|
By Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
4.16.03/ Iraq
news: Best sources portal
4.04.03/ The
Station Fire Weblog
April 18, 2003 - (Last
week's weblog)
Please reconsider the red-light cameras, mayor:
Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline unveiled a plan on Wednesday (Cicilline
pledges to fight budget woes, reg.req.) to address a $58.9
million budget deficit and a $526 million unfunded pension liability that,
he says, threatens to bankrupt the city within 10 years unless drastic
steps are taken.
One element of the plan is "cameras that would photograph red light
violators, enabling the city to send them traffic citations and raising
an estimated $1.9 million in six months."
When I read this, I wondered how the registered owner of the car could
get a personal license violation no matter who was driving.
I'm not the only one. From the Washington Times yesterday, Suit
filed against traffic cameras:
Two D.C. lawyers have filed suit to force the city to return all fines
from traffic cameras because they violate constitutional due process
rights.
Thomas Ruffin Jr. and Horace L. Bradshaw Jr. filed a class action
lawsuit in D.C. Superior Court against the city. The two litigators
are seeking to represent the entire "class of automobile owners"
ticketed since the red-light camera program began July 31, 1999, and
since the photo-radar program started Aug. 6, 2001.
"There is no proof that the owner is driving the car and the only
way to get out of the ticket is to submit an affidavit identifying the
person who was driving your car," Mr. Ruffin said.
... The two lawyers said the city's camera program is a civil rights
violation that must not be tolerated. Tickets are issued to car owners
based on photographs of the rear license plates as vehicles speed past
a radar camera or run red lights at intersections.
"After a month, when you get the ticket, you may have forgotten
who drove your car that day, and if you guess wrong, you could be charged
with perjury," Mr. Ruffin said.
... Former Executive Assistant Metropolitan Police Chief Terrance W.
Gainer said in January last year that "300 or so errors" should
be expected when tens of thousands of tickets are issued monthly but
that would not be a "show stopper" for the program. Later
that month, the city was forced to admit wrongdoing when it was found
guessing license plate numbers and issuing tickets to residents who
didn't own the cars in the photos.
AP |
| Jill
Bucciarelli of Cardiff, Calif. leans on her BMW and displays the 'red
light camera' ticket she received in the mail from San Diego police.
Bucciarelli's ticket shows photos of her running a red light with
statistics stating she ran the light .05 seconds after it turned red.
A judge dismissed the citations against Bucciarelli and some 400 other
motorists who were photographed running red lights at San Diego intersections.
|
The story notes that judges in San Diego and Denver halted similar programs,
and notes that AAA
Mid-Atlantic withdrew its support of the cameras in D.C. In
2001, onetime House majority leader Dick Armey wrote, in an essay entitled
The
Truth About Red Light Cameras,
Two attorneys representing 290 motorists in San Diego, California have
taken on this system -- and won. Arthur F. Tait and Coleen Cusak forced
the city to pull the plug on all nineteen red light cameras after they
uncovered evidence that the camera hardware was being manipulated to
entrap motorists.
Their lawsuit also forced the private company that operates the cameras
to release over 5,000 pages of confidential documents about the program.
These papers describe what the real motivating factor behind these cameras
has been.
Safety was never the primary consideration. In fact, none of the devices
were placed at any of San Diego's top-ten most dangerous intersections.
Instead, the documents tell us how the camera operators consciously
sought out mistimed intersections as locations for new red light cameras.
Yellow signal time at intersections turns out to be directly related
to "red light running." Simply put, when the yellow light
is short, more people enter on red. Inadequate yellow time causes a
condition where individuals approaching an intersection are unable either
to come to a safe stop or proceed safely before the light turns red.
In San Diego, according to AP (Red
Light Cameras Yielding Outcry), "The police union denounced them
after five on-duty officers received citations."
I hope the mayor takes a longer look at what has happened elsewhere and
discards this idea -- playing "gotcha" with citizens is divisive
and mean-spirited, and everyone who has to take a day out of work to prove
they don't own the green car allegedly sporting their plates will remember
that at the ballot box.
