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October 31, 2003 6:05 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

Updated 11.03.03 1:40 p.m. / S&L bailout costs you $50 a month for a life? In yesterday's interview with Outrage Radio's founders, the new show's host, James Linkin, tossed out an astonishing figure:

"Reagan’s HUD and the Savings & Loan catastrophe: your taxes are higher by $50/month for the rest of your life because of that bailout."

I asked Linkin for a source on that -- how he derived it.

In order not to perpetuate the error in search engines, I've commented out the inaccurate paragraphs. Here's Linkin's correction:

Doing a little research, I discovered that my dated information from the ‘80’s that I described for you does not carry forward. Because the Resolution Trust Corporation (formed to liquidate the assets of the failed S&Ls) sat on its hands for a while, the S&L assets appreciated in value, and by 1995, they had recovered all but $90 billion of the bailout money. There remain some contingent liabilities, but the total bill is probably closer to $100 billion.

In today’s money, that $161 billion. Your household share is a mere $1,610. At 5%, you can pay that off in three years, a mere two decades after the bailout occurred.

The net cost doesn’t include the lost opportunity cost of the money that churned through the insurance fund, but nevertheless the eighties pronouncement is not correct. A fifty year term would require only a payment of a little over $7. So I am only 14% as outraged about the S&L bailout as I was before.

Another update, from Outrage Radio's president, Michael Tulipan, "The show debuts on November 13 on www.outrageradio.com. Additional partners will be announced soon."
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Where pumpkins fly: The town of South Kingstown joins the grand tradition of pumpkin hurling with tomorrow's (Saturday's) Great Pumpkin Launch from 10 to 11 a.m.:

Don’t know what to do with your Jack O’ Lantern? Bring it to Curtis Corner Playfields for the first annual South Kingstown Pumpkin Launch. Youth, teens, families and groups are invited to have their pumpkin launched as far as it will go and win great prizes for the longest distance, closest target and the most creative pumpkin (creative categories include both carved and hand decorated pumpkins). Just bring a pumpkin; we’ll supply the catapult!

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Hackers on Atkins: At Salon (free day pass for watching an ad), Doc Searls, Cory Doctorow and other bloggers view their diets through a prism of tech language:

Picking up dieting tips at a computer conference could sound like the setup for a real groaner of a bad joke. Fairly or not, computer geeks have become cultural stereotypes for their embodiment of the modern-day version of the classic mind/body split: Many geeks tend to live their "real" lives in the virtual domain, while their bodies become forgotten blobs, crouched behind a monitor in some featureless room. Even the iconic penguin that reigns over all things Linux has a bit of a cuddly paunch.

But while there's nothing particularly bleeding-edge about eating the hamburger but not the bun, now that low-carb dieting has gone mainstream, the diet does appear to hold a special attraction for hackers, programmers and other close-to-the-machine dwellers. For some geeks, the low-carb diet is itself a clever hack, a sneaky algorithm for getting the body to do what you want it to do, a way of reprogramming yourself. Programmers, who are used to making their computers serve their will, are now finding that low-carb diets enable the same kind of control over their bodies.

...Doctorow, who lost 75 pounds by cutting out carbohydrates, sees a natural affinity between his brethren and the diet: "Read the alt.support.diet.low-carb FAQ, and you'll find people attacking their bodies like they would attack a logic board," he says. "Substitute 'faster bus speed' for 'metabolism,' and you've got something pretty close to an overclocking FAQ, he adds, referring to a practice popular with hardware hackers in which computer processors are tweaked so that they run faster than their out-of-the-box speeds.

Doc has a great line:

"We see people when we go to conferences that used to be a lot wider than they are now. Now, they're down to, like, one chin," says Searls, who lost 25 pounds last year in time for the Linux Geek Cruise in October, and has kept it off.

Related: BoingBoing.net, blog home of Doctorow and friends, got knocked out by a DNS attack, but it's back at http://216.126.84.59/

It'll take a couple of days for the old url to work again, but those numbers will work for now.
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Poetry "video game": Rectangles (text by Kim Rosenfield); from "The Truth Interview" with Kim Rosenfield at Arras.

Via wood s lot.
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Americans Flock to Get on NRA Blacklist: From Reuters,

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Most blacklists are designed to intimidate. But thousands of Americans are clamoring to join one drawn up by the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Actor Dustin Hoffman was so dismayed to find his name missing from the NRA's shadowy 19-page list of U.S. companies, celebrities, and news organizations seen as lending support to anti-gun policies that he wrote to the powerful pro-gun lobby group begging to be included. ...

... Hoffman's name has now been added to the list which reads like a Who's Who of American business, culture and religion and which ranges from the American Jewish Congress to A&M Records, ABC News and talk show queen Oprah Winfrey.

An NRA spokesman could not be reached for comment.

The list was found deep in the official NRA Web site by a group of grass-roots anti-gun campaigners and publicized by them two weeks ago to garner support for two pieces of gun control legislation going through Congress.

