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By Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
July 25, 2003 5:40 p.m. -- (Last
week's weblog)
Women
who blog: Ms.
Magazine blogger Christine Cupaiuolo months ago put out a call for
women bloggers, with the intention of making a list:
This is by no means a definitive list, and other suggestions are welcome.
After hearing from hundreds of readers (a big thank you to all), we
decided to winnow it down mainly to blogs that cover politics, current
events, feminism, culture and technology.
These blogs are not necessarily representative of the views of Ms.
Magazine -- though most of the blogs are, as one might expect, written
by feminists and progressives, some are not, and some don't take an
overt ideological stand. But in all cases they are written by women
with strong voices whose writings are respected in the blogging community.
Happy reading.
Liz Donovan,
whom I often link to, is on there. Be sure to check out the comments
that go with
that Ms. post. Many of us on Ms.'s list have used them to suggest
other women we think should be included. My choice: Shelley Powers, Burningbird.
Link
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Snapster? Robert X. Cringely at PBS (Son
of Napster: One Possible Future for a Music Business That Must Inevitably
Change) offers a way out of the RIAA logjam. I've cobbled a paragraph
together to establish the structure, but you really have to read it all.
First the law. Snapster is built on the legal concept of Fair Use,
which allows people who purchase records, tapes, and CDs to make copies
for backup and for moving the content to other media. ...Snapster is
all about ownership. Snapster will be a company that buys at retail
one copy of every CD on the market....Snapster will also be a download
service with central servers capable of millions of transactions per
day....
Each Snapster share carries ownership rights to those 100,000 CDs....
Snapster is a kind of mutual fund, so every investor is a beneficial
owner of all 100,000 CDs. Each share also carries the right to download
backup or media-shifting copies for $0.05 per song or $0.50 per CD,
that download coming from a separate company we'll call Snapster Download
that is 100 percent owned by Snapster.
What I have described is legal, it just leverages technology in a way
that has never been done before. There are precedents for group ownership
of recordings and certainly the law of mutual funds is very clear. Of
course, the RIAA will have a response. They will file suit, probably
claiming restraint of trade, but this simply will not stand and it is
impossible to believe they could get any form of retraining order.
Cringely offers this to encourage more lateral thinking along these lines.
There are a few more thinkers needed to flesh this out.
Adam Crane of Matunuck (R.I., of course, at the beach) emails, "The
only point I don't think he touched on enough is how this will all affect
the actual artists and their money? And, in the end, isn't he just creating
a bigger, wealthier, entity living off the artist's talent?"
He's got a point. I hope there's lots of discussion on this one, artists
included.
Link
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Rarotonga
or Bust: How We Packed Up the Kids and moved to Paradise— Or So We
Thought. Everybody's fantasy, at LA Weekly.
The tagline at the end explains how they're financing the escape:
Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair will be filing dispatches throughout
their family’s year in the South Pacific. And, of course, there'll
be a book in it...
Link
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Mailinator:
Brilliant. Necessary. Free:
Have you ever gone to a website that asks for your email for no reason
(other than they are going to sell your email address to the highest
bidder so you get spammed for ever (and ever (and ever)))?
Welcome to Mailinator(tm). No Signup. No waiting. No SPAM. Just email
- your email - anytime you want it. No time wasted signing-up, just
send an email to any address @mailinator.com. Your email address already
exists. Get your email sent here, THEN come check mailinator. Your mail
will be waiting.
Forget giving out your real email address. Forget giving out your information.
Forget spam. ...
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Salt or Fresh? My colleague Jack Perry has
new column, What
side are you on in the annual parting of the waters? Take
the poll...
Link
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 Bad
Girl Movie Posters: I love this stuff.
On a page of thumbnails, I clicked on one that appealed: Live Fast,
Die Young. 1958. Troy Donahue is in it, and it was directed by Paul
Henreid. (I know that name. As an actor, he played Victor Laszlo -- Ingrid
Bergman's husband -- in Casablanca!)
Its music ("Music in the mood of today's 'beat' generation")
was composed by Joseph Gershenson (head of the music department at Universal
Studios) and Henry Mancini (Mr. Moon River was a "staff composer"
at Universal.)
Link
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Faux
Faulkner and Imitation Hemingway contest winners: At Hemispheres
Magazine.
Link
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Here's
the truth. But it depends on where you are: Great headline, interesting
story from The Age (Australia)
America and Britain - along with America and France, America and Russia,
America and Botswana, America and anywhere, really - live in parallel
information universes. By that I mean that the media produced in different
cultures don't merely reflect different opinions about the news, they
actually recount alternative versions of reality.America and Britain
- along with America and France, America and Russia, America and Botswana,
America and anywhere, really - live in parallel information universes.
