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By Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
May 9, 2003 6:22 p.m. - (Last
week's weblog)
My piece of the Iraqi blogger story: Now that
he's apparently safe, I feel free to publish a snippet of an email exchange
I had with "Salam
Pax," the blogger who seems to be in Baghdad, back in February.
SL: Salam, where did you learn such flawless English? Your spelling
and phrasing are perfect, your idioms American.
And... what's the reaction to your blog in Baghdad?
>your idioms American.
MTV and the american movies are the new global religion. i don't try
it just comes out like that.
>> Salam, where did you learn such flawless English?
before 9-11 i would have said I am what you call a citizen of the global
village, i have lived in here and there, speak arabic english and german.
now i just feel like someone who has lost all identity by trying real
hard to be from no particular place.
>And... what's the reaction to your blog in Baghdad?
if they knew it existed I wouldn't be blogging anymore, I would probably
be finding out what it feels like to have electricity running thru various
body parts.
It would seem he might be able to blog more freely now, and perhaps reveal
his name. I've asked.
Is he authentic? Here at projo.com, we traced his email headers as far
as TerraNet in Lebanon, which I only bring up here because of a comment
on his revived blog:
One of the funniest things was talking to my boss in Beirut after the
war (Thuraya should make an ad saying : “Operation Iraqi Freedom,
brought to you in association with Thuraya phones”) and him telling
me that someone called Diana Moon is bugging us about a certain Salam
Pax. I can’t even remember telling her where I work.
We wondered if he worked for an Internet Service Provider, since he seemed
to be operating quite fearlessly: Until a week or so before his March
24 disappearance, he was quite openly posting the names and urls of sites
that had linked to him in the previous 24 hours, along with the number
of hits he had received from each site. I had happened to send what's
below March 13 to my boss, to note how both urls were still going strong.
(The directory of this blog changed, but so many people were using the
old url that a bit of coding was added to make both urls work.)
projo.com
| Providence | Weblogs | Subterranean Homepage News [32]
projo.com | Providence
| Technology | Subterranean Homepage News [15]
I replied to "Salam," saying,
Thanks for replying. You're very visible -- your referrers' list
is getting really long, ya know -- and it's hard to believe you're
not already known to those who might watch you. It is perhaps this
that causes doubt about who and where you are.
Your mail seems to be coming through Beirut, btw. Is that real?
He never answered.
Link
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The original gonzo journalist marries: I'm late
with this, but it's still fun. Here's
the AP report:
DENVER -- Journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who often portrays himself
as hard-drinking and unpredictable, was on his best behavior as he married
his longtime assistant in a ceremony in Aspen.
"He had a nice suit jacket and slacks on. He brought her flowers.
That never happens here. We were all impressed with that," Pitkin
County Deputy Clerk Sherry McIntire said Friday.
The 66-year-old Thompson, best-known as the author of "Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas," married Anita Beymuk, 30, in the clerk's
office April 24.
The couple live in Woody Creek, near Aspen. ...
Here's Thompson's own account, in his ESPN column: The
Royal Wedding
My own Marriage was the subject of extreme excitement and big news
around here last week. It dwarfed everything else, including the NBA
playoffs, the Kentucky Derby, Kevin Millwood's no-hitter, Naked Bowling,
and the feverish search for Saddam Hussein in Iraq. A bold headline
in the Aspen Daily News said "Congratulations to Woody Creek's
Royal Couple," flanked by photos of me and Anita scowling and smiling
out at the Reader.
Surprise surprise, eh?
It was done with fine style and secrecy in order to avoid the craziness
and drunken violence that local lawmen feared would inevitably have
followed the ceremony. I know nothing about planning even the simplest
wedding, nothing at all, and neither does sweet Anita, who is now my
Wife. So we did it the Bhuddist way. We drove straight to the County
Courthouse on a stormy Thursday morning and were happily married by
noon. Sheriff Bob performed the ceremony, his wife took pictures, and
a black priest from Sicily handled the video camera. It was fun.