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How
male or female is your brain? Catchy, that. It's a hot story in
The Guardian (U.K.) now, that comes with an irresistible two-part quiz
designed by Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre
at the University of Cambridge:
His theory is that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for
empathy, and that the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding
and building systems. He calls it the empathising-systemising (E-S)
theory.
Read the full article here.
Okay, I took the tests. You can boil them down to "Do you cry at
movies?" -- You're a girl. "Do you want to know how engines
work?" -- You're a guy.
Problem is, I'm so empathic I can't take a splinter out of someone else's
finger, but I do like to know the names of flowers. I'm in a hot race
with Mark Patinkin for who has the most cluttered desk around here, but
I do care about the processing speed of my computer purchases.
I think I broke the system.
Baron-Cohen says most women score about 47, most men around 42 on the
empathy quotient quiz. Me: 41.
On the systemizing quotient, most women score around 24, men around 30.
Me: 48, like autistics.
It's a lousy quiz, I say. Now
you try it.
Link
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Public
nixes proposed public art in Tucson: Remember
the outcry in Tucson over the public art that residents thought looked
like sewage? The Tucson Citizen reports the result of a poll of the neighborhoods:
Residents of three neighborhoods along the North Mountain Avenue corridor
have decided not to go with the flow.
By a 2-to-1 margin, voting in response to questionnaires from the city's
Transportation Department, they rejected the public art sculpture under
construction on Mountain between East Grant and East Fort Lowell roads,
in the Mountain and First, Samos and Hedrick Acres neighborhoods.
An option to complete the art, which features sculpted depictions of
flood water and drainage pipes, received 275 votes.
The other option, to raze the sculpture and put in something different,
got 558 votes.
Twenty-seven residents were undecided, said Michael R. Graham, spokesman
for the department.
There's a follow-up story, headlined, Should
public art appeal to public?
A more sober take from the Arizona Daily Star, Survey:
'Sewage' art should be flushed away includes a link to the "contestants"
in a StarNet poll on the worst public art in Tucson.
Bob
Rizzo, director of the Providence Parks Department Office
of Cultural Affairs, mounts the Convergence
Festival each fall, which includes public sculpture that spends a
couple of years in place.
I asked him if he wanted to comment on the Tucson flap. Here's his response:
"Sorry, not much to say...from what I could see the work selected
is not worthy of a comment...it's what happens when you select art by
committee..... "
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Office
workers give away passwords for a cheap pen: From The Register
(U.K.),
The second annual survey into office scruples, conducted by the people
organising this month's InfoSecurity Europe 2003 conference, found that
office workers have learnt very little about IT security in the past
year.
...Nine in ten (90 per cent) of office workers at London's Waterloo
Station gave away their computer password for a cheap pen, compared
with 65 per cent last year.
,,,The most common password was "password" (12 per cent)
and the most popular category was their own name (16 per cent) followed
by their football team (11 per cent) and date of birth (8 per cent).
Link
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Web zen:
Easter Zen. Games. Zany. Irreverent.
April 17, 2003
So
who really did save Private Jessica? From the London Times, a
story that would be heartbreaking if it hadn't turned out well in the
end. Despite some unpleasant memories, even the doctor is alive to tell
the tale:
... Far from winning hearts and minds, the US operation has angered
and hurt doctors who risked their lives treating both Private Lynch
and Iraqi victims of the war. “What the Americans say is like
the story of Sinbad the Sailor — it’s a myth,” said
Harith al-Houssona, who saved Private Lynch’s life after she was
brought to the hospital by Iraqi military intelligence.
...The Iraqi intelligence officers told the hospital that Private Lynch
would soon be transferred to Baghdad, a prospect that terrified her.
After her condition stabilised, they ordered Dr Harith to transfer
Jessica to another hospital.
Instead he told the ambulance driver to deliver her to one of the American
outposts that had already been established on the ouskirts of the city.
“But when he reached their checkpoint, the Americans fired at
him,” he said.
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Diet
Doctor Atkins Was Popular, Controversial: Dr. Robert Atkins died
at 11:01 this morning at Cornell University Medical Center from head injuries
received April 8 when he slipped on ice outside his Manhattan office.