By that I mean that the media produced in different cultures don't merely
reflect different opinions about the news, they actually recount alternative
versions of reality. ...
... During the Iraq war, a few Americans and Europeans, at least, began
to notice how tiny that village actually is. It wasn't hard to see that
the war as broadcast by the BBC or Deutsche Welle was quite different
from the war as broadcast by NBC or CNN.
Fewer understood that this is not only a Euro-American problem: a German
friend visited Poland during the war and was surprised by how much less
blood seemed to appear on the Polish evening news.
And the differences run much deeper than a disagreement over Iraq,
or portrayals of a single event. It isn't just that Europeans have different
opinions from Americans about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for
example; they actually learn different facts and read about different
events, and therefore they reach different conclusions.
When CIA head George Tenet fell on his sword over that now infamous
piece of British intelligence that made it into President Bush's State
of the Union speech, the story played in the US as "White House
Dumps on CIA". In Britain, it played as "White House Dumps
on Britain".
Link
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House
Takes Aim at Patriot Act Secret Searches: In case you missed this
-- WaPo reports,
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly
on Tuesday to roll back a key provision, which allows the government to
conduct secret "sneak and peek" searches of private property,
of a sweeping anti-terrorism law passed soon after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The House voted 309-118 to attach the provision to a $37.9 billion bill
funding the departments of Commerce, State and Justice. It would be the
first change in the controversial USA Patriot Act since the law was enacted
in October, 2001.
The move would block the Justice Department from using any funds to take
advantage of the section of the act that allows it to secretly search
the homes of suspects and only inform them later that a warrant had been
issued to do so.
Link
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 American
Gallery of Psychiatric Art: Sanity for Sale: 1960-2000.
Ads for drugs. Quite strange and spooky.
That's a 1962 ad for the antidepressant Tofranil® ~ imipramine ~
that ran in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
via wood
s lot
Link
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Wheelchair
moves at the speed of thought: From New Scientist,
Severely disabled people who cannot operate a motorised wheelchair
may one day get their independence, thanks to a system that lets them
steer a wheelchair using only their thoughts.
Unlike previous thought-communication devices, the system does not
use surgical implants. Instead a skullcap peppered with electrodes monitors
the electrical activity of its wearer's brain. Early trials using a
steerable robot indicate that with just two days training it is as easy
to control the robot with the human mind as it is manually.
Link
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Scramble your brains: Maybe you shouldn't
look at this if you're epileptic.
Link
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I'm taking Mondays off for the rest of the summer. See you back here
Tuesday.
July 24, 2003 7:52 p.m.
News outlets split over photos of Saddam's sons:
Copout or community standards?
What news websites used the post-mortem photos, which blanched? Thanks
to Steve Yelvington for posting this roundup to the Online-News discussion
list:
Used on home page
CBS News
Providence Journal
BBC News
The Telegraph, UK
The Guardian, UK
The Times, UK
The Independent, UK
El Mundo, Spain
El Pais, Spain
Die Welt, Germany
Al Jazeera
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/fronts/HOME
Used inside
MSNBC.com
CNN.com
ABCNews.com
FoxNews
USA Today
NYTimes.com
WashingtonPost.com
LATimes.com
ChicagoTribune.com
SFGate.com
SeattleTimes.com
StarTribune.com
All KnightRidder network sites
NJ.com
Dallas Morning News
AJC.com
Le Figaro
Jerusalem Post
No photos
Christian Science Monitor
International Herald Tribune
Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
OrlandoSentinel.com
Boston Globe
Here at projo.com, we used them very small on the homepage. Our news
and operations manager, Sean Polay, felt that displaying them as small
as we did diminished their gruesome and graphic detail while accurately
illustrating the story. Editor Andrea Panciera and I agreed.
I bet TV newsrooms were tearing hair over whether to show them. I still
think the photos aren't going to be convincing to those who need to see
the bodies, but Americans need to see them, like it or not.
We pulled the photos when the headline in our automatic AP feed slipped
off the edge in favor of newer stories, replacing it with a link. Our
fellow Belo sites took that path early on.
AP moved this as a service to conflicted print editors.
Editors,
The U.S. government has released photos of the bodies of Saddam Hussein's
sons, Udai and Qusai, killed on Tuesday. The content of the images is
graphic.
Some members don't want to publish the photos in their newspapers but
do want to be able to refer readers to a place on the Web to see them.
We have put these images together for use on your Web sites, complete
with a note warning readers of what the images contain. It is available
from the following URL: (This
url only works if it's on a subscribing site like this one.)
Link
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Reaction in Iraq: Hindustan
Times runs the photos of Saddam's sons, dead and alive, with an
Agence France Presse story, under a headline about conspiracy theories.