Our honeymoon was even simpler. We drank heavily for a few hours with
Chris Goldstein and accepted fine gifts from strangers, then we drove
erratically back out to the Owl Farm and prepared for our own, very
private celebration by building a huge fire, icing down a magnum of
Crystal Champagne and turning on the Lakers-Timberwolves game until
we passed out and crawled to the bedroom. Amor Vincit Omnia.
Related: Hunter
College: Doing Time As Hunter Thompson's Editorial Assistant.
A first-person account.
Link
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Christian
Right Talks of Bolting GOP in 2004: In the conservative publication
NewsMax,
Conservative religious activists cite the latest insult: the Republican
Party’s failure to rally behind Sen. Rick Santorum, whose comments
about the upcoming Supreme Court case on consensual homosexual acts
triggered a national firestorm.
With the left mounting a major battle to redefine marriage, pro-family
leaders are worried that the White House and Beltway Republicans care
little about this issue and other social issues.
The
NRA's unhappy, too.
And then there's The Gambler, Bill Bennett. The
right has been doing a lot of intramural arguing over this one. It
could be a tough coalition to hold together.
Link
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Eminent
domain and private gain: A report claims that 10,000 properties have
been seized by cities for private developers. From the Christian Science
Monitor,
PORT CHESTER, NEW YORK – Bill Brody thought he was set for life.
He'd bought and renovated four buildings on South Main Street in this
struggling New York suburb and was successfully renting them out.
Then he was informed the village was taking his property - all of it.
And because he missed a small, legal notice in the paper, he even lost
the right to fight the decision.
The village had simply declared eminent domain, so that another private
developer could build part of a Stop & Shop and parking lot where
Mr. Brody's commercial buildings sat.
"It's ludicrous," says Brody. "If it was for a road
or a school or a highway I wouldn't bother."
But since the village was taking his property only to give it to another
private developer, Brody decided to take it to court.
Sound familiar? It does if you've been following the story of Joe Mollo.
Journal columnist Bob Kerr puts it this way.
... Joe Mollo, the guy from Smithfield who is having his life jerked
out from under him by the state Economic Development Corporation.
It's a shameless, grubby piece of work -- a hideous affront to hard
work, home and family.
The state started the process of taking Mollo's land a year ago, exercising
its power of eminent domain and arguing that it was for the public good.
So is the land being taken for a hospital? A highway? Nope. It's the
expansion of an office park for Fidelity Investments. The state argues
that Fidelity will offer more and better paying jobs than Mollo's Breezy
Hill Farm and Garden Center.
Who cares? Mollo's property, where his home and business are located,
has been in the family for 92 years. It is a part of the community,
one family's place in the mix that makes Smithfield different from Scituate.
Taking it to make way for corporate expansion sends a chilling message
to property owners all over the state.
Mollo says he will fight. He will take the case to federal court, tie
up the land taking for years and stay right where he is in the meantime.
(For this and other Journal stories about Mollo -- reg. req. -- put "eminent
domain" into the search box at the top right of this page.)
Here's the kicker from the Monitor:
The Constitution does give local governments the right to condemn property
through eminent domain for "public use" if the owner is compensated.
But in the past five years, both state and local governments have taken
or threatened to take more than 10,000 homes and small businesses such
as Brody's to turn them over to private developers, according
to a report compiled by the Institute
for Justice, a nonprofit advocacy law firm in Washington.
The
introduction to the report
(.pdf download) charges,
No one—at least no one besides lawyers and bureaucrats—would
think “public use” means a casino, condominiums or a private
office building. Yet these days, that’s exactly how state and
local governments use eminent domain—as part of corporate welfare
incentive packages and deals for more politically favored businesses.
This is the first report ever to document and quantify the uses and
threats of eminent domain for private parties. We have compiled this
information from published accounts and court papers covering the five-year
period from January 1, 1998 through December 31, 2002. The results are
chilling.
Link
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Grandma
Prisbrey's Bottle Village: "This folk art environment (in
Simi Valley, Calif.) is the single handed work of self taught senior
citizen Tressa 'Grandma' Prisbrey."
 Beginning
construction in 1956 at age 60, and working until 1981, Tressa "Grandma"
Prisbrey transformed her 1/3 acre lot into Bottle Village, an otherworld
of shrines, wishing wells, walkways, other random constructions, plus
15 life size structures all made from found objects placed in mortar.