The campaigners set up their own Web site (http://www.NRAblacklist.com) and urged Americans to voluntarily put their names there. A full-page ad Tuesday in Daily Variety -- the Hollywood trade magazine -- urged movie and music artists to sign up.

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Microsoft hiring a tech journalist to work on user interface: This could be good news for puzzled end users.

The free Tipoff: Journalism Jobs at QuickTopic seems to be replacing paid classifieds for journalism jobs. Today, a headhunter for Microsoft is trolling for a "Technology Journalist/Writer (staff)" there:

Microsoft is taking a new approach to creating online help for the next generation of Windows. Rather than hiring traditional technical writers, they are looking for writers who have been writing how-to articles for technology-oriented consumer magazines like PC Magazine or technology-oriented consumer websites like pcworld.com to help create the Windows user interface.

Sorry, no telecommuting. And -- bloggers beware.
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Yahoo! kills off paid-for video: At silicon.com,

Industry analysts said most consumers are not interested in paying for streaming video services and that video is not a significant driver for broadband growth.

"When we ask consumers, we never see more than 10 percent saying they'd be willing to pay for video content," said Jed Kolko, an analyst at Forrester Research.

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A free press is not a mouthpiece: Over at Jim Romenesko's media blog, former Fox producer Charles Reina has set off an avalanche of letters that threatens to push his original post over the edge. Here's how it started:

...daily life at FNC is all about management politics. I say this having served six years there - as producer of the media criticism show, News Watch, as a writer/producer of specials and (for the last year of my stay) as a newsroom copy editor. Not once in the 20+ years I had worked in broadcast journalism prior to Fox - including lengthy stays at The Associated Press, CBS Radio and ABC/Good Morning America - did I feel any pressure to toe a management line. But at Fox, if my boss wasn't warning me to "be careful" how I handled the writing of a special about Ronald Reagan ("You know how Roger [Fox News Chairman Ailes] feels about him."), he was telling me how the environmental special I was to produce should lean ("You can give both sides, but make sure the pro-environmentalists don't get the last word.")

Editorially, the FNC newsroom is under the constant control and vigilance of management. The pressure ranges from subtle to direct. First of all, it's a news network run by one of the most high-profile political operatives of recent times. Everyone there understands that FNC is, to a large extent, "Roger's Revenge" - against what he considers a liberal, pro-Democrat media establishment that has shunned him for decades. For the staffers, many of whom are too young to have come up through the ranks of objective journalism, and all of whom are non-union, with no protections regarding what they can be made to do, there is undue motivation to please the big boss.

Sometimes, this eagerness to serve Fox's ideological interests goes even beyond what management expects. For example, in June of last year, when a California judge ruled the Pledge of Allegiance's "Under God" wording unconstitutional, FNC's newsroom chief ordered the judge's mailing address and phone number put on the screen. The anchor, reading from the Teleprompter, found himself explaining that Fox was taking this unusual step so viewers could go directly to the judge and get "as much information as possible" about his decision. To their credit, the big bosses recognized that their underling's transparent attempt to serve their political interests might well threaten the judge's physical safety and ordered the offending information removed from the screen as soon as they saw it. A few months later, this same eager-to-please newsroom chief ordered the removal of a graphic quoting UN weapons inspector Hans Blix as saying his team had not yet found WMDs in Iraq. Fortunately, the electronic equipment was quicker on the uptake (and less susceptible to office politics) than the toady and displayed the graphic before his order could be obeyed.

But the roots of FNC's day-to-day on-air bias are actual and direct. They come in the form of an executive memo distributed electronically each morning, addressing what stories will be covered and, often, suggesting how they should be covered. To the newsroom personnel responsible for the channel's daytime programming, The Memo is the bible. If, on any given day, you notice that the Fox anchors seem to be trying to drive a particular point home, you can bet The Memo is behind it.

J.D. Lasica, who's back blogging after a traveling week, puts this in perspective:

In a view probably shared by many, one blogger wrote: "FOX has every right to spin the news any way its owners and editors please."

If we were talking about a political magazine or even a television news magazine, that would be one thing. But Fox News -- whatever else it is -- is still in the news business. And too often today we think about business but forget the responsibilities that covering the news entails.

Journalism is never about about advancing your viewpoint, or your political spin. It's about getting at the truth, regardless of where the facts lead you. And anyone who has worked in journalism knows that when an editor comes over and mentions discreetly that "the boss would like this played a certain way," or that r the pro-environment angle of a story should be played down, the only legitimate feeling for a real journalist is to feel sick to one's stomach. I've worked (briefly) for such a paper once, the Sacramento Union, where new owners decreed that any reference to the National Organization for Women must be preceded by the description "the radical feminist group."

That's business, and ideology, at work. But it's not journalism.

And Jay Rosen at PressThink thinks about it all, and links to important follow-ups. If you care about this, stop there next.
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October 30, 2003 7:20 p.m.

Interview: The liberals behind Outrage Radio
Updated 10/31,

Back on Oct. 24, I blogged,

"Outrage Radio - Liberal Talk Radio with Attitude: Terrible name. Outrage is exhausting, and if that's the attitude, I won't be a frequent listener.