...Ali Abdul Hassan Haidar, 52, and Nasser Hindi, 50, chainsmoke and
play backgammon in the Umm Khathoum coffee shop. Both men hail from
Iraq's Shiite majority, long oppressed under Saddam. They have many
reasons to be happy about the strongman's overthrow.
But they are sceptical about the four-hour battle in Mosul between
200 US forces and Uday and Qusay, that ended with tank shells and a
dozen heat-seeking missiles pulverising the luxurious mansion where
they were hidden away.
To them, the last stand of Uday and Qusay has the whiff of a sell-out,
just like Baghdad's swift fall to the Americans on April 9.
"There are a lot of possibilities," says Haidar.
"Maybe the Americans pretended to kill them to get them out of
the country in order to reduce the resistance," he said.
Haidar suggests the Americans are paying Saddam to sabotage the country's
electricity and oil pipelines to slow down the pace of rebuilding, allowing
them to entrench themselves deeper into Iraq.
"Maybe it's part of the deal," he says.
To hammer home his point, Hindi show off the front page of the Islamist
newspaper, Iraqi Life, which carries a story about an alleged phone
conversation between US President George W. Bush and Saddam just hours
before US air strikes rang in the war on March 20.
Bush tells Saddam: "You are to obey what our agent in Baghdad
tells you. Keep holding military meetings and appearing on TV. You must
not worry, our agent in Baghdad will get you out safe. Have all your
belongings packed." ...
The photos are only revisited at the end, but with a wallop:
Inside a cramped studio, plastics artist Fuad Haman, 41, guesses the
two-day delay in showing pictures of Uday and Qusay comes from the elaborate
preparations to fake their corpses.
"In a photo, you would never notice the difference," says
Haman, an expert at making near-life plaster replicas of people.
Link
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Dylan
in darkest America: Stephanie Zacherek in Salon (watch an ad to
read the whole story),
There are going to be people who will see "Masked & Anonymous"
five times, if not 20, simply because there are hundreds (if not thousands)
of people in this world who think, "When it comes to Bob Dylan, why
do something just five times when you can do it 20?" They'll search
the movie arduously for every in-joke and reference (and there are lots);
they'll ponder it, fetishize it, pick it apart as if they were trying
to figure out what makes a pocket watch tick.
But my advice is this: See it in one glorious shot, grab as much from
it as you can and run like hell.
I say that not because I hated "Masked & Anonymous,"
but because I loved it. "Masked & Anonymous" -- which
opens in New York on Thursday, in Los Angeles on Friday and thereafter
in other cities -- is an exhilarating and sometimes puzzling jumble
that explores the dangers of power, the nature of Americana and the
Bob Dylan myth, among many, many other things.
The New York Times has a truly clueless review headlined Times
They Are Surreal in Bob Dylan Tale, which reminds me that Dylan wrote
the lines, "Something is happening but you don't know what it is,
do you, Mr. Jones?" about a journalist. (Ballad
of a Thin Man, 1965)
You can sample the music from "Masked and Anonymous" at this
Sony Classics site.
Link
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Sparks fly as new journalism collides with old:
Uh-oh is right, J.D.! J.D. Lasica wrote,
Oh, oh. Not sure what I started. In early June I was approached by
the editor of Nieman Reports, who told me she wanted to publish an issue
on weblogs, and could I suggest some of the leading lights in the field.
Jeff Jarvis, Doc,
Dan,
Sheila and Tom
Regan were some of the names at the top of the list. Most of them
have been approached.
But Jeff
has some issues with how his manuscript has been edited. (I'm finishing
mine up now.) Sorry about that, Jeff. The flap is fairly interesting,
judging by the two dozen postings on his "world without editors" item.
Nieman
Reports is the quarterly of The
Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Journalists
are invited to publish their own reporting experience with the topic of
the issue -- Science Journalism, Reporting on Health, Investigating Scandal
in the Catholic Church. And, upcoming this fall, Weblogs and Journalism.
Yes, I'm the Sheila referenced above. I got a call inviting me to write
for this issue too. Jeff made the early deadline, but J.D. and I have
been delayed by other writing commitments. (I hadn't planned to write
a weekend preview of the New
England Reggae Festival for today's newspaper, but Channel 12 anchor
Karen Adams, who usually teams with Live editor Alan Rosenberg to offer
"Best Bets" for the weekend, was away and didn't file. Somebody
had to do it.)
Now, before we've even shot our copy off, the Nieman editor has become
the story.
Here's one example Jeff gives of what happened to his copy:
: I said: "Weblogs are revolutionary."
: She said: "In Iran and other nations where people are repressed, we
are learning that Weblogs can be tools of revolution."