The name "Bottle Village" comes from the structures themselves
- made of tens of thousands of bottles unearthed via daily visits to
the dump for years, some of them from her husbands own bad habit. Appearances
aside, Bottle Village began as two purely practical needs for a cheap
building material to build a structure to store her pencil collection,
which eventually numbered 17,000 and a bottle wall to keep away the
smell and dust of the adjacent turkey farm. However, it was her own
ability to have fun and infuse her wit and whimsy into what she made
which over time became the essence of Bottle Village. Practicality alone
would not explain The Leaning Tower of Bottle Village, the Dolls Head
Shrine, car-headlight birdbaths, and the intravenous- feeding- tube
firescreen, a few examples of her delightfully idiosyncratic creations.
The 1994 Northridge earthquake badly damaged the Village, and this site
hopes to help rebuild it.
Link
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TV
watchdog checks claims of bias on Murdoch channel : From The Guardian
(U.K.),
The Murdoch-owned Fox News Channel, whose determinedly patriotic stance
during the Iraq conflict brought it critical notoriety but commercial
success, is under investigation by television regulators in Britain
for alleged bias.
The independent television commission is investigating nine complaints
by viewers of the channel, broadcast on Sky Digital satellite, also
controlled by Rupert Murdoch.
If the network is found to have breached the ITC's "due impartiality"
rules, it could be forced out.
Link
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Mars:
Dead or Alive? Published in IEEE Spectrum Online, an engineering
zine.
Recent missions to Mars have focused on the search for water, past
or present, as a surrogate for life itself. But now a British-led team
is working to renew the search for life directly, fueled by doubts about
the equipment that prompted NASA to declare Mars a dead world some 26
years ago.
If all goes according to plan, a Soyuz-Fregat booster rocket will lift
off from Baikonur cosmodrome next month carrying an extremely compact
and sophisticated life detection probe that might finally settle one
of the most intriguing questions in science: did Mars once harbor microbial
life—and is it still there?
Link
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The
Disappearance of Saturday Morning: "Saturday morning no longer
means kids in front of TV sets across the country, glued to the latest
in hip cartoons. Why? Gerard Raiti investigates the death of an era."
It's in Animation Magazine:
In a time not so long ago, Saturday mornings were indicative of one
and only one pastime for children -- watching cartoons. Throughout the
'70s and '80s, the broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC dominated the
Saturday morning airwaves by inundating children with cartoons. Cartoons
on these networks used to earn ratings of more than 20 million viewers.
Today, network Saturday morning cartoons only exist on ABC Kids, FOX
Kids and Kids’ WB!, the latter two networks either did not exist
or did not air cartoons two decades ago. Current successful cartoons
on FOX Kids or Kids’ WB! can garner a mere two million viewers.
That statistic does not even take into consideration that the population
of children in the U.S. has increased by approximately ten percent over
the last 20 years. Due to this precipice in viewers, network cartoons
are left struggling to make money while advertisers remain befuddled
without a mainstream channel to promote new toys and products to children.
Why have children stopped tuning in on Saturday mornings to network
cartoons and what are the ramifications of this change?
Six key factors have led to children watching less Saturday morning
cartoons: more recreational sports, the introduction of cable and satellite
TV, the Internet and video games, a poorer quality of animation, and
a greater emphasis on family time. These factors are rather self-explanatory
with the exception of the latter: the divorce rate of Americans now
stands at 49 percent, and time on the weekends has become more precious
for children as many commute between parents’ houses.
Link
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Cows
with Guns: A catchy bovine ballad with good lyrics and a cartoon
video.
Link
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Related: Back in July,
I blogged the tale of the blue cow that a shop in Barrington was ordered
to remove by the town. I've been meaning to blog how it all came out --
the cow won -- but my colleague Jack Perry beat me to it, or saved me
the trouble, depending on how you look at it. Here's his column: This
cow knows how to milk a win.
Happy weekend...
May 8, 2003 7:40 p.m.
