Subterranean Homepage News

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

April 25, 2003, 7:02 p.m. - (Last week's weblog)

Friday!

Help me find garden blogs, please: I hope to compile a list of these throughout the season. I'd appreciate contributions to the list. Please send an email about any you find and like (or write yourself!), and let me know if you'd like to be credited with the find.

Garden spot (from which come the next four links)
The Daily Muse
Cold Climate Gardening
Marmalade
13 Labs Garden
Garden Blog
outside in the garden
The Garden of Till Hamwhich (of Buckleberry Fern)
Clearwater Landscape Designs

More to come, I hope...
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Topsy-turvy: There's a Chris Rock joke flying around the Net that begins,

You know the world is going crazy when.......the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war ...

To which we can add:

1. Andrew Sullivan (former editor of The New Republic magazine and conservative blogger) sounds like he's about to abandon the Republicans over Sen. Rick Santorum's (R-PA) comments on sex. Sullivan even asks,

Don't you love this new conservative approach to the law - that it can be ignored if necessary? I don't remember them making that argument during president Clinton's impeachment.

2. Tony Blair took secret advice from Bill Clinton on how to reconcile Bush with Europe before the war.

3. British researchers are now discovering that cannabis "compounds may protect the brain against the damaging effects of aging." A colleague was heard to mutter, "Now they tell us..."

4. Iranians want regime change.

5. Now that Napster's been sued to death, a federal judge rules today that file-swapping tools are legal. RIAA loses one.

I'm hoping to find a more normal world while I'm digging in the garden this weekend.
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Ethics 101: San Francisco Chronicle tech columnist Henry Norr was finally axed after a suspension. The official reason was he marked "sick day" on his timecard rather than "vacation day" -- when he was in jail, after being arrested at an antiwar demonstration. The Examiner reports that "Top editors at The San Francisco Chronicle had been looking for a chance to discipline recently suspended columnist Henry Norr for nearly a year for his views on the Israel-Palestine conflict." Earlier, the Examiner reported that

Norr says newspaper union officials told him he could likely negotiate a buyout deal with the Chronicle for $10,000 to $20,000, but he’s not leaving quietly.

A possible deal that would require him to stop talking to the press and agree not to sue was not for Norr, who made national headlines as one of a handful of reporters punished in the last month for antiwar sentiments.

Hartford Courant Travel Editor Denis Horgan, as reported here yesterday, was told to stop blogging on his personal site.

There are tricky journalism ethics issues here. I went looking for precedents, and came across a fascinating page of "case studies" at the University of Indiana. None of them involved blogs -- new ground breaking -- but some address outside activities.

Here's an especially interesting one by Greg Brooks, the metro editor for The Anaheim (Calif.) Bulletin:

How one newspaper handles off-hour activities: How do you maintain your newspaper's credibility when your policy is not to restrict the outside activities of reporters?

The bottom line: "Would I want a written policy? No, I would still rather count on a reporter to make the right decision than to infringe on his or her private life away from work."

Also worth a look:

Freedom of political expression: Do journalists forfeit their right?
Author! Author!: Ethical dilemmas when reporters turn author
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Anonymous speech: Is your mayor online? How about your local judges? Or their wives? Can household names have private opinions and write about them like any other citizen?

Now, they can. At invisiblog.com, anyone can have a weblog:

You don't ever have to reveal your identity - not even to us. You don't have to trust us, because we'll never know who you are.

But, as J.D. Lasica points out, don't try it if you're a journalist wanting to get out the juicy, unprintable details of your beat. Steve Olafson was fired from the Houston Chronicle last year after it became apparent that he was also "Banjo Jones" of Brazosport News.

Olafson said he thought the similarity between a Banjo Jones column on his father's death and the paid obit at the paper about Olafson's father tipped his hand (his editor says he got a tip from a local "newsmaker"), but the challenge is clear: Keep your personas separate if you're gonna do this.

And expect to have bloggers and fans parsing every word for clues to your identity.

Who is that lefty blogger who calls himself Atrios, anyway?
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Jim Morrison's Parents & In-Laws Sue The New Doors: How many Doors does it take to be The Doors?