: Once again, wordy and obtuse and diluted. Weblogs are revolutionary
much closer to home -- in America ... and in newsrooms.
I tend to think the burden is on the writer to communicate, and maybe
an example from Jeff would have led this print editor to an understanding
of what he meant. Without that, she seems to have jumped to the conclusion
that he was talking about meat-world political revolutions organized by
blogs. Other edits Jarvis cites suggest she doesn't quite "get"
blogs, which is okay: She represents print journalists all over the world
whom she's asked us to help educate.
I've been on both sides of this. I've been primarily an editor of one
sort or another for most of my career, but I've also written a lot for
other editors. A good editor knows his or her readers and is the canary
in your coal mine, the early warning that there's a problem. If your editor
doesn't get it, the readers of that publication probably won't get it
either. If your editor asks a question, readers at home will be frustrated
by the same question if your story doesn't answer it. That's part of what
the editing process is good for. The editor is your first reader.
Flexing my hindsight on the examples Jarvis gave, I might, had I been
the editor, have avoided the temptation to rewrite from my limited understanding
of his medium and instead have peppered Jarvis's copy with questions:
Why is that? Got an example? Do you mean aiding political revolutions,
or are you saying weblogs will change journalism? How? Spell it out so
I get it, please.
Had I been Jarvis, the author, I would probably have explained that I
didn't mean third-world bloggers, and then offered a concrete incident
to back up that assertion.
But Jeff chose to kill his own Nieman story and published
it instead on his blog, with unpleasant mutterings for Nieman. And
the blogosphere is all over this, with comments from all quarters. Maybe
Jeff didn't tell how blogs could be revolutionary, but he certainly showed
how they could bypass the traditional gatekeepers and find a wide audience
-- although probably not the Nieman readers whom he might have enlightened
with a rewrite.
Given the benefit of his experience, I'm adjusting the pitch of my Nieman
piece for the reader who's never heard of a weblog, and will document
every statement.
Later: Your blog is your own -- you're publisher, editor, reporter, janitor
and sometimes fool. Somebody else's dead trees, you negotiate somebody
else's rules or don't play at all.
Link
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RIAA
Hit List: From Tech TV, Kazaa usernames of those getting
subpoenas:
The recording industry has launched a sweeping effort to identify and
shut down individual song swappers, making good on recent threats to
expand its legal battle against copyright theft.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has now issued
more than 911 subpoenas to Internet service providers across the United
States, trying to get the names of people still offering music on file-sharing
networks such as KaZaA and Grokster.
...The following user names were culled from subpoenas filed with the
US District Court in Washington, DC. All subpoenas, incidentally, are
being served by the Los Angeles law firm of Mitchell Silberberg &
Knupp. A total of 253 RIAA subpoenas were listed as of July 22 through
the federal court system's paid online database, PACER.
The actual subpoenas are available to view online in about half the
cases. ...
Link
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July 23, 2003 7:35 p.m.
Hunter S. Thompson is back with a vengeance:
Welcome
to the Big Darkness, the gonzo journalist's first ESPN column since
June 10, touches briefly on Kobe Bryant before moving on to bigger game:
You thought O.J. was bad? Wait until we get a taste of the K.B. scandal.
It will be like a feeding frenzy and a long parade of cannibals.
Then HST lets us know what's really on his mind:
But wow! This goofy child president we have on our hands now. He is
demonstrably a fool and a failure, and this is only the summer of '03.
By the summer of 2004, he might not even be living in the White House.
Gone, gone, like the snows of yesteryear.
The Rumsfield-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our
eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning
to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on
a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely
incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent
chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful
of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable
sin in America.
Beyond that, we have lost the respect of the world and lost two disastrous
wars in three years. Afghanistan is lost, Iraq is a permanent war Zone,
our national Economy is crashing all around us, the Pentagon's "war
strategy" has failed miserably, nobody has any money to spend,
and our once-mighty U.S. America is paralyzed by Mutinies in Iraq and
even Fort Bragg.
By this point, he's warmed up. There's more. I'll let you go there yourself.
Link
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Proof that the dead are Saddam's sons? Lt.
Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, may have said visual identification
by four former aides, as well as medical and dental records, confirmed
that two of four people killed in the battle at the villa were Saddam's
sons Uday and Qusay, but an informal survey of the journalists who sit
near me suggests that won't be enough.
Reuters reports that U.S.
Wrestles with Decision Over Iraq Death Photos:
U.S. officials were debating whether to release graphic photos of the
dead sons of Saddam Hussein to prove to Iraqis they were killed by American
troops, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said on Wednesday.
He spoke after one official told Reuters the Pentagon planned in coming
days to release at least facial photographs of the two men, who the
U.S. military said were killed in a lengthy battle in the city of Mosul
on Tuesday.