Beats
for Peace tour at Lupo's Saturday: A six-city tour
sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee comes to Lupo's
in Providence Saturday night. Beats for Peace features Pharoahe Monch,
Medusa, Headfake and the Jazz-Hip Hop Orchestra, hosted by Jahi and Toni
Blackman. $10 advance; $15 day of show.
MTV
reports, "The six-city tour also includes spoken-word artists.
The idea of the outing is to inspire youth to take a more active role
in bettering their communities."
The other cities are New York, Northampton, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia
and Boston.
They also have a nice poster.
Link
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 Old
money: The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco's American
Currency Exhibit online includes images of money through our history--
National Gold Bank Notes, Confederate currency, money from the 13 original
colonies. There's also a fascinating section on Artistry and Imagery with
wonderful engravings.
At right, one side of a 1786
Rhode Island bill, worth 30 shillings.
Link
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Public
Notice: Psychogeographers Navigate New York City's Changing Landscape.
The Village Voice spotlights new kinds of street art in NYC:
...A barely connected network of maverick artists and unorthodox urban
investigators are making fresh, if underground, contributions to pedestrian
life in New York City, and upping the ante on today's fight for the
soul of high-density metropolises.
A timely festival and conference called "Psy-Geo-Conflux"
is coming to the Lower East Side this Thursday (through Sunday, at and
around ABC No Rio, 156 Rivington Street, 212-254-3697), and it will
likely spin New York's sense of place in more ways than one person can
digest in a weekend. ...
... The Surveillance Camera Players differ from other surveillance
awareness activists such as the Institute for Applied Autonomy (appliedautonomy.com)
in that they not only count and archive the locations of surveillance
cameras, they put on plays for them. Regularly performed works include
George Orwell's 1984 and Art Toad's God's Eyes Here on Earth (a play
written specifically for surveillance cameras used to monitor churches).
Over at appliedautonomy.com
there's a photo of an ordinary-looking van with the caption,
StreetWriter is a modified cargo van, capable of printing messages
on to the pavement while driving. The system is capable of rendering
messages that are legible from tall buildings and low flying aircraft
and is capable of rendering message that are several hundreds of feet
in length.
Spread the memes, all cities could benefit.
Link
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Will
Denis Horgan Blog Again? Connecticut law could be on his side.
Mark Glaser, at Online Journalism Review,
It's not exactly up there with "Free Mumia," but the virtual
world of weblogs has been ablaze with anger at the Hartford Courant
for killing travel editor Denis Horgan's personal weblog.
... But while the hyperbole has swirled, few people are paying attention
to Horgan himself. His last official weblog post stated that he was
exploring his "rights and options," and quite a few people
have intimated that he should sue the newspaper for restricting his
free speech outside of work. So what gives? A Connecticut state law,
§31-51q, prevents an employer from disciplining an employee for
exercising First Amendment rights. In this case, Horgan was basically
told to stop weblog commentary or he would lose his job as travel editor.
Now, the longtime columnist is talking to a lawyer about legal action,
and hopes that the threat of a lawsuit will get the paper to back off
and allow him to blog again. "I think I'm going to win this,"
he told me. "Hopefully cooler heads will prevail, and the law will
prevail. I have no demands. I want no apologies. I just want to be left
alone, so I can come into my family room and type away at my keyboard
every night." ...
Link
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The
Secret Service Test: Not Her Majesty's Secret Service, for sure,
but let's pretend. Both college boards and classic arcade games are good
preparation for this quiz. I passed, but barely.
Link
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Nasty
flower power: From the Miami Herald,
Mr. Stinky first stank in 1998, when he made the news after becoming
the first Amorphophallus titanum plant to bloom in the United States
since the 1930s. Three years later, he was in the headlines again when
he bloomed for a second time. Scientists had previously thought the
plant would die after blooming.
But no, Mr. Stinky just wouldn't quit. He's back this year with a third
burgundy bloom, making it one for the record books. No titan has bloomed
more than twice, Allen said.
The titan will drop the mother of all stink bombs about May 14, when
it's scheduled to bloom. The offensive aroma, meant to attract the carrion
beetles that pollinate the plant, is so convincing that previous blooms
have fooled flies and even a few buzzards.