Related: Steve Morse at the Boston Globe, Cult's Astbury breaks on through to Doors tour:

When the Doors played a VH1 ''Storytellers'' show two years ago, the singers they recruited to do Jim Morrison's parts were an flock of eager disciples. They included Scott Stapp of Creed, Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots, and Ian Astbury of the Cult. The one who emerged to do the new reunion tour was Astbury, who was exactly what the Doors were looking for.

''Ian has that Celtic/Christian thing that Jim had,'' says Doors organist Ray Manzarek. ''And he has that dark shaman thing. He has that power, man. He's not imitating Morrison, but he's coming from the same place.''

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Finding Best Hotel Rate on Web May Not Be Easy: Reuters reports,

Consumers searching for the best deal on hotel rooms on the Internet should shop around, since no single travel site stands head and shoulders above rivals, a consumer advocacy group said on Wednesday.

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Right-brain fun: The American Museum of Photography.
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April 24, 2003, 7:02 p.m.

Subterranean Homepage News can now come to you as email, weekdays at 8 p.m. You have to register at projo.com, so they know who to send it to. Here's the "email newsletter" page -- the "shenews" checkbox is at the very bottom.

Eight Days In An Iraqi Prison: An eight-part series by Newsday reporter Matthew McAllester on his strange stay in a Baghdad prison last month:

If we were being taken to the border, then we would likely be taken in the white-and-orange Chevrolet Suburbans that worked as taxis between Baghdad and Syria and Jordan. Instead, two white pickup trucks stood outside a side door of the hotel. My stomach contracted. In one I could see Molly Bingham, whom I barely knew, staring at me with a sort of passive horror. In the second truck sat other figures, including a Danish photographer named Johan Spanner, whom I also had met only days before. Security men in the vehicles guarded them. Others stood around. From the belt of one, whose face was sharp and without many traces of mercy, hung a pair of handcuffs. On the rear of the pickups were emplacements for machine guns. This was not the sort of transportation you take to Syria.

AP

Right to left, Newsday writer Matt McAllester, freelance photographer Molly Bingham and freelance photographer Johan Spanner.

"We go to Syria?” I asked the man with the handcuffs. He looked at me blankly for a few seconds, nodded and turned away to Salem.

I understand a little Arabic. In the days that followed, I never revealed this to our jailers. It let me pick things up. This time I picked up the following: "I told them we're taking them to Syria,” Salem said to the man with the handcuffs.

"We're in big trouble,” I mumbled to Moises. "We're in big trouble, man.”

Freelance photographer Molly Bingham, on assignment for Esquire, was taken at the same time. Here's her tale from the Guardian (U.K.) earlier this month.

Bingham's story says the group was imprisoned for seven days, not eight as McAllester headline suggests. On their return, McAllester told a New Zealand Herald reporter in Jorddan,

"We were in Abu Ghraib prison for seven or eight days. There were no specific charges. It wasn't much fun but we were not physically hurt and we are very happy to be out," said Matthew McAllester, 33, shortly after crossing the border.

McAllester, a reporter for the US newspaper Newsday, was speaking from a four-wheel drive in Jordan's desert town of Ruweished, near the border.

...The group made few other comments during the late night stop in Ruweished, saying they were keen to get to the Jordanian capital Amman to rest before commenting further.

The discrepancy probably arises from whether they count their interrogation in their hotel rooms late on the first night as a "day."

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Related? The Baghdad deal: From Asia Times,

BAGHDAD - Much of the world was surprised. After the spirited resistance in the south of Iraq, how could Baghdad possibly have fallen in only two days?

An Asia Times Online investigation in Baghdad, Tikrit and Najaf has yielded a clear certainty among Iraqis, both Sunni and Shi'ite, as to the answer: The Pentagon and the Ba'ath Party leadership made a safqua ("secret deal" in Arabic) for the (almost) bloodless fall of Baghdad. Crucially, this safqua may have included a package of American green cards for top Republican and Special Republican Guard commanders and their families.

