By Sheila
Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Nov 8, 2002 - (Last
week's weblog)
Mind turning to mush after a tough week. Just in time, a three-day
weekend. See you Tuesday.
Plain talk from Tom Petty: Rolling
Stone interviews the rocker.
"Music is only the beginning of what's pissing him off these
days. 'The Last DJ is a story about morals more than the music
business,' Petty says. "It's really about vanishing personal freedoms."
Among them: "Only a sick culture would sexualize young girls...
Why are we creating a nation of child molesters?"
Link
to this item | Comment
Amazing photos by Ed
Book. Made my day. Thanks to Judy
Watt for the link.
Link
to this item | Comment
Etch-A-Sketch
as high art: In the right hands, such as Michael McNevins', amazing
things are possible. There's a
story about him, too.
Link
to this item | Comment
Magazines
to publish on tablet PC: News.com reports that "Six major
magazine publishers, including Forbes and the New Yorker, plan to don
a new image for tablet PCs, creating digital facsimiles of their periodicals
and pushing the fold on Web advertising."
Link
to this item | Comment
The
Absolute Bottom 50 Urban Legends: Fodder for slumber parties.
Link
to this item | Comment
This 404 page is fun: it's a breakout
game that gets funky after the first level.
Link
to this item | Comment
Nov 7, 2002
Social-conscience-pricking
meme-design competition: Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream founder Ben
Cohen has launched a contest. He'll pay $10,000 each for 5 cool designs
that get folks thinking about What Matters:
The final product can either be included in emails that get passed
around or they can be hosted on a web site (like a Flash file) and a
link can get passed around.
This can't just be entertaining. It's also got to be meaningful --
which makes it hard. It's not Frog in a Blender, Dancing Bush (www.miniclip.com),
or Whack a Flack (www.whackaflack.com)
-- although they've got the arresting visual, humor, interactivity,
and forwardability that we need.
For us, the fun and games need to be about what matters to people.
Your entry can focus on a hot issue embedded in our Ten Principles,
listed on our web site (www.truemajority.com).
Or it can explain how the TrueMajority unites citizens who care about
many different issues....
The Ten Principles are:
1. Attack poverty and world hunger as if our life depends on it. It
does.
2. Champion the rights of every child, woman & man.
3. End our obstructionism to the world's treaties.
4. Reduce our dependence on oil and lead the world to an age of renewable
energy.
5. Close the book on the Cold War and end the nuclear nightmare forever.
6. Renounce Star Wars and the militarization of space.
7. Make globalization work for, not against, working people.
8. Ensure equal treatment under law for all.
9. Get money out of politics.
10. Close the gap between rich and poor kids at home.
If this is something you can sink into and come up with a meme, the deadline
is Nov. 15.
Link
to this item | Comment
Federal
Judge Blocks New Navy Sonar: High-Volume, Low-Frequency System
Will Harm Marine Mammals, Suit Alleges
(This happened on Halloween, but I didn't see it. This link is to the
Washington Post story.)
A federal judge has blocked the Navy from deploying its long-planned
and powerful new sonar system, concluding that the deafening underwater
sounds could injure and kill whales protected by law.
Responding to a lawsuit filed by environmental groups against the Navy
and other federal agencies, U.S. Magistrate Elizabeth D. LaPorte in
San Francisco issued a temporary injunction stopping the Navy from deploying
the high-volume, low-frequency active sonar worldwide because of its
likely danger to marine mammals.
But LaPorte also agreed with the Navy that a ban on the new sonar could
hamper military preparedness and ordered the two sides to work out a
compromise creating zones where the equipment could be tested and sailors
could be trained in its use. Still, the decision was a rebuke to the
Bush administration, which had argued that it could deploy the sonar
while adequately protecting marine wildlife.
Link
to this item | Comment
No
Fish Tale: Swimming in Macs: Wired reports that aquariums made
from old Macintosh computers have become as iconic as the Mac itself.
The practice started as a joke, but has evolved into a booming cottage
industry.
Link
to this item | Comment
Macromedia
to announce new web content software: At ThinkSecret,
Macromedia is on the verge of announcing new content management software
aimed at webmasters managing sites for clients. Sources said that the
product, called Contribute, will be unveiled this month.
Sources said that Contribute is based on code from Macromedia's Dreamweaver
web development program, and allows a web designer to give clients the
ability to quickly change information and content on their Web site.