"We are still weighing the decision," Wolfowitz said at a
news conference. But he left little doubt Washington was leaning toward
releasing the pictures.
While the officials weigh their concern over children seeing the graphic
photos on TV, my colleagues think that still won't be enough. Tales of
Saddam clones and plastic surgery, and the ease with which photos can
be doctored led our corner to the reluctant conclusion that it may be
necessary to display the bodies so Iraqis may decide for themselves.
A Reuters
story out of Baghdad reports,
Mosul residents said the owner of the villa where they were hiding
may have betrayed them to claim the cash.
But in Tikrit, where the walls are littered with references to Saddam
even if his main palace here is now home to the US troops hunting him
down, residents found the whole affair hard to swallow.
"I don't believe it. I saw a lot of stuff on TV, but none of it
is true," 23-year-old medical student Akil Edan told the AFP.
"If they want us to believe it, they should show us the bodies."
At Baghdad, Iraqis meanwhile rejoiced the killing but said they will
not believe the nightmare is finally over until they see the corpses
and the coalition cuts off the head of the snake... Saddam himself.
"It's only a lie," clinic employee Abbas Shalab pipes up.
"It's a plot so they (the Americans) win the sympathy of the population."
Idriss Salem adds: "We want Saddam, who is a cancer, which must
be attacked at the root."
"When we get rid of Saddam, we hope also to be rid of the Americans,"
Salem added.
Related: Assassination
ban still on books but widely ignored: From AP,
In theory, pursuing with intent to kill violates a long-standing policy
banning political assassination. It was the misfortune of Saddam Hussein's
sons that the Bush administration has not bothered to enforce the prohibition.
...
... The ban on assassinations, spelled out in an executive order signed
by President Ford in 1976 and reinforced by Presidents Carter and Reagan,
made no distinction between wartime and peacetime. There are no loop
holes; no matter how awful the leader, he could not be a U.S. target
either directly or by a hired hand.
The advantages of using assassination as a political tool seemed less
obvious a generation ago than they are today.
Ford's executive order was in response to the general revulsion over
disclosures by a Senate committee about a series of overseas U.S. assassination
attempts -- some successful, some not -- over many years.
The committee found eight attempts on the life of Cuban President Fidel
Castro. Other targets included Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic
and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, both in 1961; and Ngo Dinh Diem of
South Vietnam in 1963. Lumumba and Diem were both assassinated, although
the degree of U.S. involvement has never been clear.
One rationale for the ban was that an attempt on the life of a foreign
leader could produce retaliation -- a concern borne out in U.S.-Libyan
tit-for-tat attacks during the late 1980's. Libyan agents killed two
U.S. soldiers at a German disco in early April 1986. Days later, Reagan
authorized the bombing of Libya; Gadhafi was spared but his 15-month
old daughter was killed. Libyan agents were behind the bombing of Pan
Am flight 103 in 1988, killing 270, most of them Americans.
Link
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What jobs will be left for us? In a chilling
story yesterday (I.B.M.
Explores Shift of White-Collar Jobs Overseas, reg.req.; also at
Yahoo News) the New York Times reports,
With American corporations under increasing pressure to cut costs and
build global supply networks, two senior I.B.M. officials told their
corporate colleagues around the world in a recorded conference call
that I.B.M. needed to accelerate its efforts to move white-collar, often
high-paying, jobs overseas even though that might create a backlash
among politicians and its own employees.
During the call, I.B.M's top employee relations executives said that
three million service jobs were expected to shift to foreign workers
by 2015 and that I.B.M. should move some of its jobs now done in the
United States, including software design jobs, to India and other countries.
"Our competitors are doing it and we have to do it," Tom
Lynch, I.B.M.'s director for global employee relations, said in the
call. A recording was provided to The New York Times recently by the
Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, a Seattle-based group seeking
to unionize high-technology workers. The group said it had received
the recording — which was made by I.B.M. and later placed in digital
form on an internal company Web site — from an I.B.M. employee
upset about the plans.
The recording offers a clue to what might stop the plans, besides frowns
from Congress:
In the hourlong I.B.M. conference call, which took place in March,
the company's executives were particularly worried that the trend could
spur unionization efforts.
"Governments are going to find that they're fairly limited as
to what they can do, so unionizing becomes an attractive option,"
Mr. Lynch said on the recording. "You can see some of the fairly
appealing arguments they're making as to why employees need to do some
things like organizing to help fight this."
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Mozilla v1.5 alpha
-- for early adopters only, since it's a "first draft" --
is out, in Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows versions. The most useful new
feature to me is "Closing a window with multiple tabs now prompts
the user with a confirmation dialog." More than once I've clicked
the wrong X to close a tab and instead closed them all.