"Smart, sane, honest, wise, creative radio -- where's that?"

Yesterday, an email arrived from Michael Tulipan, president of Outrage Radio:

Thanks for your note in the Dallas News. (This blog is syndicated to about 16 other Belo news sites.) The reason we chose Outrage is because it is catchy & sums up our feelings about having our gov't hijacked by the right wing. I can assure you that we will not be screaming into the microphone, but we will also not be wimpy liberals who will sit down & shut up when a bully like Rush takes us on. "Smart, sane, creative" will get lost in the screaming of O'Reilly, Savage, et al. Liberals need an image makeover badly.

And besides, we're New Yorkers. We have plenty to be outraged about.

I couldn't leave it there. So I tossed back some questions off the top of my head. Maybe they'd answer, maybe not. Today, Tulipan and James Linkin, who'll be the Net radio show's host, responded. I've added links.

It's a joke among my friends that we're not going to be able to afford to retire in America, and we're looking for a nice Third-World spot to hunker down in. What would liberals do to remedy that?

• Linkin: Don’t consider that option unless you’re prepared to learn another language, probably Spanish. The best places are in Latin America. I won’t tell you my personal favorite because I don’t want it to get too crowded. I changed my mind; their economy could use the help. It’s Nicaragua, now amazingly the most peaceful country in the region, a nation of poets. Between Lake Nicaragua and the surrounding volcanoes, it’s one of the most picturesque places on Earth.
• Linkin: Astonishingly, the Democrats have become the party of fiscal responsibility. Republicans are determined to loot our Federal treasury to the point of bankruptcy (they call that “starving the beast”, except the beast in this case is the protector of everything we hold dear). Read yesterday’s column in the NY Times by David Brooks. The only way that there is any hope that the Federal Government might meet its Social Security and Medicare obligations is if Democrats run the White House and the Congress. If Bush is elected next year, sign up for total immersion.
• Tulipan: I am 33 and I am not counting on SS being available to me. If Bush & Co. stay in power, this will be a Third-World nation. Our national debt will cripple us. At which point, I am moving to Italy to make wine. I am especially fond of Southern Italy as it is not developed and still won't be in 30 years. Land is cheap and the weather beats the Northeast.

Will you have Camille Paglia on? She wants to stop the war now. (See Salon today.) (Link is to the story; view an ad for a free pass for a day)

• Linkin: I have not yet read her article. We’d love to have her on. In my judgment, there’s a credible argument to be made for pulling out, or threatening to do so, in that it might force our “allies” to pony up. Iraq needs to see a face other than ours. We have procrastinated too long in Iraq, and our effort there is rife with corruption, incompetence, and venality. Now, every NGO and aid organization is inextricably linked to the US and, by extension, to Israel. We’re fairly ineffective now, and we’ll be less effective 6 months from now. A change in administration will help enormously, if for no other reason than how it might help our image abroad, Bush being Al Qaeda’s preeminent recruiter. But that won’t happen soon enough.
• Tulipan: We need to get the UN in there now and get our guys out. It's not our business, never was, and never will be.

Will you have returning troops from Iraq? It's just a matter of time before there's an Iraq Veterans Against the War group, isn't it?

• Linkin: Yes and yes.
• Tulipan: I want to have National Guard members on too.

(Michael) Moore and (Al) Franken are funny, but they're easy targets as "extremists." Are you going to hunt for some gravitas -- i.e. Walter Cronkite, or another substantial grownup to articulate positions that more of the middle can get behind?

• Linkin: We’d like to get Paul Krugman, Michael Kinsley (Slate, Washington Post), William Saletan, Fred Kaplan, and Frank Rich. We’re in discussion with Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah’s Men, about the 1953 US-sponsored coup in Iran and its relation to the roots of Middle Eastern terrorism and religious extremism.
• Tulipan: It's easy to get caught up in the celebrity culture, but I think that Bill Maher has done this sort of thing well. I'm personally averse to aligning us with the Hollywood elite because they are a juicy target for the right.

Why are the Democrats behind things like red-light cameras? Dick Armey was the leader of the opposition to them.

• Linkin: Much as both are loath to admit it, both Democrats and Republicans want to control our behavior and thoughts. Dissent and dissenting behavior threaten established orders, and our two political parties are about as established as any order can be in this country.
• Linkin: Republicans tend to prefer their chaos in the public sphere: unregulated markets, underfunded education, unpatrolled highways, etc., but they want to impose order in the home: mandatory Internet filters, restrictions on abortion, hard time for drugs, and God everywhere. In general, Democrats are more likely to leave you alone in your home but, in the belief that it serves public advocacy, restrict behavior in the public sphere: no smoking, regulated markets, hard time for drugs, and easier on the God stuff.
• Tulipan: I think we need to frame this kind of debate with practicality. Politicians are interested in issues and regular people generally only care about day-to-day issues. Public safety is a black hole for the Democrats, and as a result they get on some strange bandwagons. Personally, I think all this big brother stuff is a load of crap. If you do something wrong, you should be punished. Too many people get away with things -- try walking or driving in New York. Nothing is enforced at all. Trucks double-parked, people making illegal turns. Too much permissiveness has negative consequnces. The real key, again to frame an issue, is to have boundaries.