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Money talks: CNN's Bill Hemmer interviewed Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) this afternoon:

Hemmer: Senator, one final point. You said it's going to backfire on the White House. What's the chance of this backfiring on George Voinovich, [Sen.]Olympia Snowe [R-Maine], yourself, from the White House pressure?

Chafee: I think most Americans have the same questions that Senator Voinovich and Senator Snowe and [Sen.] John McCain [R-Arizona] and myself have about this: How can you be proposing more tax cuts? The big tax cuts, the $1.5 trillion in the spring of 2001, didn't stimulate the economy.

Now you're coming back for more? At the same time, we had these enormous expenditures in Afghanistan, with homeland security, with the war in Iraq. Just doesn't make sense.

Hemmer, asking if White House pressure might backfire on Chafee, probably doesn't realize that the lead local story in The Providence Journal (reg. req.) today is White House rejects appeal for disaster declaration:

President Bush has again turned down Governor Carcieri's appeal for a disaster declaration for The Station nightclub fire, and for aid through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

With that avenue closed, the state's hope for additional aid to help pay for the response to the Feb. 20 fire now rests with ongoing discussions with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and with the efforts of the state's congressional delegation to add money for the Rhode Island fire into some other bill.

The Bush administration had turned down Carcieri's original request for a disaster declaration in the days after the West Warwick fire, which killed 99 people, saying it did not qualify for aid under the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief Act, which states, in part, that a disaster must be beyond the capacity of state and local governments to effectively manage.

Carcieri appealed the decision, and got essentially the same answer yesterday.

". . . It has been determined that this event, though tragic in nature, is not beyond the combined capabilities of the state and affected local governments, given the resources that have been made available from federal, state, local and voluntary entities," wrote Michael D. Brown, the undersecretary for emergency preparedness and response, in a letter to Carcieri dated yesterday.

Carcieri has projected the one-year cost of the fire to be $8.7 million. Some long-range cost estimates "exceed a hundred million dollars," Carcieri wrote to the president in his appeal, "partially because of the enormous costs associated with long-term disability and care of burn victims."

Carcieri had asked the president for access to public and individual assistance programs, such as unemployment benefits, crisis counseling, uninsured medical costs and money for other unmet needs.

There's money for war, money for tax cuts, but no money for widows, orphans and terribly burned and disabled young people?

I don't think Chafee needs to worry about local reaction to his tax-cut position.
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If you dig to China, how long would it take to get there?
42 minutes. Scientific American says so.

And when you fell through the hole, you'd accelerate till you got to the center of the earth, then start slowing down till your speed in China was zero. You might even land on your feet.

But it's just as quick to go around the molten core, I certainly would.
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Microsoft Pulls XP Patch: From PC World,

Microsoft pulled a security patch for Windows XP systems with Service Pack 1 installed after customers complained that installing the patch slowed their systems to a crawl.

Microsoft is working on a revised patch for Windows XP Service Pack 1 and will reissue that patch when it has been completed and fully tested, the Redmond, Washington, software maker said in a revised version of its security bulletin MS03-013 posted late Wednesday.

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Denis Horgan of the Hartford Courant: former columnist, now former blogger (From Editor & Publisher: Hartford Paper Tells Employee to Kill Blog).

The comments on Horgan's farewell blog post are the best.
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Kiddie psychedelia working for upbeat Polyphonic Spree: You might want to read that headline again. I sure did. From the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times:

There are a lot of wonderful and miraculous things about one of the strangest touring bands in America, the Polyphonic Spree, a group that sounds like a mix of Up With People and Pink Floyd.

This 23-person Dallas-based orchestra/glee club dresses in white robes and looks like that comet-chasing cult. It was playing one of its first U.S. shows at the ungodly hour of 10 a.m. to an audience of music critics at the Texas South By Southwest festival.

The members sang and danced for 30 minutes, with sunshiny voices, like a bunch of hand-raising Holy Rollers, surrounding their joyful jumping bean of a French horn player and backed by keyboards, drums, viola, trombone, trumpet, bass and theremin.

... one by one, the writers and music industry professionals got sucked into these songs that sound like something from a childhood Disney record, mixed with strong surrealistic overtones of Frank Zappa or Radiohead.