As of Monday, "In the past three weeks since Mozilla
1.4, was released (the last official release), it has been
downloaded over 500,000 times from mozilla.org's FTP servers alone (i.e.
not including any of our mirrors.)"
Mozilla, a cooperatively developed, open-source child of Netscape, is
now under the wing of a foundation partly funded by AOL -- which bought,
then killed Netscape. From the press
release:
Mitch Kapor, the new Chairman of the Mozilla
Foundation, is making a personal contribution of $300,000, and Red
Hat and Sun Microsystems are among the companies planning to continue
their contributions to the Mozilla project.
“As an independent organization, the Mozilla project will have
even more freedom to innovate and provide meaningful choice to users
on all computer environments. A competitive, standards-compliant browser
suite is vitally important to maintaining freedom and innovation on
the Internet, so I’m delighted to make a contribution,”
commented Kapor. Kapor was the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the “killer
application” that made personal computers ubiquitous in the business
world in the 1980s. He currently chairs the Open Source Applications
Foundation.
Link
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Great White launches tour: Great
White was the band playing when the pyros ignited
The Station nightclub Feb. 20; 100 people died. The band kicked of
a benefit tour in Sterling, Colo. Tuesday night. The
Rocky Mountain News reports,
On Tuesday night (Great White and fans were in) Sterling as the 1980s
hard-rock band played its first show since the tragedy at The Station
in West Warwick, R.I. It is the first date on a benefit tour for the
survivors and victims. Great White guitarist Ty Longley was among the
dead; he had lived in Colorado, which is why the band started out here.
A crowd of about 1,000 packed the fairgrounds arena for Great White,
the hair band that reached its apogee in the late 1980s. Fans came for
nostalgia, campy fun and guilty pleasure.
But none came out of morbid curiosity.
"I put 40 dollars in that boot," said Tanya Kitchin, 30,
of Woodrow, when asked if Great White's notoriety brought her to the
Logan County Fairgrounds. She was referring to a firefighter's boot
passed by the Sterling Fire Department among the hundreds waiting in
line before the show.
Great White has an uneasy relationship with others swept up in the
tragedy. A burst from the band's pyrotechnics is believed to have caused
the fire. The blame was heaped on the band as it - and club management
- pointed fingers over whether the special effects were allowed. Both
are defendants in civil lawsuits arising from the blaze, and a grand-jury
investigation could lead to criminal charges.
But despite all that, Great White is accepted by The Station Family
Fund, a memorial started by survivors, and has signed up to be a workhorse
fund-raiser for the cause.
Great White expects to write checks for between $5,000 and $15,000
for each date it plays on this tour, said manager Charrie Foglio. Tickets
to Tuesday's show were $17. Promoters have offered 41 dates through
Oct. 2, she said, and 18 have been confirmed. A show in Colorado Springs
is today.
There are no plans for any dates in Rhode Island.
The band is pledging 100 percent of their profits and a percentage of
other items to the Station
Family Fund. Here's The
Providence Journal story (reg.req.), and MTV's
take on it all.
Related: Added email contact links to yesterday's Station
Fire Memorial Foundation press release below.
Link
to this item | Comment
The
9-11 Report: Slamming the FBI by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff:
The FBI blew repeated chances to uncover the 9-11 plot because it failed
to aggressively investigate evidence of Al Qaeda’s presence in
the United States, especially in the San Diego area, where two of the
hijackers were living with one of the bureau’s own informants,
according to the congressional report set for release this week.
The long-delayed 900-page report also contains potentially explosive
new evidence suggesting that Omar al-Bayoumi, a key associate of two
of the hijackers, may have been a Saudi-government agent...
...The report is sure to reignite questions about whether some Saudi
officials were secretly monitoring the hijackers—or even facilitating
their conduct. Questions about the Saudi role arose repeatedly during
last year’s joint House-Senate intelligence-committees inquiry.
But the Bush administration has refused to declassify many key passages
of the committees’ findings. A 28-page section of the report dealing
with the Saudis and other foreign governments will be deleted. “They
are protecting a foreign government,” charged Sen. Bob Graham,
who oversaw the inquiry.
Link
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Google
Advanced News Search: A good tool gets even better.
J.D. Lasica's New
Media Musings is full of good stuff this week. Rather than steal
his thunder, I'll point you his way and say it's worth the trip.
Short links from
Liz Donovan:
moreCrayons:
"Most internet users have monitors that can display more
colors than the 216 that are used in the traditional “browser-safe”
palette. moreCrayons is a bigger box of crayons; 4,096 colors for the
web."
The liberal
bias media blog: "You've heard the media talk about a liberal
bias media, but always wondered 'where is it?' Well, this is it!"