Getting the government out of our lives has traditionally been a conservative position, but now it's up for grabs, with only the Libertarians making a stand there. The "nanny state" is identified with the liberals now. Is that accurate? What do liberals want?

• Linkin: This is a thirty-year run of a very clever frame game by the right wing. If government is out of our lives, then there is no credible agency to protect us individually from avarice in the private sector; and in a “market” economy, that presence is far greater than government. It’s not a coincidence that whenever we have a major financial scandal, there are Republicans not asleep at the switch, but sitting on it. Reagan’s HUD and the Savings & Loan catastrophe: your taxes are higher by $50/month for the rest of your life because of that bailout.* And when the Republican Congress cut funding for the SEC to the nub, several thousand CEOs made off with billions more. WorldCom alone is an 11-digit number; that they will be allowed to emerge from bankruptcy is perhaps the greatest travesty in the history of corporate law.
Liberals mostly want honesty and transparency. Is that too much to ask?
• Tulipan: If you want a nanny, move to Sweden. There will never be a real social safety net here. A large % of Americans have no insurance and the idea of national healthcare is so odious to the right wing, that it will never happen. My health care costs $900 for 2 people, with a $500 deductible. And my doctor works 3 days a week. If this is the free market, then I'll take something else.

(*I asked Linkin for the source of the $50 a month per taxpayer figure. Here's his reply.)

Are you going to raise the potential for abuses in electronic voting? Will Bev Harris of Black Box Voting show up on your show? (After all, if the vote totals can be bought, none of the rest of it matters, does it?)

• Linkin: They’re not for sale. They’re sold. It’s not just the vote totals. These companies are very knowledgeable about the ergonomics of operating these machines, and you can bet they won’t be as easy and clear as they should be for the elderly, the handicapped, and people who are reading-impaired by lack of education. The Congress will do nothing about this of course, so the action needs to happen at the state level. Require auditable voting devices, and require all software for voting machines to be OPEN SOURCE. This is something I know a little about from a previous career. And sure, we’d love to have Bev Harris.
• Tulipan: This needs to become an issue for next year. We will certainly push this and link every instance of bias (Diebold-Bush connection to name one). Over and over. No one can be allowed to hijack our country ever again.

Crain's New York Business reports, "Messrs. Linkin and Tulipan were formerly director of computer operations and director of operations, respectively, at streaming video provider iNEXTV.com, which went belly-up in 2001. They raised $50,000 -- half of it from Manhattan-based radio commercial producer Trendset Studios -- to launch their new venture."

The show is to debut next month. When Tulipan tells me exactly when it will launch, I'll pass it on. Nov. 13.
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Need a last-minute halloween mask? I put this into projo's Halloween section, but it's too good to hoard. Forbes has masks you can download and print: Dead celebrities, disgraced CEOs and billionaires. (It's Forbes, after all.) I could be Marilyn, Martha or Oprah, but Lennon works (the gene connection), and behind Bob Marley's mug, I'd sing fine songs, mon.
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Virtual Tour of VW's Transparent Factory: At Car & Driver magazine.
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E-Vote Software Leaked Online: Another firm's software, not Diebold's this time. Wired reports,

Software used by an electronic voting system manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems has been left unprotected on a publicly available server, raising concerns about the possibility of vote tampering in future elections.

The software, made available at ftp.jaguar.net, is stored on an FTP server owned by Jaguar Computer Systems, a firm that provides election support to a California county. The software is used for placing ballots on voting kiosks and for storing and tabulating results for the Sequoia AVC Edge touch-screen system.

The security breach means that anyone with a minimal amount of technical knowledge could see how the code works and potentially exploit it. According to a computer programmer who discovered the unprotected server, the files also contain Visual Basic script and code for voting system databases that could allow someone to learn how to rig voting results. The programmer spoke on condition of anonymity.

Jaguar blocked public access to the FTP site late Wednesday. Representatives from Jaguar did not return calls for comment.

Sequoia said it was disturbed that the proprietary code had been accessed in an "inappropriate manner," and went on to blast Jaguar in an e-mail to Wired News about the security gaffe.

"While this breach of security is grossly negligent on the part of the county's contractor, the code that was retrieved is used to accumulate unofficial results on election night and does not compromise the integrity of the official electronic ballots themselves," wrote Sequoia spokesman Alfie Charles.

Peter Neumann, lead computer scientist at the Stanford Research Institute, said the exposed code could allow someone to plant a Trojan Horse in the system's compiler -- the program that translates the code for use by the computer -- that would be undetectable to anyone reading the code.

The files on the server also revealed that the Sequoia system relies heavily on Microsoft software components, a fact the company often has been coy about discussing since Microsoft software is a frequent target of hackers.