The goal is the eliminate webmasters' hassles of dealing with minute
changes that clients need made to their page.
Link
to this item | Comment
Friendly
Dictators Trading Cards: Featuring 36 of America's Most Embarrassing
Allies.
Link
to this item | Comment
Changing the subject: Goodies found in the archives
of a UK site called Amy's
I:
Wam TV -- the UK's first broadband
internet TV station. It has taken six years to put together, so give
it a chance -- even if it's not immediately obvious why you should.
Hidden away on the site are about 5,000 hours of arts and entertainment
programming and a 24-hour-a-day arts channel.
The Falafel
Game. It's hard. It's funny. Here are some of the instructions:
 Click
on a pita to take it. Then start filling it up. Make sure each serving
contains the correct amount of falafel, hummus, fries and salad according
to the little signs next to each ingredient. Click each ingredient to
put it in the pita.... Pay attention to the "Anger Meter"
floating above each of the customers.). Whenever flies start eating
your food, click the fly repellent on your right to get rid of them...
You may play online or download it. Move your mouse around the main
screen to reveal the options.
Link
to this item | Comment
Akiyoshi's
illusion pages: "Caution: This page contains some
works of "anomalous motion illusion", which might make sensitive
observers dizzy or sick. Should you feel dizzy, you had better leave this
page immediately."
Link
to this item | Comment
Nov 6, 2002
Why
do we hope? by blogger Michael Finley:
Why do we hope?
This morning I can barely inhale. Seriously. It is hard to draw breath,
and my heart feels like it is beating out of rhythm. I think I have
post-electoral angina.
When it became apparent late last night that all the efforts of Minnesota
DFLers to rescue something from the ashes of Paul Wellstone's Beechcraft
were themselves ashes, my heart broke.
I was angry, disgusted, dangerous. I noted that my worst anger was
for the weblogs etc that egged me on with their encouraging predictions
for the night.
I wanted to write them hateful notes saying something prescient like
Oh yeah?
But I know that we are like wasps trapped with one another in a half
bottle of Coke. We sting each other not out of hatred but for the frantic
relief of expressing our misery.
And I wonder ... why do we get our hopes up? Year after year, the guys
I voted for or supported come up short. McCarthy, Martin Luther King,
Kennedy, Humphrey, McGovern, on through Mondale, Dukakis and Gore. Even
the ones that get elected get run out of town on a rail -- Carter, Clinton.
It's a phenomenal string of futility, and I have to stop and ask myself
... WHY?
Is it that I'm a liberal? Because, except for wishing the poor folks
of the world well, I don't think I am a liberal... (continued)
Related: Lexicon
for Democrats, Angrydems.com
Link
to this item | Comment
Tara
Grubb, the N.C. libertarian and political novice with a
weblog who took on Rep. Howard Coble, gets double digits, 11.19% of the
vote, reports N.C. journalist-blogger Ed
Cone. Cone explored this "coming revolution in candidate communications"
in his column Sunday in the Greensboro News and Record: Plugging
in the disconnected voter.
Link
to this item | Comment
HP
to offer three-in-one tablet PC: Hewlett-Packard will announce
its own twist on the tablet PC on Thursday, with a new kind of transformable
computer that features a detachable keyboard.
...Tablet PCs are essentially 3- to 4-pound "ultra-portable"
notebook PCs with touch screens, wireless Internet connections, and
speech and handwriting input. Some, known as convertibles, have screens
that can rotate 180 degrees and fold down to create a tablet. Others
follow a more traditional, tablet-only route.
HP's Compaq Tablet PC TC1000 does both. The machine can be used like
a notebook or like a tablet, thanks to a special detachable keyboard,
and can also serve as a primary PC through a docking station. ...
HP's Compaq Tablet PC TC1000 is based on a 10.4-inch screen protected
by tempered glass and includes a full-sized pen and a detachable keyboard.
The machine will use Transmeta's TM5800 processor running at 1GHz, along
with 256MB of RAM (random access memory) and a 20GB hard drive for $1,699.
Adding 802.11 wireless networking, which the company believes most customers
will do, ups the price to $1,799. Customers can also add extra memory
and larger hard drives for additional fees.
Link
to this item | Comment
The
color of cool: Why does so much tech gear suddenly glow blue?