More
from Hidden City weblog, which, like the Herald, has a photo -- and
also points to StinkyCam,
the eye on the bud. A bit of the text:
... over six feet tall, growing at a rate of up to six inches a day
right before it opens.
Of course, if this was just a big flower it would be interesting, but
not really a media event. No, the plant's real claim to fame is... well,
let's just say that the common name in its native Indonesia is "corpse
flower."
It's all via Liz Donovan at Infomaniac.
Link
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Great 404 page: A colleague sent the following:
In the spirit of play, I tried to connect to www.getalife.com
Try it and see what happens.
A 404 page is the web equivalent of "file not found." Here's
an
index of some other imaginative ways to say that.
Link
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SalaMystery deepens: The references to having
met New York Times reporter John F. Burns have been removed from Salam
Pax's blog.
Mr. Burns wrote, in an email," I have no idea who this man is, and
no interest at all in pursuing it."
Drats. I had hoped we had a lead on the mysterious "Salam."
Link
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May 7, 2003 7:40 p.m.
Baghdad
blogger "Salam Pax" tells a tale of a Times reporter:
Media blogger Lou
Josephs emailed with the news this morning.
The blogger whose name means "Peace Peace" in Arabic and Latin
respectively went silent March 24. Today he's posted 15 blog items he
couldn't get out of Iraq till now. He doesn't explain how he did it today,
except to say he was able to attach a Word document to an email.
It's all interesting. Most flabbergasting to those who've been wondering
who he is: his description of interviewing for a job as a translator with
N.Y. Times reporter John F. Burns. The irony, of course, is that as headlines
blared, "Where is Salam Pax?" the answer may have been, "He's
chatting with a Times reporter who doesn't know who he is."
(Update: By Thursday afternoon, this section had been removed from "Salam
Pax's" blog.)
I've emailed Burns to ask if he has any recollection of such an incident.
I hope he replies.
With Saddam out of the picture, perhaps Salam could now tell us his real
name.
Link
to this item | Comment
 Is
you wicked? Maureen Dowd writes in the New York Times (reg. req.)
about Ali G, HBO's
"hip-hop guy wearing fatigues, shades, a skullcap and bling-bling
and talking like a British gangsta/Rasta rapper." (For those out
of the hip-hop loop, bling bling is big, gaudy jewelry.)
Ali, who, Dowd reports, is actually "Sacha Baron Cohen, a brilliant
graduate of Cambridge (University)," ambushes powerful establishment
figures in surreal interviews that run rings around rationalism.
Here's an excerpt from an interview with former secretary of state James
Baker:
MR. BAKER: Well, the way you deal with countries on foreign policy
issues . . . is you deal with carrots and sticks.
YOUNG MAN: But what country is gonna want carrots, even if it's like
a million tons of carrots that you're giving over there——
MR. BAKER: Well, carrots — I'm not using the term literally.
You might send foreign aid — money, money.
YOUNG MAN: Well, money's better than carrots. Even if a country love
carrots and that is, like, their favorite national food, if they get
given them——
MR. BAKER: Well, don't get hung up on carrots. That's just a figure
of speech.
YOUNG MAN: So would you ever send carrots? You know, is there any situation——
MR. BAKER: No, no.
YOUNG MAN: What about if there was a famine?
MR. BAKER: Carrots, themselves? No.
Link
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Death
Of a Chef: The changing landscape of French cooking by William
Echikson in the New Yorker is a fascinating look at the cutthroat world
of French cuisine. The author wrote a book a decade ago about chef Bernard
Loiseau, who killed himself after lunch on February 24; Echikson went
back to France to talk to Loiseau's wife, the staff of La Côte d’Or,
Loiseau's famed, three-star Burgundy restaurant, and some of the townspeople
of tiny Saulieu about the pressures of changing tastes that threatened
his restaurant's rating and drove him to suicide.