Jaguar, based in Riverside, California, left the data unencrypted and unprotected. The FTP server allowed anyone to access it anonymously. ...

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In 1963, JFK ordered a complete withdrawal from Vietnam: This astonishing headline tops a fact-filled James Galbraith piece in the current issue of Boston Review, but it's very dense.

Blogger Charles Dodgson boils it down a bit, if you want just the bottom line; the Galbraith excerpt follows:

A lot of people get attached to romantic notions that just don't comport with the real world. Some people, for instance, want to believe that the whole traumatic Vietnam conflict would have been avoided if John F. Kennedy had stayed in office. For years, this notion has been denounced as being completely at variance with the well-studied historical record. Even Noam Chomsky has mocked its adherents as hopeless romantics. But some people just won't let go.

And now, we have tapes, made in the oval office in October of 1963, containing the voice of JFK ordering a complete and unconditional withdrawal from Vietnam within two years, "victory" or no. And he is backed up by the strong urging of, of all people, Bob "Body Count" McNamara, who had already concluded that prospects for victory were doubtful at best.

Here's Galbraith (son of historian John Kenneth Galbraith and himself a historian at the University of Texas):

Before a large audience at the LBJ Library on May 1, 1995, (former Defense Secretary Robert F. ) McNamara... confirmed that President Kennedy’s action had three elements: (1) complete withdrawal “by December 31, 1965,” (2) the first 1,000 out by the end of 1963, and (3) a public announcement, to set these decisions “in concrete,” which was made. McNamara also added the critical information that there exists a tape of this meeting, in the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, to which he had access and on which his account is based.

The existence of a taping system in JFK’s oval office had become known over the years, particularly through the release of partial transcripts of the historic meeting of the “ExComm” during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. But the full extent of Kennedy’s taping was not known. And, according to McNamara, access to particular tapes was tightly controlled by representatives of the Kennedy family. When McNamara spoke in Austin, only he and his coauthor, Brian VanDeMark, had been granted the privilege of listening to the actual tape recordings of Kennedy’s White House meetings on Vietnam.

In 1997, however, this situation changed. The Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), an independent civilian body established under the 1992 JFK Records Act that has already been responsible for the release of millions of pages of official records deemed relevant to Kennedy’s assassination, ruled that his tapes relating to Vietnam decision-making should be released. In July the JFK Library began releasing key tapes, including those of the withdrawal meetings on October 2 and 5, 1963.7

A careful review of the October 2 meeting makes clear that McNamara’s account is essentially accurate and even to some degree understated. One can hear McNamara—the voice is unmistakable—arguing for a firm timetable to withdraw all U.S. forces from Vietnam, whether the war can be won in 1964, which he doubts, or not. McNamara is emphatic: “We need a way to get out of Vietnam, and this is a way of doing it.” ...

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Bill Moyers: The Buzzflash interview. Moyers was once Lyndon Johnson's press secretary; he will be the keynote speaker at the National Conference on Media Reform in Madison, Wisconsin, on Nov. 8. A lot of this interview deals with that topic:

MOYERS: ...Watching the opening of the second game of the World Series, I was struck at how effectively the Fox producers mixed patriotic imagery with prurient promotions for upcoming programming in what amounted to a sedation of the viewer's critical faculty. It's a fitting metaphor, I think, for what's happening in politics as the mainstream media have been silenced and the partisan media have turned propaganda into "news." Wave the flag, stroke the sentiments, stir the prejudices -- and you can keep the masses distracted from the real game happening out of sight, behind closed doors in boardrooms and oval offices.

BUZZFLASH: And what is that game?

MOYERS: Class war. The corporate right and the political right declared class war on working people a quarter of a century ago and they've won. The rich are getting richer, which arguably wouldn't matter if the rising tide lifted all boats. But the inequality gap is the widest it's been since l929; the middle class is besieged and the working poor are barely keeping their heads above water. The corporate and governing elites are helping themselves to the spoils of victory -- politics, when all is said and done, comes down to who gets what and who pays for it -- while the public is distracted by the media circus and news has been neutered or politicized for partisan purposes.

Take the paradox of a Rush Limbaugh, ensconced in a Palm Beach mansion massaging the resentments across the country of white-knuckled wage earners, who are barely making ends meet in no small part because of the very policies of those corporate and ideological forces for whom Rush has been a hero. ...

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Mad Magazine: All the covers since 1952.
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Rock the Vote and CNN are co-sponsoring America Rocks the Vote, a town-hall meeting with the Democratic Presidential candidates on Tuesday, Nov. 4. It will be broadcast live from Boston's Faneuil Hall on CNN from 7-8:30 p.m.
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E-vote hopscotch update: C. Scott Ananian at MIT has received a cease-and-desist letter for mirroring the Diebold memos; Ananian is maintaining good ongoing links to the developing story in a blog that begins below his site's index.
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Bush in 30 Seconds: The MoveOn.org Voter Fund invites you to make a 30-second spot on "The Truth about George Bush:"

Sick of the propaganda being beamed at you from the current administration's media mavens? Here's a new way to fight back: Enter MoveOn.org Voter Fund's political ad contest. You don't have to be formally trained in the art of filmmaking, just ready, willing and able to create an ad that tells the truth about George Bush.