First
Read: new daily political news/gossip from NBC. The peacock's
answer to ABC's The
Note.
USDA Plants Database:
Download a national or state plant checklist, look up individual plants,
get lots of info on plants & environment. (I added this to our
Garden
Blogs section.)
July 22, 2003 6:30 p.m.
We've lost "St. Jude," Mondo 2000 editor,
pioneering cybergrrl: Jude Milhon, senior editor of Mondo 2000, is
dead of cancer, her age unknown (so far). She coined the term cypherpunk
to describe cryptography activists. Her widely quoted definition of hacking:
"the clever circumvention of imposed limits, whether imposed by your
government, your own skills or the laws of physics."
From the Wired
obit:
 If
there is a heaven, the angels are in for a hell of a time when Jude
Milhon, the Internet's real and very earthy patron saint of hacking,
shows up.
Better known on the Internet by her nom de plume, St. Jude, Milhon
died on July 19 of cancer. Her age was an issue Milhon obviously decided
not to address. Even her closest friends could only guess at it, and
they admitted they could be off by as much as a decade.
St. Jude wasn't your typical saint.
She was a staunch advocate of the joys of hacking, geek sex and a woman's
right to choose to use technology. She figured life was too short to
waste worrying about what other people might think, and was also known
for her very colorful way with the English language.
Back when the Internet was populated primarily by men, she encouraged
and helped other women to get online.
"Girls need modems!" she said in a
February 1995 Wired magazine interview (headlined Modem Grrrl ).
Her books include The
Cyberpunk Fake Book and How
to Mutate and Take Over the World (with R.U.
Sirius) and, online, The
Nerdgirl's Pillow Book. I can't get into the Mondo
2000 site now; if this persists, here's something about
Mondo 2000 from TechTV. And, of course, there was a
book.
Link
to this item | Comment
Station Fire Memorial Foundation Formed:
Here's the press release, verbatim.
WEST WARWICK - Family members and friends of the Station Fire victims
recently registered with the Secretary State’s office as a nonprofit
group in order to gain ownership of the site of the tragedy, and to
build and maintain a memorial to their loved ones that would celebrate
their lives and not their deaths.
The Station Fire Memorial Foundation officers, Thom Cahir, President,
Rev. Susan Asselin, Vice President, Kimberly Jalette, Treasurer and
Lori St. Jean, Secretary, hope to raise funds to purchase the land at
211 Cowesett Ave. if it cannot be donated to the Foundation.
At this point the SFMF will be looking to work with other Station related
charities, the Red Cross, and other interested parties, in gaining a
consensus that a memorial at the site is needed. This tragedy has directly
or indirectly affected the entire state, has seen historic fire-prevention
legislation passed in its wake, and needs to be memorialized in a timely
fashion, unlike the Hartford Circus fire which killed 167, but took
the city 50 years to remember with a small plaque.
Plans are in the works to sell bumper stickers, baseball caps and compose
a memorial yearbook of those lost in the fire. The Foundation will also
be seeking out corporate donations and sponsors, willing to raise funds
for this effort.
The Foundation meets on a bi-weekly basis and welcomes any who want
to be of assistance. For more information please call Thom Cahir at
401-826-1312 (thomcahir@att.net)
or Rev. Susan Asselin at 401-232-2063, (SolitaryRev@cox.net).
The fire, Feb. 20 during a Great White concert at The Station nightclub
in West Warwick, killed 100.
Link
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Dallas
Morning News editorial writers blog: Maybe more a discussion than
a blog, but it's great to see them do it at all. It's a bit hard to follow
-- imagine six people trying to hold a conversation in this format of
sequential items -- but they'll probably work the bugs out. They call
it the EdBlog.
Link
to this item | Comment
Readers
Want Press to Cover All U.S. Casualties: At Editor & Publisher,
Greg Mitchell reflects on a previous story which linked to the Iraq
Coalition Casualty Count Web site.:
A news
analysis that I wrote last week (Media Underplays U.S. Death Toll in
Iraq ), posted at E&P Online on Thursday, has drawn the heaviest
e-mail response of any article from E&P in the nearly four years
I have worked for the magazine.
The article charged the media with providing a misleading sense of
the recent U.S. death toll in Iraq. The press routinely highlights "combat"
deaths and downplays all deaths, including accidents, suicides, and
other causes (which vastly outnumber the deaths from hostile fire).
This apparently struck a raw nerve, with several dozen e-mails arriving
in our mailbox within two days, including tips on the deaths of two
female soldiers under mysterious circumstances. And these weren't the
usual media junkies or political activists, but an apparent cross-section
of backgrounds and beliefs.
And then he publishes some of the email. via Romenesko.