Haute cuisine prizes invention. Loiseau was dismayed to realize that
his famous frogs’ legs—once avant-garde—had become
a “classic.” “He always wanted to be in the pole position,”
Paul Bocuse recalled. As Loiseau saw himself slipping from this spot,
he became increasingly unhappy. In the past few years, friends who visited
La Côte d’Or told me that they came away disappointed. Frogs’
legs and pike perch in red-wine sauce still featured prominently on
the menu. One new dish consists of a lamb chop, lamb filet, and lamb
kidney, served au jus. I tried it recently: it was perfectly prepared
but rather boring, and appeared on the same beige plates with brown
piping that I remember Bernard picking out in 1993.
The latest wave in cooking incorporates ingredients from all over the
world, in unlikely combinations. The emblem of this movement is Ferrán
Adrià, the chef-owner of El Bulli, on the Costa Brava, in Spain,
who has taken the mandate for constant renovation to an absurd extreme.
His restaurant is open only six months of the year; Adrià spends
the rest of his time in a laboratory kitchen in Barcelona, experimenting
with new recipes. He changes the menu at El Bulli constantly, adding
dozens of new items each year.
Adrià’s influences are overtly scientific: using a nitrous-oxide
cannister, he prepares “foams” out of cod, pine nuts, asparagus,
and mushrooms; he injects warm olive oil into dinner rolls with a syringe;
he gives cooking times in seconds rather than in minutes or hours; waiters
at El Bulli instruct how and when and in what order to eat the food,
as if choreographing a complex chemical reaction. Temperature is an
important variable.
From black-truffle lollipops to polenta ice cream—through twenty-nine
tapas-size courses that sometimes include seawater mousse and pulverized
Fisherman’s Friend lozenges and spaghetti noodles made from Parmesan
cheese—meals at El Bulli can last six hours. The menu is prix
fixe, a hundred and fifty dollars, without wine. Adrià designs
new plates every year to complement his latest dishes. Foie-gras sorbet
and foie-gras consommé sit side by side on a white porcelain
dish, an oval with two shallow depressions. Loiseau served a traditional
grilled foie gras on a traditional round plate.
It's beautifully written, and hard to put down.
Link
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In
step with the Stripes: Longtime rock critic Wayne Robins (Creem,
Rolling Stone) is on a White
Stripes kick:
...the Stripes strike me as very much the distillation of various strands
of Michigan rock roots: John Lee Hooker's working in the auto factory
blues meets the MC5's rebellion against the auto factory system meets
Grand Funk's laid-off from the auto factory survival toolbox. Add the
hillbilly ethic of towns like Pontiac, where country music dives thrived
and which seemed more like Tennessee than Michigan when I spent time
there in 1975. The Whites break it all down, then glue it back together
with their own severe savoir faire, not to mention panache, not to mention
je ne se quois...whatever It is, they've got It.
You can hear clips from Elephant, their latest CD at Amazon.com.
Link
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Useful
information for Windows users: Some programs install themselves
in your taskbar without asking whether you want them there or not. Their
config utilities, for instance, which you use rarely, may load every time
you load Windows, hogging memory and slowing your system down.
AnswersThatWork.com has compiled explanations of these programs, telling
you what is important and what to leave alone. It's worth a look.
In case you're wondering how you know what's loading, the site tells
you how to find that out, too:
In Windows 95/98/ME you can bring up the Task List by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del.
In Windows NT4/2000/XP you bring up the Task List by right-clicking
on the Task Bar and choosing "Task Manager."
As always, when it doubt, leave it alone.
Link
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When
I Was Little: The Baby Picture Project is just what it
sounds like. You're invited to add your Now and Then photos.
Link
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May 6, 2003, 6:22 p.m.
Baseball
blogs: Todd Muchmore, a diehard Redsox fan, has found 64
bb blogs so far.
A few more sites:
-- A long list
of blog names and links from Baseball
Primer
-- A San Francisco fan lists
blogs and local papers, and blogs
his team separately
-- Baseball
Blogs list by the Baseball
Today Coaching Journal staff
-- @TheBallPark
--
Baseball blogs at All-Baseball.com
Link
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"Peace is abnormal"?: Knight-Ridder
moved a story headlined Neoconservatives
push for a new world order which, no matter what political stripe
you may be, contains a disturbing sentence:
Today, the institute (Project
for a New American Century) still has hawks who were hawks before
the neocon label became hip; witness ex-Reagan Pentagon adviser Michael
Ledeen, who, while puffing on a fat cigar the other day, said: "Americans
believe that peace is normal, but that's not true. Life isn't like that.