All eligible submissions will be posted on this web site and rated by visitors. The top rated ads will then be voted on by our panel of esteemed judges, including Michael Moore, Donna Brazile, Jack Black, Janeane Garofalo, and Gus Van Sant. The winning ad idea will be broadcast on television during the week of Bush's 2004 State of the Union address, and the winner will receive a recording of the ad as broadcast.

There's a catch, though:

No Express Advocacy: MoveOn.org Voter Fund is a so-called section 527 political organization, and is prohibited from expressly advocating for the election or removal of specific candidates for federal elections. In other words, your ads can say lots of different things about George Bush and his administration, but you are not allowed to say that people should vote for or against him.

The format: Format: Submissions will be accepted online ONLY in mpeg or Quicktime digital formats. Your ad needs to be 4MB or smaller in its final, encoded version.

There's more on the submission guidelines page.

And much more from Moby (yes, that Moby), who dreamed this scheme up.
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Northern Lights visible here tonight? The rain is clearing, and the aurora borealis may be visible, a result of this: Powerful Geomagnetic Storm Strikes Earth. From Washington, D.C., Lou Josephs notes,

Tonight look northward for the Northern Lights to be visible. Take a look here to see the red heavy intensity of where you're going to see the display. This is the 2nd biggest bang from the sun in recorded history and it will be impressive.

Lou adds, in an email,

When the K index goes higher the chances of an auroral display increase. We missed last night because of the rain, (but) this thing is so strong that we will get to see it again tonight and perhaps tomorrow night as well.

K index measures the geomagnetic field, which currently is at major storm levels.

AM band listening towards Europe should be very good at local sunset. Count on it. Used to hear 1512 from Belgium in the car and 747 from Holland, and 1179 from Sweden.

And, from SpaceWeather.com today,

The prospects for more auroras tonight are good, mainly because the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) near Earth has just tilted sharply south--a condition that promotes geomagnetic activity. Where might these auroras appear? High latitudes -- e.g., Alaska, Canada and US northern border states from Maine to Washington--are favored, as usual, but auroras could descend to lower latitudes, too. Sky watchers everywhere should be alert.

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October 28, 2003 7:00 p.m.

Disposable DVDs have been on store shelves for a little over a month and, for the most part, they seem to be staying there.

Four states are serving as test markets for the 48-hour DVDs, called EZ-Ds. The product is vacuum-packed; once opened, the disc will play for two days before a resin on the DVD reacts with the atmosphere, rendering it unplayable.

... "They haven't sold very well yet," said Tom Mullen, the store manager for Cub Foods in Peoria, Illinois. "We've got them up front in a prime location right by the check-out lanes."

In more than one month's time, the store has sold around 15 to 20 of the EZ-Ds, he said.

"I think the biggest reason is the price. It's a tad bit too high," he said.

Cub Foods sells the EZ-Ds for $7 and offers about 10 titles, including Sweet Home Alabama, The Hot Chick and Shanghai Knights.

"Too expensive," said Tom Tow, who manages the Cub Foods 40 miles away in Bloomington. "That's the most echoed comment I've heard."

Customers aren't interested in paying more than $6 for a limited-play DVD when they can pay $2 at the video store. Even with a $2 late fee, it's cheaper than buying a disposable DVD, Tow said.

"I don't think they like the idea that it self-destructs in 48 hours," he said. "I think a lot of them are worried about the quality of the DVD for that price. Seeing as how it self-destructs, can it really be that good?"

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Black Box Voting Blues: Steven Levy at Newsweek writes for the general reader about the dangers electronic voting machines, and the Associated Press covers Diebold's threats to sites that host the documents the voting-machine manufacturer left on an open server. Students at 15 universities are now hosting the files.
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History Of Robots In The Victorian Era: Lots of pictures.

Boilerplate was unveiled in 1893 by Professor Archibald Campion. Built as a prototype soldier for use in resolving the conflicts of nations, Boilerplate served with Roosevelt's Rough Riders and fought alongside Pancho Villa.

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An eBay ad with attitude: One of the funniest eBay auctions ever (Collection of 26 Beanie Babies from Ex-Wife) closed last month, but will stick around a while longer. Read it all -- he had no idea when his ex left behind a single box of the critters (from her collection of more than 1,000) that he had stepped into a minefield. Here's a small excerpt:

...I understand from a friends wife that people are afraid to get fakes. FAKES? Fake plush toys? I was amazed. I thought people forged money, not childrens toys. Well I can only say, that 99% of these goofy toys were bought with my money, from eiter the local Hallmark Store, or one of the dozen or so Southern Craft/ collectibles stores I had to go to on a weekly basis buying these ridiculos toys years ago. Happy Bidding! Please take these critters from me so I can buy tools.