This story from Reuters seems more clueful about his namesake diet than
most:
 Long
a household name for his popular diet that advocates eating freely of
meat and fat while shunning starchy foods, Dr. Robert Atkins found little
acceptance in the medical community for ideas considered nutritional
heresy.
Cardiologist and nutritional expert Atkins, who died in New York on
Thursday nine days after suffering severe head injuries in a fall on
an icy sidewalk, first drew widespread attention with his best-selling
book, "Diet Revolution," published in 1972.
He developed the "Atkins Diet" -- now referred to as "the
Atkins Nutritional Approach" -- that blames carbohydrates, a major
energy source, for weight gain.
The Atkins diet claims to change the body from burning carbohydrates
to burning fat. The book, one of the 50 best-sellers of all time, was
updated and sold millions of copies, including "Atkins for Life"
published in January 2003.
The medical establishment said it flouted accepted nutritional advice
and warned its followers risked disease, but several recent studies
have shown that the diet can help people lose weight without damaging
their health.
Atkins said carbohydrates including grains, pasta, fruit and potatoes
caused weight gain. Instead of carbohydrates and sugar, the Atkins plan
allows plenty of fat and protein such as meat, eggs and cheese. The
system also encourages dieters to eat vegetables such as lettuce and
broccoli and a few fruits.
Blogger Cory Doctorow,
another sedentary blogger slimmed by low carbs, notes Atkins' passing
and quips "I think he was secretly offed by the grain lobby."
C'mon, Cory, Atkins' frozen low-carb bread is at my local supermarket,
so the grain guys are off the hook. The sugar folks, on the other hand...
The Atkins Center's usual webpage
has been replaced by a memorial to its late founder. Readers are invited
to share stories of how Dr. Atkins affected their lives.
Link
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Shades
of Abbie Hoffman in pranksters' barcodes site: Print some barcodes
for your favorite products at re-code.com,
take a little glue to the store and bingo, you're an electronic shoplifter.
Sounds simple, right? Walmart was not amused.
I didn't point to the site -- responsible journalism doesn't tell you
how to break the law. Now that the catalyst is disabled, the concept is
free to start a new life with a lot of publicity.
The most succinct version of the tale, Walmart
takes action against site offering fake bar codes, is a post by
Bill Royle at TechFocus:
LITTLE ROCK - The very technology that revolutionized retail checkout
— the bar code — is now being subverted by anti-capitalist
protesters who fancy themselves cyberpranksters.
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.
Wal-Mart considered the ploy an incitement to theft and sent a cease-and-desist
letter dated April 2 to one of the companies that was hosting the Web
site, Re-code.com.
Re-code.com's operators responded by disabling the link on their Web
site that allowed users to print sheets with a selection of bar code
labels that could be slapped on store items.
But Re-code had to go further than that. The original homepage now exists
only as a .jpg
image. The current homepage is an explanation of the incident, headlined
Corporations Win Again! Excerpts:
The goal of Re-Code.com is to encourage everyone to reflect on the
real costs of the products that we buy.
... Our site was intended to be satirical; however many legal and corporate
officials failed to see the humor and we were attacked, first with a
legal letter from Wal-Mart and subsequently with a series of very persaonal
threats that came from a consortia of lawers associated with WalMart,
Kellogs, and other unnamed companies. When the personal threats started
rolling in, we decided to shut down. We are ceasing to operate this
site, but we would first like to explain our position. ...
And then...
Our Formal Apology:
Sorry Wal Mart© and Kellog's© (sic). We hope we didn't
cost you any hard earned cash. We need jobs - want to hire us?
You know we never actually switched any barcodes and we have the footage
to prove it!
This service was brought to you by the members of the Carbon Defense
League and Conglomco.org.
AP has the whole saga: Prankster
Web Site Draws Wal-Mart Ire. A bit of this:
We were advised by our lawyers it would make sense to remove those
for now," said one of the activists, who identified himself only
as Nathan Hactivist and responded by telephone to an e-mail request
for an interview.
... Hactivist said he lives in "upstate New York" but refused
to be more specific. The Web site is registered to Mike Bonnano in Loudonville,
outside Albany, N.Y. Bonnano said he was not among activists who created
the site but was willing to risk being its legal owner.