Peace is abnormal."
Link
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Shatner
'breaks' Beatles record: I think Shatner's version of Hey Mr.
Tambourine Man is worse, though. (He calls out to him, "Hey, Mr.
Tambourine Man! Mr. Tambourine Man? Mr. ...?")
Former Star Trek actor William Shatner's version of Lucy In the
Sky With Diamonds has been voted the worst Beatles cover of all
time.
He beat Pinky and Perky, who did a version of All My Loving,
and Pop Idol stars Will Young and Gareth Gates with The Long And
Winding Road.
Viewers voted in a poll for digital TV channel Music Choice to mark
the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' first number one, From Me To You,
this week.
Jim Carrey doing I Am the Walrus placed sixth of the 10 published.
Never heard that one.
Link
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 The
Museum of Unworkable Devices:
This museum is a celebration of fascinating devices that don't work.
It houses diverse examples of the perverse genius of inventors who refused
to let their thinking be intimidated by the laws of nature, remaining
optimistic in the face of repeated failures. Watch and be amazed as
we bring to life eccentric and even intricate perpetual motion machines
which have remained steadfastly unmoving since their inception. Marvel
at the ingenuity of the human mind, as it reinvents the square wheel
in all of its possible variations. Exercise your mind to puzzle out
exactly why they don't work as the inventors intended.
via Ft. Boise
Link
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Digital
Photography for the Web: Michael Calore, Webmonkey's senior
technical editor, offers a nine-page primer on getting your digital files
to "sing":
The truth is that digital photography is actually rather difficult.
Not the taking pictures part, that's easy. It's the creation of a perfect
end product that's the sticky part. Taking a raw JPEG or TIFF file and
crafting a digital image that looks beautiful on all the different monitor
types is a process that transcends art and borders on science. Some
photos turn out almost perfect from the get go — never underestimate
the power of good natural light! — but most of your snapshots
are going to need some gentle persuasion in the right direction before
they are ready to wow the New York gallery scene.
Link
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 The
MegaPenny Project: Kids will love this. I do, too.
Visualizing huge numbers can be very difficult. People regularly talk
about millions of miles, billions of bytes, or trillions of dollars,
yet it's still hard to grasp just how much a "billion" really
is. The MegaPenny Project aims to help by taking one small everyday
item, the U.S. penny, and building on that to answer the question: "What
would a billion (or a trillion) pennies look like?"
The image at right contains just 1,000 pennies [5 pennies wide x 5 pennies
high x 40 pennies tall]; it weighs 6.25 pounds. More fascinating data
at the site, which builds its penny solids in increments.
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Headline sparks fantasy: "Post-Saddam
Leaders May Soon Take Shape" seems an unfortunate choice of words
by an AP headline writer. Are the leaders gaseous now? Ghosts? Shapeshifters?
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Ever wanted to fly? You could go to Trapeze
School.
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May 5, 2003, 6:32 p.m.
BBC
plans grass-roots politics site: Wired reports,
In October, the BBC plans to flick the switch on an ambitious website
designed to help Britons organize and run grassroots political campaigns.
The site, dubbed iCan, is designed to help citizens investigate issues
that concern them, find others who share those concerns and provide
advice and tools for organizing and engaging in the political process.
"It's a big change for the BBC," said James Cronin, the project's
technical lead. "It's ceasing to be just a broadcaster. It's starting
to enable conversations."
The BBC's purpose is twofold. On the one hand, the iCan site will help
keep the broadcaster's ear to the ground. By mining the iCan website
for leads, the BBC will be better able to respond to issues pertinent
to its viewers, or so it hopes.
On the other hand, the effort is intended to counteract what officials
at the broadcasting network feel is widespread political apathy in the
United Kingdom, marked by low voter turnout at elections and declining
audiences for its political programming.