Final Notice and Disclaimer: I know nothing about these stuffed Beanie Babies. I offer no proof of anything. It is a stuffed animal, get over it! I don't think my ex-wife was in the Black Market Beanie Trade..but then again, I didn't know she was having an affair either!

Related: An entire art exhibit was auctioned on eBay -- it ended today. It came full circle:

You are bidding on a conceptual artwork called The ebay Show. The ebay Show has been on physical display at Goatsilk Gallery in Missoula, Montana, since Sept. 5, 2003, and has been viewed by countless others on the internet at http://www.goatsilk.com. The exhibit consists of nine works purchased off ebay - in the last year - for $25 dollars or less. In the installation, the artworks hang along side their documents and packaging to suggest that the collective activity of ebay, and rapid implementation of technology in general, is art in and of itself because it forces new examinations of the nature, purpose, and definition of humanity. The winning bidder will receive all nine art works under glass, their packaging and documentation, and a signed copy of the curatorial essay. The $200.00 starting bid price reflects the actual material cost for curating and mounting this exhibition.

Individual Works and curatorial statement can be viewed at the following link: http://www.goatsilk.com/current2.html

via Judy Watt
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Unexplained tree-top boulders found in forest: From the Brown Country (Ind.) Democrat,

Something unnatural is going on in Yellowwood State Forest.

The mystery began a few years ago when a turkey hunter, scouting in a remote area of the 23,000-acre forest, discovered a large boulder in the top of an 80-foot-tall chestnut oak tree. What he saw wedged among its branches was a boulder about 4 feet wide and a foot thick.

The boulder was eventually dubbed Gobbler’s Rock after the turkey hunter. It sits high on a south-facing slope overlooking a ravine near Tulip Tree Road in western Brown County and is thought to weigh at least 400 pounds.

After the initial sighting of Gobbler’s Rock, hikers have found at least two more giant sandstone boulders sitting in the top limbs of two sycamores. One boulder is nearly 45 feet off the ground and both rocks appear to weigh about 200 pounds. The trees are 100 yards apart growing near the banks of Plum Creek in a seldom-visited part of Yellowwood State Forest, just southwest of Helmsburg.

Known to locals as URBs, or Unexplained Resting Boulders, officials can’t explain how the boulders got wedged into the branches in the first place. The huge rocks couldn’t grow upward with the trees because the saplings could not have withstood their weight. The boulders must have been placed high in the trees after their trunks were sturdy enough to support them.

Flying rocks? UFOs?
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October 27, 2003 7:05 p.m.

Updated 10.28 / SignOn SanDiego has a fire blog.

LA Blogs is tracking posts about the Los Angeles fires.
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Dell DJ takes on Apple's IPod: At PC World,

Dell released details Monday about its previously announced Dell Digital Jukebox music player and its new download service, both of which will be available Tuesday. ...

The 15GB version will be priced at $249, while the 20GB version will cost $329 when it goes on sale Tuesday through Dell's Web site. The Dell DJ weighs 7.6 ounces and will play music continuously for 16 hours, according to Dell. ...

Dell's music download service will come through a partnership with MusicMatch, which offers 250,000 songs for $0.99 each, or complete albums from artists such as Dido and 50 Cent for $9.99 or higher.

Songs will be available in the MP3 or WMA (Windows Media Audio) format. A version of Apple's ITunes service for Windows users launched earlier this month, but it allows Windows users to download songs only in the M4P format, also known as AAC (advanced audio coding).

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Still crazy...: Tom Mangan went to "a benefit concert Neil Young organizes for the Bridge School (in Hillsborough, Calif.), which uses technology to open up new vistas for disabled children."

Then he covers it -- the scene, the performances, band by band.

Here's some of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young part:

One of the first songs has to be "Deja Vu," because, yeah, we've all been here before. Then the high guitar note that hints "For What it's Worth" is up next. "There's something happening here..." and yeah, it's not exactly clear. Because there are, again, men with guns over there telling us we've got to beware. A song played so many times it's become a cliché, but tonight, it works, maybe in a way it hasn't worked since the fall of Saigon. They close with "Teach your Children" and I'm overcome with emotion for the second time tonight. The feelings come back even when I write about it. Maybe because at this age there's no way to deny: I'm becoming more and more like them, the Dinosaurs of Rock, and less and less like the youngsters of Dashboard Confessional.

On the way out, we're discussing the CSNY set ... I'm noting how their voices seem to have aged at the same rate, so even though they can't hit the notes they did before, they still sound good together.

I like that -- they've all broken down in similar but compatible ways.

I never expected to hear the same music all my life. I have preschool memories of music on my mom's kitchen radio -- Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, Jerry Vale, "How much is that doggie in the window?" The generation raised on that hasn't been haunted by it forever.

Reading Tom's retrospective, I wondered if anybody sang,

An' here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice.