...Bonnano, the Web site registrant, belongs to The Yes Men, a group
of "satirical impostors" that lampoons organizations with
a perceived globalization bent.
One of the group's more well-known pranks was to send a member masquerading
as a representative of the World Trade Organization to a textile conference
in Finland, where he delivered a satirical speech.
If you go the Carbon
Defense League site, you'll just see a bit of text, "Gone fishin'
."
Over at The
Infrastructures of Digital Design, though, scroll down to "Nathan
M. Martin and Hans Meyer, HACTIVIST.ORG" and you'll see,
The Carbon Defense League (CDL) is a tactical media arts and engineering
collective that began in Pittsburgh, PA in 1997 as a way to combine
technology subversion, critical theory, and punk activism. The CDL functions
as a tool provider, skillsharing network, and writing collaboration
whose projects have taken the form of radical software, electronic reverse
engineering, media intervention ,and direct action.
The whole time I've been blogging this story, I kept thinking about Abbie
Hoffman's "monkey warfare" -- he'd be pleased with this
prank.
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Blogroll stands alone: Finally! The blogroll is now over on the
far right of the page, which will make it possible to use photos more
easily. Sean Polay made it happen, and has my thanks.
April 16, 2003
Film critic Roger
Ebert Talks About Michael Moore and Much More: Transcript of a
radio interview at the Progressive
Radio (MP3
file / RealAudio):
On Moore's Oscar speech:
I would propose to you that if Michael Moore had taken a deep breath,
and looked straight at the audience, and said, "I am a nonfiction
filmmaker during a fictitious Presidency," and stopped, I think
he basically would have gotten a positive response to that. But his
whole delivery was wrong. I think his delivery prompted the audience.
They were not ready to assimilate that much that quickly. You know,
they didn't boo anyone else, and there were several other anti-war speeches
that were applauded.
On the criticism of Hollywood celebrities for speaking out against the
war:
I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who
took a civics class. I begin to feel like most Americans don't understand
the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech,
and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to
speak out. If Hollywood stars speak out, so do all sorts of other people.
On church and state:
The Bush theory, of course, is that he has a personal dialogue with
God: God talks to Bush, Bush talks to God. And Bush gets God's message,
and Bush really believes that God's on his side. The problem with that
is Bush then can't change his mind because God isn't going to change
his mind. And so what we have here really is a rather alarming situation
where religion in the White House has crossed the line between church
and state. It's funny that there was so much disturbance about having
a Catholic in the White House with Kennedy, and when we finally get
a religion in the White House that's causing a lot of conflicts, and
concerns, and disturbances for a lot of people, it's in the Bush Administration.
On the difference in style between the left and the right:
When I write a political column for the Chicago Sun-Times, when liberals
disagree with me, they send in long, logical e-mails explaining all
my errors. I hardly ever get well-reasoned articles from the right.
People just tell me to shut up. That's the message: "Shut up. Don't
write anymore about this. Who do you think you are?"
Related: 'A
Chill Wind is Blowing in This Nation...' Transcript of the speech
given by actor Tim Robbins to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.,
on April 15, 2003. Excerpt:
The journalists in this country can battle back at those who would
rewrite our Constitution in Patriot Act II, or "Patriot, The Sequel,"
as we would call it in Hollywood. We are counting on you to star in
that movie. Journalists can insist that they not be used as publicists
by this administration. (Applause.) The next White House correspondent
to be called on by Ari Fleischer should defer their question to the
back of the room, to the banished journalist du jour. (Applause.) And
any instance of intimidation to free speech should be battled against.
Any acquiescence or intimidation at this point will only lead to more
intimidation. You have, whether you like it or not, an awesome responsibility
and an awesome power: the fate of discourse, the health of this republic
is in your hands, whether you write on the left or the right. This is
your time, and the destiny you have chosen.
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Japanese
firm buys ReplayTV, Rio: InternetNews.com reports,
Japan's D&M
Holdings will take the digital video recorder and MP3 business units
-- including the Replay TV and Rio brands -- off SONICblue's hands for
$36.2 million.