From Business 2.0,
But why so much blue now? Science, it turns out, holds part
of the answer. I've always assumed that behind every power-indicator
lamp and backlit display is a tiny incandescent light with a colored
filter over it. Wrong. In just about any electronic device made since
the 1970s, the blinking and glowing emanates from a light-emitting diode,
or LED, a semiconductor
that sends out a fixed wavelength of light as a small current of electricity
passes through it. The early ones glowed red and were popular in calculators
and digital watches. Then came green. But for decades, no one could
figure out how to make a blue one bright enough to work in consumer
devices.
That changed in 1993 when Shuji Nakamura, a researcher at Japan's Nichia
Corp., used gallium nitride to create the elusive color radiating at
a wavelength of 470 nanometers. "When I first saw it, I remember
thinking, 'What a pretty color,'" Nakamura says. Now the director
of the University of California at Santa Barbara's Center for Solid
State Lighting and Displays, he received a bonus of only about $165
from his company for the invention.
Link
to this item | Comment
Nov 5, 2002
The greatest show on earth -- and in the stars:
This could be a very strange election.
Virtually all of our political experience happens through television
(that’s a very sobering thought, come to think of it). Therefore, we
must first become aware that our knowledge and feelings about a candidate
or race are filtered through the mass media, and carried on in front
of cameras for an audience, and the audience is us. We must recognize
that a large part of all this is theater, and we must develop the same
kind of critical distance that we use to watch professional wrestling.
Clearly, this makes us prone to even more cynicism. The difference is
that Stone
Cold Austin can’t raise or lower your taxes or put your son on the
battlefield. Politics really matters.
-- From Don't
Vote for a Speech Writer, at BraveNews
World.
Off in the wings, astrologers are predicting in public, and Russian human
rights observers will watch our elections. Which leads us to Florida.
Again.
The Washington Times reports on the
international election observers -- including some from Russian and
Bosnia -- drawing the world's attention to our banana republic:
An international organization that normally observes suspect elections
in Third World countries will observe U.S. elections in Florida on Tuesday,
but no federal and state officials have acknowledged inviting the group...
The
Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, based in Warsaw,
is part of the 55-nation organization (Organization
for Security and Co-operation in Europe, to which the U.S. has a diplomatic
mission). It was formed to carry out the international human rights provisions
of the 1975 Helsinki
Accords.
So far this year the OSCE has observed elections in Montenegro, Bosnia,
Latvia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Macedonia. They did not observe Iraq elections,
however, where Saddam Hussein won re-election with a reported 100 percent
turnout and 100 percent of the vote.
But
not everyone is pleased to have these folks drop in, never mind that
they're distinguished professionals.
This is the sort of work Jimmy Carter does, having monitored three dozen
elections through the Carter Center, most
recently in Jamaica. But in January, 2001, the former President and
2002 Nobel Peace Prize winner told
Gwen Ifill, on PBS NewsHour,
...We have certain minimal standards in a country before we will go
in there at all. And we would not dream of going into a country that
had election laws like ours, where there is such a vast chasm in some
central nonpartisan or bipartisan agency deciding on election arguments.
And also, where every precinct, every voting place can have a separate
kind of voting mechanism, and where the interpretation of what is a
good vote or a bad vote depends, almost exclusively, on local officials'
prejudices. So we require uniformity in the type of voting and in the
standardization of what is a good vote, and we also require that a central
election commission be available, on a nonpartisan basis, in order to
make judgments during a contest period immediately before, during, or
after an election.
How's that for excitement? Voting wthout a net!
And vote we do, marking the ballot between the solid lines, slipping
it into the counting machine and watching the digital dial go up one number
as technology first counts the voters.
Now I'm hooked on the outcome, and can't wait for the season finale of
the political reality show to start. Live election-night TV is fun (except
last time). The exit polls, the hints, the clues. It's blooper night for
local news as reporters electronically elbow each other for airtime, and
anchors interrupt each other at the whim of whisperings in their ears
from unseen lips.
We get to see old politicians play sages on TV, and see how they've
aged. There's suspense, rapid mood swings at hotel headquarters, and a
wave of stiff upper lips and gentle weeping as the losers go first. Then
it's thumbs up and thank you and party time for some -- and, in the best
of years, we've dipped and soared and chewed our nails over candidates,
living through it all in realtime with them, all without moving off our
couches. .