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100th casualty of the Feb. 20th Station fire:
Pamela Gruttadauria of Johnston died last night at Massachusetts General
Hospital. From the New
York Times yesterday (Yahoo link),
In her bed at Massachusetts General Hospital, Pam Gruttadauria, 33,
cannot speak to her mother, Anna, because of the ventilator that keeps
oxygen flowing to her lungs. She cannot see her mother because her eyes
are sewn shut. With no lids to protect her eyes from infection, it is
safer to keep them closed. She cannot touch her mother because her burned
hands were amputated.
Still, Mrs. Gruttadauria believes that her daughter knows she is there.
On Easter Sunday she touched her daughter's foot, one of the few places
she was not burned.
"The nurse asked, `Did you feel your mom touch your foot?' "
Mrs. Gruttadauria said. "She nodded. That felt really, really good."
Related: There are now several
Yahoo groups dealing with The Station fire. One is only for survivors,
another
"a safe haven for people (survivors, family/friends of the injured
or just those who care) to discuss the tragedy." These are moderated,
with messages readable only by members.
A new group, just beginning, is open to all, with its archives public,
meaning you don't have to join the group to read messages, only to post.
It's called WWSFFriends;
click the "Join this group" button on its page to join
it:
This is an inclusive open community coalition comprised of all those
who were affected by the West Warwick Station Fire, in Rhode Island
on 2/20/03. Our goal is simply to help each other and preserve the memory
of those who perished in this tragedy.
Links: Complete Providence
Journal fire coverage (reg. req.); The
Station Fire Weblog.
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"THEY
CAME TO BAGHDAD: 945 Buwayhids; 1055 Seljuks; 1258 Mongols led
by Hulagu; 1340 Jalayrs; 1393 & 1401 Mongols led by Tamerlane; 1411
Turkoman Black Sheep; 1469 Turkoman White Sheep ; 1508 Safavids ; 1534
Ottomans under Sultan Sulayman the Magnificent; 1623 Safavids; 1638 Ottomans
under Sultan Murad IV; 1917 British; 1941 British again to depose pro-German
government; 2003 Anglo-American invasion"
From Al-Ahram, in Cairo, a special section o the Iraqi capital.
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 Brian
Greig, orrery maker: An orrery is a moving model of the solar
system or, more
formally, "An apparatus which illustrates, by the revolution
of balls moved by wheelwork, the relative size, periodic motions, positions,
orbits, etc., of bodies in the solar system."
Greig makes beauties, but even if you're not in the market, there's much
to learn and see on his site.
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Garry
Trudeau's Doonesbury was largely in French in newspapers yesterday.
The translation is on his website. It's an interesting way to "converge"
the two.
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DPChallenge's
digital photography contests are ongoing, topical and judged by peers.
Current open challenges include Glass and Primary Colors. Basic membership
-- which lets you submit to open challenges, vote on challenges and participate
in forums -- is free.
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"Firemen's
friar": There's
a movement to make Fr. Mychal Judge, who died in the in the lobby
of Tower One of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, a saint.
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Top
Ten Pet Peeves of a Fast Food Employee: A glimpse of life from
the fryolator side at ilovebacon.com:
5.why do people who order a 3 pc meal of greasy chicken and two unhealthy
sides order a diet drink?? splurge and get the regular pepsi, your diet
has gone to hell now.
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Paris:
The first totally wi-fi city? From the International Herald Tribune,
PARIS An experiment is under way in Paris that aims to turn the city
into one huge Wi-Fi hot spot, making it what could be the first large
wireless city in the world.
.
A dozen Wi-Fi antennas have been set up outside subway stations along
a major north-south bus route, providing Internet access to anyone near
them who has a laptop computer or personal desk assistant equipped to
receive the signals. The access is free until June 30 but will require
paid subscriptions afterward.
.
If all goes as planned, the private partners building the system expect
to make a decision before the end of the year to install at least two
antennas, and possibly three, outside each of Paris's 372 Metro stations
and to link them through an existing fiber optics network in the subway
tunnels.
.
That would create one continuous network that would allow people to
roam seamlessly throughout the city while sending and receiving data
over the Internet. Individual subscribers to the service could sit in
parks, cafés or restaurants and sign on to check their e-mail
or surf the Net. Businesses could create so-called virtual private networks
that would let them exchange information with employees in the field
or, for example, with delivery trucks.
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com |