D&M Holdings, parent of audio equipment makers Denon Ltd. and Marantz
Japan, won the business units in an auction of SONICblue's assets in
the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in San Jose, Calif. Tuesday. D&M said
it expects to close the deal in about 10 days.
... D&M said the assets it won in the auction include inventory,
receivables, intellectual property and capital equipment. The company
said it will also take over "selected contractual relationships
and liabilities." D&M did note that it intends to keep all
ReplayTV customers and will design, manufacture and distribute a line
of ReplayTV and Rio products.
No word yet on whether this means they'll honor the "lifetime subscription"
that came with earlier Replay TVs.
Related:
Time Warner Cable Introduces Digital Video Recorder: From WXIX in
Cincinnati,
If you're already a digital cable subscriber - and about 39 percent
(140,000) of Time Warner's 360,000 customers are - you can upgrade to
the DVR box without paying any additional equipment fee. But digital
customers must pay a one-time $19.95 installation and tutorial fee,
plus a $9.95 monthly programming fee.
Link
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Doc Searls
has a very cool idea: A
barn-raising for civilization. He's talking about this
civilization.
Link
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I
don't have any cash. Do you take mackerel? The Guardian (U.K.)
has an appropriately surreal story about the Paris auction of Andre Breton's
collection:
I had gone to Paris to witness the "death of surrealism",
to watch what was being called "a great national humiliation",
the Passion of André Breton. That is how French intellectuals
see the sale and dismemberment of the astonishing collection of surrealist
masterpieces, letters, books and bric-a-brac the leader of the 20th-century's
most important art movement crammed into his small apartment above the
clip joints of the Rue Fontaine.
Dali, Miro, Duchamp and Max Ernst all climbed the stairs to Breton's
studio, hard by the Moulin Rouge, to take part in surrealistic experiments
and pay homage to the man who wrote the Manifeste du Surréalisme
in 1924. All left work behind on the walls next to the Picassos, the
Magrittes, and the photographs and collages by Man Ray and the rest
of the gang.
The dreams and fantasies that poured out with the absinthe were recorded
and stacked away alongside Breton's collections of curiosities, religious
kitsch and "object poems" made from bottles, buttons and bits
of string. By the time he died in 1966, and the door of 42 rue Fontaine
was locked, there was only room inside for two people. It had become
a museum to a man and a movement that loathed museums. It was the perfect
surrealist conceit - a museum no one could enter except in their dreams.
Related: Surreal
prices at Andre Breton art sale: The outcome, at expatica.com
via AFP,
PARIS, April 15 (AFP) - The first batch of modern paintings belonging
to Surrealist master Andre Breton to be sold at a controversial auction
in Paris has netted EUR 13.2 million (USD 14.2 million), with five record
sales.
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Baghdad
Did Not Fall - It Was Handed Over:
What do you think?
Related: Arab
Suspicion
Link
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Earth Day: Local
cleanups, by community, at Rhode Island DEM. Many are next weekend,
perhaps bowing to the competition from Easter. R.I. Earth Day Festival
is Saturday, 11 a.m. - 4 p.m. at Roger Williams Park. There's a free bus
-- RIPTA’s "Earth Day Express" -- from Kennedy Plaza downtown
to Roger Williams Park Zoo, with the first 500 riders getting free zoo
admission. Schedule
and more are here.
Link
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Mozilla morass: The cooperatively developed
Mozilla browser, based on Netscape
code, got too big for some, and a spinoff is the sleek Phoenix,
which lacks a mail and news client but is configurable, fast, and, like
Mozilla, lets the user open many tabs in one window and block popups.
In the latest Mozilla
roadmap, the team announced it was going to shift its efforts from
Mozilla to building Phoenix and Minotaur,
a a cross-platform standalone mail app.
But there were problems with the names -- there's already
a Phoenix browser. Oops. So the pair will be renamed Firebird
and Thunderbird. Oops. There's already
a Firebird. Stay tuned.
(No, I have no idea why they're dipping into cars for these names.)
If you're into experimenting, lots of folks love the Opera
browser, too.
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April 15, 2003
Brief blog today -- lots going on with the other part of my job today,
producing this site.