Time later for the best campaigners to figure out how to do the jobs
they've won.
Yeah it's a crapshoot. And maybe that's why I was pleased to run across
this political site, where the punditry is based on hard data, some of
it of an unusual kind.
MyDD, a liberal political
blog that's heavy on polls and polling, doesn't link its affiliated
Astroworld political
astrology index
from the homepage, but this offers its own sorts of odds.
Astrologers there are analyzing the cosmic weather, using a symbolic
language, and looking at indicators: Who's moving to another house, who's
under a heavy Saturn transit, who's a winner whose precise time has come.
Nancy Luber Sommers is looking for periods of elation in the charts of
the candidate and leaders of both parties in the next few days and beyond,
especially to January. She has on on
her own site a chart of predictions in major races based on what she
sees in the candidates' charts.
Does this work? No idea. Come back tomorrow.
We might have a surprise.
That's what astrologer
Jerome Armstrong says we'll see today, a surprise that's been brewing
below the radar: that women voters will pour out to the polls today, while
men will be inclined to stay home, for reasons only an astrologer might
understand (so I've edited them out here):
Bush and the rulers (in) power could be pierced by something that seems
trivial in (its) simplicity, that triggers larger events to occur. Simply
put, men will not turn out to vote in near the numbers that women will
this election....
Ceres and Venus are representative of younger, and especially feminine
energies in the mundane election analysis;... they are holding a secret,
their voice has seem(ed) stifled, and their vote will be a secret from
Bush & the media...
No one knows how big the vote is, until after it happens, surprising
the media, and shifting control of Congress.
It’s an angry vote. The dissatisfaction with the economy is there;
but the Sun-Moon’s conjunction in the 7th, where the Rx Venus/Mercury
conjunction is also, points towards the threat of war as a strong motivation.
This is one to watch for while you're watching TV tonight.
Link
to this item | Comment
Nov 4, 2002 - (Last
week's weblog)
Short blog today, because all Providence Journal columnists, including
me, are on assignment to write about voting for tomorrow. (No, I'm not
going to tell you what to do.)
Wi-Fi's reach may extend:
John Markoff writes (NY Times, reg.req.) "A start-up
company plans to announce new antenna technology on Monday that it says
can expand the limits of a popular wireless Internet format, providing
access to hundreds or even thousands of portable computer users at distances
of more than 2,000 feet within buildings and about four miles outdoors."
The company is Vivato.
More from Paul
Boutin at Wired News and from Glenn Fleishman's 802.11b
Networking News.
Link
to this item | Comment
Reactions to Peggy Noonan's "channeling"
of Paul Wellstone:
Jesse Taylor at Pandagon.net does a hiphop parody under Noonan's logo:
Hit
Em Up; What Tupac Shakur might have thought of Paul Wellstone's memorial
rally. Just about none of it is printable in a family newspaper, and
unless you're young and very hip you may not understand much of it, but
the fact of its existence makes the point.
Jack MacMillan emails this in response to former Reagan speechwriter
Peggy Noonan's "No Class" column:
Noonan's article commits the very crime she accuses Democrats of. For
a Reaganite spinmeister to turn out a bitter attack on Democrats is
no surprise, but it's deplorable for her to pretend that the attacks
are coming from the lips of the late Paul Wellstone. If she thinks it's
wrong for Democrats to use Wellstone's corpse as a podium for advancing
ideas he agreed with, how much worse is it for her to turn his corpse
into a handpuppet for a partisan Republican screed?
She has every right to publish her claim that the lives of Democrats
are sick and small and filled with poison. But it's truly inexcusable
for her to pretend that Paul Wellstone, who never said anything so intemperate
about Republicans, would have directed such viciously partisan remarks
against his fellow Democrats.
Link
to this item | Comment
Bush
Aides Deny He Wrote To Author: Writer Had Promised To Make Public Letter
From President Criticizing His Book: The Hartford Courant,
which reported the original story (President
To Author: Your Book Is Unpatriotic), now reports,
It was a fantastic story, but as the days pass -- and as White House
spokesmen keep dialing The Courant's phone number - a young writer's
tale of having his book critiqued by the president looks increasingly
suspect.
Link
to this item | Comment
Which
Founding Father Are You? A quiz.
Link
to this item | Comment
Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com
|