Related: I got a call recently from the authors of a college textbook on the '60s, asking to publish my 1989 series on Woodstock, written for its 20th anniversary. Posterity beckons, but not prosperity. The newspaper owns them, and will presumably be contacted about reprint rights.
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Reinventing the wheel: MIT's "music sharing network." Ars Technica's Ken Fisher has sensible response to today's hoopla over the MIT LAMP network (NYT: With Cable TV at M.I.T., Who Needs Napster?):

Using the MIT cable TV network, songs from a databank of music are accessible by students and faculty via the TV, not unlike cable's "on-demand" features. 16 channels are reserved for use, which means that at any given time 16 different people can be in control of the various channels (but only 16, mind you). The legality of the "network" stems from the fact that the music is being broadcast in analog form, at a quality above FM, but certainly below that of quality encoded MP3s. In a sense, it's like a radio station that you tune in via your TV, but you have no ads, and may have full control.

... However, this is no answer to the P2P problem. First of all, you are tied to the TV. The portability of music is ignored by this scheme. Even with decent speakers, I'd rather have music on my computer stored in a superior format. You could, of course, record the stream if you really wanted to, but it's quality is lackluster. At that rate, you could buy a $20 FM USB tuner, and record stuff just as well-yet who is doing that? Again, this is a great thing for students who want to have access to all kinds of stuff, but this is no P2P solution. But then, that's where the whole copyright debacle has landed us: a technically simple music distribution system is supposedly a step in the right direction when its ultimate product, inferior analog music, is a considerable step back.

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Good day on shore: Friday, the South County edition of the Journal ran a story (Sailors lend a hand at senior center, reg.req.) about crew members from the USS Chafee (in Rhode Island for the commissioning of the destroyer Oct. 18 in Newport) teaming up with sea cadets to refurbish the exterior of Beechwood House, a senior center in Wickford.

The sea cadets, based at Quonset Point, have their own website, where they posted lots of pictures and a description of how it all came together:

The ship supplied 64 able hands to engage in a time-honored Naval activity -- chipping, sanding, scraping and painting the exterior of the North Kingstown Senior Center, locally known as the Beechwood House. NCBC Sea Cadet staff provided logistical support in coordinating the efforts of the ship with the community, and the town of North Kingstown supplied paint, scrapers, ladders, brushes and staging...

It was an emotional afternoon, according to some who were there.
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A Writer in Full: Julia Keller profiles author Tom Wolfe in the Chicago Tribune (no reg. req. for this one):

Seeing life: That was the goal. Seeing it and capturing it in print, getting it all down so that other people could feel what he felt, see it the way he saw it, smell the smells. His heroes included legendary Chicago newspapermen such as Ben Hecht, co-author of the play "The Front Page," and just about any journalist who rambled and watched and listened and then wrote convincingly about it, with verve and nerve. Wolfe was on fire. He knew what he wanted to do. ...

Trouble was, as Wolfe went from the Springfield Union to The Washington Post to the New York Herald Tribune, and as the 1950s became the 1960s, he noticed something. "Newspapers," he recalls, "were no longer the place people went immediately to for news."

To engage readers who already knew the headlines, he figured out, you had to do more than recite the facts. You had to get the facts, sure, but when it came time to tell the story, you'd better have more up your sleeve than who, what, when, where and why. You'd better have a yarn. And you'd better spin that yarn like it had never been spun before.

Thus was born the New Journalism, a term coined by writer Pete Hamill to describe a certain kind of long-form, highly idiosyncratic writing that came of age in the early 1960s. The New Journalism, while factual, was as richly entertaining as fiction. Its practitioners deployed scenes and rendered dialogue, just as novelists did. The genre depended on the writer to be not only insanely curious and almost magically intuitive, but also capable of turning all of that hunger and wisdom into a story that would leap right over the boundaries of regular old journalism. It had to soar. To sizzle. To dazzle. But it also had to be the truth--the rock-solid, four-square, palm-on-the-bible truth. Not everyone, needless to say, could pull it off. ...

...Whereas a lesser writer might have come up with, "The traffic was bad," Wolfe's opening for "The Last American Hero," his profile of stock car legend Junior Johnson, was a tad more evocative: "Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek raspberry, Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock car races, and that old mothering North Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields."...

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Wholemovement - The Work of Bradford Hansen-Smith: These photos show models made from 9"diameter paper plates, during 1997-1999. They are taken from the book The Geometry of Wholemovement: folding the circle for information."

There's a "How to" as well.

Here's the "About" text, in its entirety (although there are photos):

In addition to writing about and folding circles, Bradford Hansen-Smith travels the US and Europe giving presentations for schools, teachers, and institutions."

Pages elsewhere on the web say he's from Chicago.
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Ask 'Helpful Hacker' Adrian Lamo a Question: TechFocus is partway through an interview with the hacker (CNet interview) who helped his targets fix their security holes. Lamo is charged with hacking his way into the computer system of the New York Times and using fraudulent names and passwords to run up a $300,000 tab for research on the LexisNexis system.

An FBI agent sent letters Sept. 19 to 13 reporters, telling them to preserve any documents related to Lamo in anticipation of subpoenas. The FBI has since backed off that intrusion. Justice Department procedures make media notes off limits, or at best, a last resort when all other options are exhausted. Negotiation, not subpoena, is then the preferred method of access.
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com