But the real miracle came after the group had finished its set. There was a moment of silence before a burst of applause, and the members walked through the audience with boxes of homemade compact discs for sale. These cynical scribes, many of whom hadn't bought a disc in decades -- and for whom home-burned discs by new untried bands are about as welcome as an e-mailed offer of great riches from someone in Africa -- stood up and started shelling out dollars as if they were stocking up on hot dogs at a baseball doubleheader.

Here's their site.
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Digital photographs, many of them enhanced, by John Walkenbach.

Walkenbach is also a blogger (The J-Walk Weblog) who finds very funny sites to link to, but today he's offering pure gold to those of you still browsing with Internet Explorer: How to kill popups.

I've been using this technique for about a year, and I highly recommend it. I rarely see any pop-up ads. Those that do appear are spawned from sites that I've added to my Trusted Zone for one reason or another.

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O.J. nixes reality show ...but would love to do TV commentary on Robert Blake

He is aware of video footage which was shot during his travels to a series of hip-hop concerts in 2001 and 2002.

"To be honest, this footage would get pretty boring," he said. "Maybe for a half hour it would be interesting but not for a series."

He said the videos show him arriving at airports, signing autographs and talking at hip-hop concerts.

"I had a lot of fun," he said. "We were welcomed everywhere. But this was not meant to be shown anywhere except as rebuttal to those who say I'm a pariah."

...As for commenting on the Blake case, he said he has been contacted by TV outlets which he declined to name.

"I'd love to do it," he said. "I think I have a lot of insight. I don't know if he's guilty or not but I know there's no such thing anymore as innocent until proven guilty."

Blake is accused of murdering wife Bonny Lee Bakley in Los Angeles in 2001.

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Blog link for sale on eBay: Blogger Tony Pierce's item is listed in the category "Everything Else:Services:Other" as, "I Will Link You on My Blog." In the text, we get the details: "I will link you at the upper left hand corner of my blog for the entire month of May."

With 5 days, 4 hours left, he's up to $20.50.
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April 23, 2003, 7:25 p.m. - (Last week's weblog)

Subterranean Homepage News can now come to you as email, weekdays at 8 p.m. You have to register at projo.com, so they know who to send it to. Here's the "email newsletter" page -- the "shenews" checkbox is at the very bottom.

Role of Women in New Iraq of Concern, reports Women's eNews. Here's the subhed:

The State Department says the Iraq war was fought in part to improve the lot of women. Yet, experts on the status of women in Iraq are concerned that the relative freedom women enjoyed will be lost as conservatives gain power in the new government.

On the one hand, Iraqi women are encouraged by an April 11 speech at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, by Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs Paula J. Dobriansky (here's a transcript). Excerpt:

Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs Paula J. Dobriansky

...we will support Iraqi efforts to prepare school materials that will help teach the country’s youth about tolerance and individual freedoms, rather than the belligerent, totalitarian content that has been standard in Saddam’s textbooks for an entire generation. On the economic front, we are also thinking about how to help Iraqi women overcome the legacy of dependence on government rations and handouts. To cite just one instance, we hope to invite a representative group of aspiring Iraqi businesswomen to an NGO-sponsored Arab Women’s Summit, planned for Morocco this coming June.

But this was before the Shiite fundamentalists perhaps threw a monkey wrench into U.S. plans for the next version of Iraq:

"The question of women and women's priority are something that gets negotiated away very quickly," said Sanam Anderlini. Iran-born Anderlini, director of the Women Waging Peace Policy Commission in Washington, believes Dobriansky is sincere in her efforts for Iraqi women, but she notes the growing rifts in the U.S. administration.

"We might have the State Department saying one thing, but you have to bear in mind the level of their influence," she says, pointing out that it's the Pentagon running Iraq's reconstruction show and that officials there have said nothing about involving women.

Today, though, the State Department calendar has Dobriansky hosting "a roundtable at the Department of State for non-governmental organizations and members of the 'Women for a Free Iraq' organization for a discussion about the legacy of Saddam Hussein's rule and the human rights situation of women in Iraq."

Stay tuned...