Link
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Dotcom
Garden: Blogger Chris Gulker (www.gulker.com) is documenting --
live webcam, too -- his container garden. (No weeds!):
Dotcom Garden is a project whose goal is to make a small, highly productive
garden that can easily be managed by a busy person. Read the
full story.
Link
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How
Fela Landed Me in Jail: John Darnton was the New York Times'
West Africa correspondent from 1976 to 1979.
I liked going to the Shrine: the sweltering heat, the pounding music,
the palpable anger in the air, the weapons search at the door, where
it was hard to say if more weapons were going or coming. It was my education.
The teacher was Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the originator of Afrobeat, a synthesis
of Nigerian high life and American jazz and rock. Thoughts of Fela,
who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1997, came flooding back recently
as I went to an exhibition in his honor at the New Museum of Contemporary
Art, at 583 Broadway in SoHo. The show, "Black President: The Art
and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti," explores his influence through
the work of 34 artists. It says he "was arguably Africa's most
influential musician of the last 50 years."
Who am I to argue? Simply put, Fela was the best performer I've ever
seen. And not incidentally, he was Nigeria's most notorious political
dissident. He had been arrested a half-dozen times. His songs were not
allowed on government radio but blared out of thousands of shanties
in the slums, which is to say everywhere. Little did I know that my
contact with him would help land me in a Lagos dungeon, also stripped
to my underwear, and then earn me a one-way ticket out of the country,
together with my wife and our two daughters, ages 4 and 6. But I get
ahead of myself.
I lived in West Africa -- in Gambia -- from 1974 to 1976, and played
Fela albums when I missed Africa. When I played them for American musicians,
the consensus was, "That's the best music I've ever heard."
Link
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Guerilla
Girls want you to send
leftover estrogen pills to the White House. via Plep.
Link
to this item | Comment
Newsroom humor: In Herald's
cast of characters always was half the story, that Miami paper
looks back on what might be 100 years of its history. Blogger Liz
Donovan is quoted, wearing her day-job hat:
Liz Donovan, The Herald's meticulous research editor, insists the newspaper
is dead wrong in celebrating its centennial in 2003. ''Blasphemy,''
she calls it.
''For its first nine decades, everyone knew The Herald started in 1910,''
she argues.
The discrepancy arises from the founding of a paper in 1903 that would
later become The Miami Herald.
My favorite part of this story involves a deadline tradition of sending
the type for a story up to the composing room before the headline had
been written. (Sometimes the layout hadn't been designed yet; sometimes
its relative position on the page, which would determine the size of the
headline, hadn't been established.) I loved this tale of a prank, even
if it is somewhat apocryphal. So did the copy desk that sits behind me:
Allegedly, a copyboy captured a rooftop pigeon in 1962, decapitated
it, tied a note to its leg, stuffed the bird into a pneumatic tube,
and sent the tube to the composing room. The note said, ''HTK,'' That's
journalese for Head [headline] To Kum [come].
Link
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Online
Identity-Theft Tactic Targeted: We've seen them here, spam that
says you need to confirm your eBay contact info, login, password. If you
click on the link, you'll notice it doesn't take you to eBay -- which
should kick off all sorts of alarms in your brain. A 17-year-old who's
been "phishing" this way with a phony AOL member page ran up
about $8,000 in purchases using real credit card information people had
typed into his fake page.
Washington Post: "Under terms of the settlement, the L.A. teen agreed
to surrender $3,500 in ill-gotten gains, including his computer, and to
never send spam again."
Link
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Mont St. Michel / Mindwalk: Metafilter
points to it; Plep
points to photos;
I'm pointing to Mindwalk, a 1990 movie made there and promoted
as "A Film for Passionate Thinkers." Sam Waterston and John
Heard were '70s idealists together. Afterwards, Heard -- the poet -- became
an expat; Waterston joined the system as a politician to try to fix it.
They meet at Mont St. Michel and meet Liv Ullman, a brilliant scientist
who dropped out after her discoveries were used for warmaking. It's based
on the book The
Turning Point by Frijtof Capra. Not much actually happens. They
talk, explore ideas and walk around this beautiful place. Rent it. It'll
wake up your brain cells, if it isn't too dated now.
Here's a
quick overview review -- and lots of viewer
reviews, solicited by a fan of the "systems
thinking" in the film..
Link
to this item | Comment
Hotels with wi-fi: Geektels
maintains a list. This link is to U.S. hotels. Hack it back to http://www.geektools.com/geektels/
for the international index.
Link
to this item | Comment
Find
Recalled Products by Product Description: Chuck E. Cheese tambourines?
Yup, for sharp points and small parts. From the Consumer Product Safety
Commission.
Link
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com |