And
the winners of Jefferson Muzzles are...: The Thomas
Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression awards Jefferson
Muzzles to " to those who in the past year forgot or disregarded
Mr. Jefferson's admonition that freedom of speech 'cannot be limited without
being lost.' "
Link
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The
2003 Iraq War & Archaeology: Links, photos, videos of what
remains, what's gone, what's destroyed. via
Burningbird
Link
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Folk
Explosion: Loving send-up of aging hippies is a real gas. This
is a rave review of A
Mighty Wind,
the latest from the Christopher Guest ensemble (This is Spinal
Tap, The Big Picture, Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show), at New
York Press:
A Mighty Wind, about 1960s-era folk musicians reuniting for
a benefit concert in New York, is a treasure chest of human oddity,
brimming with deluded, myopic but mostly decent people all nursing pet
obsessions.
... (The broken-souled Mitch, played by Eugene Levy with magnificent
control and mystery, best exemplifies this sense of longing; he recognizes
the concert for what it is—a doomed attempt to relive vanished
times. "There’s a deception here," he says of the concert
and its potential audience. "They’re expecting to see a man
who no longer exists.")
I saw a hilarious clip of the film in which Levy says fans still come
up to Mitch to say, "I dig what you do, man!"
Haven't heard that one in a while.
Link
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Online
Catalogue of Jamaican Records: From the National Library of Jamaica
in Kingston, mon.
Link
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Free
Comic Book Day is May 3: Take the kids to a participating
comics store and get a free comic. I found six of them when I plugged
the downtown zip code in to the store locator. Easy. via BoingBoing
Link
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Electronic filing has sure killed the party at the post office.
No party tonight.
April 14, 2003
There's a new "She Who Must Be Obeyed":
Friday, a new African queen was installed, the latest in an interesting
line of Rain Queens -- said to have mystical powers as rainmakers -- who
were immortalized by H. Rider Haggard in his 1887 novel She
(Text
at Project Gutenberg / web
version at Classic Reader):
"Pardon me, my father," I interrupted at this point; "but
if, as I understand, 'She-who-must-be-obeyed' lives yet farther
off, how could she have known of our approach?"
Billali turned, and seeing that we were alone--for the young lady,
Ustane, had withdrawn when he had begun to speak--said, with a curious
little laugh--
"Are there none in your land who can see without eyes and hear
without ears? Ask no questions; She knew."
According
to The Guardian, Makobo Modjadji, 25,
was crowned Queen Modjadji VI at an elaborate ceremony held in the
highland bushveld of South Africa's Limpopo province.
Last Friday, the day of the ceremony, hot sun gave way to clouds and
light drizzle: a welcome omen for a drought-ravaged realm. Government
dignitaries, traditional leaders and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the
former wife of ex-president Nelson Mandela, joined well-wishers at the
royal court to watch the coronation.
SABC
News, in South Africa, noted,
...before the coronation, the proceedings were briefly disrupted by
the arrival of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela fully clad in Xhosa tradition.
The crowd became very excited when she was escorted to the stage to
pay courtesy to the queen.
VOA
reports,
At 25, the new Rain Queen, Modjadji VI, is not only the youngest ever
crowned. She is also the first Rain Queen to have a formal education,
and in a break from tradition, she has vowed to continue her schooling,
possibly even accepting Mr. Mandela's offer to send her to university
abroad.
Although Haggard's "She Who Must Be Obeyed" was described as
white, others ascribe the African queen's pallor to being hidden away,
seldom seen by her people.