Related: Women's eNews starts an Arabic news site. The New York Times writes about it.

Here's the url, but the site is in Arabic, and your browser may not like trying to find the fonts.
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UN backs off from battle with sugar industry: From the Financial Times,

United Nations food and health authorities drew back from a full-scale confrontation with the world's sugar industry on Wednesday by saying their latest recommendations on sugar consumption were guidelines rather than standards requiring regulation.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and World Health Organisation were reacting to sugar industry complaints about an FAO-WHO report that suggests people wanting to avoid chronic diseases should limit daily consumption of free sugars to less than 10 per cent of total energy intake. (

Free sugars include sugars added to foodstuffs by manufacturers, cooks or consumers, as well as sugars naturally present in fruit juices, honey and syrups.

The UN recommendations have outraged US sugar producers, who have indicated they may lobby the Bush administration and Congress to link US funding for the WHO to changes in research methods at the UN agency. The US supplies 22 per cent of the WHO's budget.

An earlier story in the Guardian (UK) reported that the sugar industry "claims that the review by international experts which decided on the 10% limit is scientifically flawed, insisting that other evidence indicates that a quarter of our food and drink intake can safely consist of sugar."
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Free ice cream next Tuesday AND Wednesday: Speaking of sugar... Next Tuesday (April 29) is Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry's stores (from noon-8 p.m.; you get ice cream too, not just a cone), and Wednesday 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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Daddy takes the T-bird away again: Gearbox at Slate has context and links. Poor sales, says Ford.
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The Onion: New Fox Reality Show to Determine Ruler Of Iraq.
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Googlediving: How to Visit Google's Last Result: The new word and technique comes from Ross Rader, the point from Doc Searls.

The trick lies in guessing where the last page is. Bret noted that there were 950,000+ entries for ICANN, so presumably changing this number to 949,990 would do the trick, but natch - that just brings up an empty result set.

I decided to see if this was just a big number problem and dumped 999 in. Again, nothing. Scaling back to 500 got me something again - so I split the difference and went up to 750. No results again. I dropped back to 700, got results and then decided to increment by 10 until nothing.

In this case, the magic number is 720 - there are 727 unique entries in the GoogleDB for "ICANN" - the last of which being the Webopedia "Who's Who" bio's that start with "C" - includes Vint Cerf, ICANN's current chairman.

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New reality show in the works – starring O.J. Simpson: Fortunately, it's only slated for satellite TV... for now. The Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press has the story

Fort Myers’ Norman Pardo — called one of the most culturally diverse rednecks you'll see — is bringing O.J. Simpson back into the spotlight.

Pardo’s publically traded company, Spiderboy International, Inc., has signed a one-season contract with the Urban America Television Network to televise a 13-week series starring Simpson. The reality-based show will be aired during prime time starting in June.

UATVN has approximately 75 affiliates and comes into 22 million households through satellite TV.

David Simon, UATVN executive vice president for network operations, declined to release details about the show.

...Pardo has approximately 60 hours of tape of Simpson, most of which was shot during a 12-city tour from 2001-02. “They were impressed with the amount of equipment we had as well as the quality of the videos,” Pardo said of the network. “They thought they were more exciting than Anna Nicole and The Osbournes combined.”

There's just one problem: AP reports that nobody has talked to Simpson about it:

(AP) - O.J. Simpson could become the star of a new reality television show that would be centered around snippets of his appearances at hip-hop concerts.

But his lawyer says there's one problem: Simpson hasn't been approached by the companies that are planning to create the show.

"He's not in a show," Simpson's attorney Yale Galander said today (Wednesday). "They can't have a reality TV show and call it the OJ Simpson TV show without our involvement."

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Goodbye, Nina...

April 22, 2003, 7:08 p.m. - (Last week's weblog)

Al Jazeera’s Edge: 35 million viewers. A great read at New York Metro:

Indeed, while the results of Gulf II remain entirely uncertain, it is clear that, along with Saddam Hussein being over with, Al Jazeera is going to be very big—big to an extent and at a scale that is just dawning on the Al Jazeera folk themselves. The network is being transformed the way Gulf I transformed CNN—but then, CNN’s audience has rarely exceeded more than a few million, whereas Al Jazeera already speaks to a good 35 million every day.

