, infiltrated Hanoi during the Vietnam conflict and smuggled men out of the Congo, post-independence, in the boot of her car. When she refers to "the office", she means MI6.

"It's been a huge advantage during my professional career that I've always looked like a cheerful, fat missionary," she says, fondling her onyx pendant. "It wouldn't be any use if you went around looking sinister, would it?"

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Playing Card Deck Shows Way to U.S. Regime Change: Updated, 3:26 p.m. From a perhaps surprising source -- The World Trade Organization in Lausanne, Switzerland (GATT) From a WTO impersonator comes the following:

In the wake of the U.S.'s "pre-emptive" destruction of Iraq, her people, and her culture, the Trade Regulation Organization is issuing a "55 most wanted" playing-card deck similar to the one that the Pentagon issued two weeks ago in Iraq.

The TRO, estimating that the U.S. governing regime is no longer consistent with world peace or prosperity, hopes that the playing cards will show the way to regime change and, eventually, large-scale war crimes proceedings.

The cards are here.

More on the hijacked URL later today.
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A new voice and two old hands bring fire to Doors favorites: Following last week's item about Jim Morrison's heirs suing The New Doors, here's Steve Morse's review of their Boston concert.
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The Feral Eye's Cartoon Links: New links added daily in a bloggy way.
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Gilgamesh tomb believed found: BBC reports, "Archaeologists in Iraq believe they may have found the lost tomb of King Gilgamesh - the subject of the oldest 'book' in history."
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Garden blogs: Thanks for the tips and emails. I hope to pull together the beginnngs of a list here Thursday. So please send any more you find.

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