 |
SABC
photo
Queen Modjadji VI |
Makobo succeeds her grandmother, Mokope Modjadji V, born in 1937 and crowned
in 1981. (Princess Maria, Mokope's daughter and Makobo's mother, died two
days before Mokope in 2001: Mourning
for Rain Queen of Lovedu) The
Worldwide Guide to Women in Leadership describes Makobo's grandmother,
who ruled from 1881 to 2001, this way:
According to custom and the strict laws of the tribe, she was not allowed
to have a husband but did have around 15 wives. These were chosen for
her by the Royal Council and in general are from the household of the
subject chiefs. This strange ritual of ‘bride giving’ is
strictly a form of diplomacy to ensure loyalty to the Queen. The queen
did have three children of whom two daughters have died. (A) subject
with the right royal credential was chosen by the Royal Council to father
her children. Discreet arrangements were made to ensure that her natural
desires were fulfilled but the queen was not expected to confine her
sexual activities. Modjadji’s daughter and intended successor,
Princess Makheala, died two days before she did. Modjajdi is survived
by a son and it is not known who will succeed her. The selection of
a heir is expected to take up to a year, but the only female in the
family is Modjadji V's granddaughter, Princess Makobo Modjadji, who
is 23.
An astonishing number of movies have been made based on Haggard's legend
of She Who Must Be Obeyed -- Ursula Andress played the title character
Ayesha in the 1965
version. From the Internet Movie Datebase:
Great photos of the valley can be found at this site: The
Ethnographic Lens: Images from the Realm of a Rain Queen. Between
1936 and 1938 social anthropologists Eileen and Jack Krige undertook intensive
fieldwork in the north-eastern regions of South Africa among the Lobedu
people whose chief Modjadji was widely acclaimed as a rainmaker.'
'In 1943 their book 'The Realm of a Rain Queen' was published and has
remained in print ever since. Some of the photographs taken by the Kriges
were used as illustrations in the book but many remained unpublished and
little known ...' Via this
collection of archaeological and anthropological resources from the
South African Museum.
Link
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Man
who got Belo to invest millions in CueCat has a new gig: Webby
Award nominee
Jim Romenesko at Poynter.org, the journalists' first daily stop, is
leading his column right now with this item from the (alternative
weekly) Dallas Observer:
J.
Jovan Philyaw, the Texas entrepreneur who convinced Belo to sink
nearly $40 million into the failed CueCat
scanning device, is calling himself J. Hutton Pulitzer these days,
according to Eric Celeste. His new job is peddling crystals.
Meanwhile, Philyaw asks on his site, Who Is J. Hutton "Jovan"
and replies, "Jovan believes so strongly in the depth and stronghold
of "Generational Curses" that he even changed his birth name
(as his 33 Great Grandfather did in 1470) to shake the hold he felt his
"Family Name" had over his life."
This is apparently why he changed his name. No clue how he chose J. Hutton
Pulitzer, though.
CueCats (which whisked you to websites when you used one to scan barcodes
in print) are
available on eBay, some modified
to scan ordinary barcodes.
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David Mach's Bangers and Mash, made
of four abandoned cars and 150,000 newspapers. |
Bless this reader: Back on May 3, I blogged,
• Too big to hide: U.K. artist David
Mach's latest creation -- a 50-ton sculpture made from four abandoned
cars and 150,000 copies of The (Glasgow, Scotland) Herald newspaper
-- is something any ink-stained wretch would want to see. But I can't
find it. I
can read about it, I can see many other Mach works (such as a full-size
train made of red brick, sculptures made of match heads, others made
from coathangers). But I can't find a photo of Bangers and Mash, the
newsprint behemoth. If you can, please email
me.
Today I got an email from a reader in Wisconsin, John Bergman, who sent
along the photo above and added, "I personally saw this exhibit in
Glasgow last summer, and was quite impressed. If you've received any better
photos, I'd be interested in seeing them."
Now we all know.
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Diet
doctor Robert Atkins remains in coma, on life support: AP reports
that Atkins' doctors said his chances of a "meaningful recovery"
are slim after the the doctor slipped on the ice outside his Manhattan
office last week.
This story, like most others, says, "The Atkins diet emphasizes
meat, eggs and cheese and discourages bread, rice and fruit." I find
on this diet that I eat an awful lot of salads drenched in blue-cheese
dressing and, in restaurants, double veggies while the rest of you are
scarfing down fries. Wonder why they never mention that?
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Persian
Blogger Chronicles is by Alireza Doostdar, an Iranian getting
a master's in education at Harvard. Doostdar is blogging in English and
translating the highlights from other blogs that aren't. via Dave
Winer.
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The
BunnyBass archive of amusing bass guitars.
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com |