“By the time this whole thing is over,” I said to the three correspondents, “you’ll be far and away the dominant media organization in the region—one of the largest in the world!”

They clearly knew this but did not seem, for reasons of modesty or coolness, to want to quite claim it.

“I mean,” I said, “you could end up being Time Warner Al Jazeera.”

“Al Jazeera Time Warner,” said Omar.

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Related: Map game: Where is Qatar??? Drag a country's name to its outline on the interactive map. Yes, it's hard: They're all in the middle east. via Liz Donovan
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Fast food comes to Iraq: From the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald,

Basra: Fastfood giants Pizza Hut and Burger King have set up their first franchises inside war-torn Iraq, even as many aid convoys waited on the borders for the war to officially end.

The arrival of the two restaurants - sited inside giant trailers on a British military base near Basra - won a rapturous welcome from soldiers, whose limited range of rations lost their appeal many weeks ago.

But some officers were less keen on the new arrivals, which are due to start selling food tomorrow.

"I would prefer we got decent showers and toilets sorted out first," muttered one high-ranking officer.

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The Heartland Wrestles With Biotechnology is a fascinating story at the Washington Post about mainstream farmers' growing fear of Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" wheat. Approval of the genetically engineered strain may be inevitable, but it's banned in Europe, and "America's breadbasket" fears losing its market.

...Doane, the Monsanto industry-affairs officer, has plied North Dakota on the company's behalf. At his suggestion, a group of skeptical farmers, not including the Wileys, boarded a Monsanto plane in December and flew to St. Louis to talk to company leaders. The discussion was mostly calm, but Louis Kuster, a grower from Stanley, N.D., and a member of a state commission that promotes wheat sales, said he took offense when a company executive, Robb Fraley, seemed to imply that farmers opposing Monsanto might be advancing the agenda of radical environmental groups.

"At that point I countered, and I did raise my voice a little bit and I was a little bit angry, and I looked right straight at him and he was only about five feet away from me, and I said, 'You're not talking to the Greens here today,' " Kuster recalled. " 'We're money people. We need to make money, too.' "

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Reader's Digest Magazine To End Use Of Sweepstakes: Freely clickable, from the Wall Street Journal.
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Tired of the clatter of sitcoms and talkshows? How about some meat for your ears? Lie back and listen to Philosophy Radio.
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Elegant eye candy: It's wrapped inside a Honda ad, but it's also a stunning bit of kinetic art: a nuts-and-bolts marble-go-througher. If you marvel at precisely timed actions that set off other actions, go there. Everything in the ad did happen as shown, they say, with no computer generation involved. (Flash 6 required)
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Doctors' blogs: At American Medical News.
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April 21, 2003, 6:35 p.m.

Not even the troops had the"Iraqi playing cards" when they went on eBay: It's the spam of the moment, and there are 2,875 "Iraq playing cards" for sale on eBay right now. But none are the real McCoy.

Stars & Stripes reported last week, in Buyers beware: The real Iraq 'most wanted' cards are still awaiting distribution,

The troops don’t have the cards yet... according to Pentagon spokeswoman Megan Fox.

“The cards have been sent to CENTCOM, but they have not been distributed yet,” Fox said Tuesday, after speaking to an official in Qatar.

Meanwhile, there are fewer than 200 actual decks to be handed out, according to Navy Lt. Cmdr. Jim Brooks, a spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“CENTCOM asked for a couple hundred [decks], and we made them in our own print shop and sent an initial shipment out before the war,” Brooks said in a Tuesday telephone interview.

But Central Command never asked for more cards beyond the original 200 sets, Brooks said.

“If they had wanted more, we were prepared to have a [commercial] contractor do it for us, but they didn’t ask,” Brooks said.

What is readily available is a computer “PDF” file that allows anyone with Internet access to download the playing card templates for free.

Pentagon officials quickly decided to make the PDF files available after getting swamped with requests for the cards, Brooks said.

“With such a large interest, it was the only thing I could do,” Brooks said. “The money to make the cards comes out of operational funds, and that means taxpayer dollars. There was no way we were going to print up a bunch of giveaways” just to satisfy collectors, Brooks said.

The Stars & Stripes story notes that some are "selling electronic links to the PDF site — something any computer user with access to a search engine could quickly locate."

The Dallas Morning News (reg.req.) today reports that an Arlington, Texas, company, Liberty Playing Card Co., is selling decks made from the pdf. The wholesale minimum is 35 cases (144 decks to the case) @ $432/case, which works out to $3 per deck.

Liberty directs retail buyers to its distributors, one of which, www.Iraqs55MostWanted.com, a site owned by Commerce Street, Inc., also of Arlington, sells them for $6.95 plus $3.95 shipping per order (not per deck). A page there, About Iraqi Freedom Playing Cards, is quite straightforward about it all:

# The United States Embassy (in Kuwait) distributed the first professionally printed decks, with the US Embassy seal on the back. These cards were printed by Liberty Playing Cards, in the United States.

# These original cards printed for the US Troops and US Embassy are not available for sale or distribution. The government did make the artwork for the cards available to the general public so collector's editions could be printed. These "collector's editions" are what's available for sale to the general public.

# These cards available on our web site are printed in the United States by the Liberty Playing Card Co., who printed the cards for the US Embassy in Kuwait. These are the same cards printed for the US Embassy, except they have the "camo" back like the cards distributed to the troops, instead of the US Embassy seal. Cards with the US Embassy seal are not available for distribution or sale to the public.

Liberty offers a link to the DOD pdf link, and adds,

If the CentCom.mil copy is no longer available, we have a copy here:
http://www.IraqiPlayingCards.com/playing_cards.pdf

The other distributor cited by Liberty, card-press.com, sells one deck for $7.95, with discounts on shipping for more than one, and bulk discounts.

Thanks to Al Tompkins at Poynter.org for the Stars & Stripes link.
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Bridesmaid from the green lagoon? And the bride wore what?

Some frocks look like grandma's tablecloth or worse, but our favorite is at right. If this was the bridesmaids' getup, we wish we could see what the bride wore.

The dyed shoes were saved for St. Patty's Day, we suspect.
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The Man Who Hijacked Napster: Yesterday in the Boston Globe Magazine,

Shawn Fanning was the brains behind the popular Internet startup, but it was his uncle, John Fanning of Hull, who called the shots - and pocketed an estimated $1 million before the business went bankrupt.

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There are image, galleries, links and print resources.

From the beginning a unique and characteristic sound endeared the Harley-Davidson to its owners. The Harley's pistons connected to its crankshaft in a way that caused the motor to give two "pops" then a quiet pause as it hummed along the road.

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Is your diet 25 percent sugar? Pretty amazing story by The Guardian (U.K.) -- Sugar industry threatens to scupper World Health Organization's funding: WHO's new healthy eating guidelines are to suggest no more than 10 percent of your diet be sugar, the industry wants it to be 25 percent:

The sugar industry in the US is threatening to bring the World Health Organisation to its knees by demanding that Congress end its funding unless the WHO scraps guidelines on healthy eating, due to be published on Wednesday.

The threat is being described by WHO insiders as tantamount to blackmail and worse than any pressure exerted by the tobacco lobby.

In a letter to Gro Harlem Brundtland, the WHO's director general, the Sugar Association says it will "exercise every avenue available to expose the dubious nature" of the WHO's report on diet and nutrition, including challenging its $406m funding from the US.

The industry is furious at the guidelines, which say that sugar should account for no more than 10% of a healthy diet. It claims that the review by international experts which decided on the 10% limit is scientifically flawed, insisting that other evidence indicates that a quarter of our food and drink intake can safely consist of sugar.

"Taxpayers' dollars should not be used to support misguided, non-science-based reports which do not add to the health and well-being of Americans, much less the rest of the world," says the letter. "If necessary we will promote and encourage new laws which require future WHO funding to be provided only if the organisation accepts that all reports must be supported by the preponderance of science."

The association, together with six other big food industry groups, has also written to the US health secretary, Tommy Thompson, asking him to use his influence to get the WHO report withdrawn. The coalition includes the US Council for International Business, comprising more than 300 companies, including Coca-Cola and Pepsico.

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Privately built spacecraft: Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne and its drop-ship, the White Knight.

MOJAVE, Calif. -- What has been billed as the "First Private Manned Space Program" and a new, never-seen spaceship, was unveiled Friday by noted design wizard Burt Rutan and his company, Scaled Composites, Inc.

Aggressive work on a passenger-carrying sub-orbital craft has been active and hidden from public view for two years.

Labeled as the SpaceShipOne Project, the unveiling took place here about 80 miles north of Los Angeles before a large crowd of journalists and invited guests.

The company plans to use the craft to compete for the X Prize, a $10 million cash prize that will be awarded to the first team that successfully launches three people to an altitude of 62.5 miles (100 kilometers) returns the safely to Earth and then repeat that feat with the same vehicle within two weeks.

An earlier project of Rutan's, an aircraft named Voyager, made the first nonstop, non-refueled flight around the world in nine days in 1986.
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TV's Military 'Embeds': Colman McCarthy in the Washington Post may explain why so many sought alternative war news:

The tube turned into a parade ground for military men -- all well-groomed white males -- saluting the ethic that war is rational, that bombing and shooting are the way to win peace, and that their uniformed pals in Iraq were there to free people, not slaughter them. Perspective vanished, as if caught in a sandstorm of hype and war-whooping. If the U.S. military embedded journalists to report the war from Iraq, journalists back in network studios embedded militarists to explain it. Either way, it was one-version news.

Why no dissenting voices to say what millions of people around the world proclaimed in the streets: that this U.S. invasion was illegal, unjust and unnecessary? Why were pacifists from such groups as the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Pax Christi USA, Peace Action and the American Friends Service Committee not given airtime to counter the generals? Why were leaders from Veterans for Common Sense or Veterans Against the War in Iraq not brought in to offer their analysis and view: that what the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Powell-Wolfowitz war machine has been doing to the people of Iraq is brutal and criminal and that political, legal and moral alternatives to violence exist? Why have no social workers or teachers from America's inner cities been invited to sit across from the generals and give their views on military spending -- more than $11,000 a second? In wartime, presumably, the message to peace activists is shut up or shut down.

Not entirely, though. C-SPAN, as always, let the cameras roll on the widest range of voices. It has televised news programs from the Middle East, Asia and Europe and taken phone calls from anyone patient enough to wait for an open line. C-SPAN offers the left wing, the right wing and the whole bird. It was on C-SPAN, not the networks, that a three-hour antiwar forum was aired on March 22 in which the director of Veterans for Peace said that hours after Congress endorsed a resolution to support the troops in Iraq it proposed cutting $25 billion from health, education and disability programs for veterans.

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Watermarks as an alternative to Digital Rights Management: J.D. Lasica, senior editor on Online Journalism Review, engages in a "blogversation" with Stanford cyberlaw professor Larry Lessig on the digital watermarking debate that centers on how to prevent "piracy" of Hollywood's products.

JD also points to Tips and tricks for Google geeks (it's a phonebook!) at the International Herald Tribune and several other bits of search engine news.
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Bastion of Buddhism faces gender debate: The Christian Science Monitor reports,

NAKHON PATHOM, THAILAND – From the outside, it looks like any other temple in Thailand, a country that considers itself a bastion of Buddhist culture. A cluster of modest wooden buildings and a well-kept lawn hide behind a 15-foot-high golden Buddha that faces the busy highway to Bangkok.

But this temple is breaking the mold of Thai Buddhism. Its nominal head is a female monk ordained two years ago in Sri Lanka as Dhammananda Bhikkhuni. One of only a few women to have challenged the male makeup of Thailand's 300,000 monks, she now wants to extend that right to other women, and has turned to the Senate for help.

As a result, a subcommittee is considering a proposal to permit the ordination of women as monks. The final say, however, lies not with lawmakers but with the country's Buddhist clergy, known as the Sangha, whose ruling council of elders has long opposed the idea.

via news we can use
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com