|
By Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up'
journalism from the pros September 6, 2002 | 2002 | 1974 | 
Former
Providence Mayor Vincent A. (Buddy) Cianci |  |
Cianci
era ends with sentencings
PROVIDENCE -- Mayor Vincent A. Cianci
Jr. was sentenced to five years and four months today on a federal corruption
charge, ending a political era. In little more than an hour, City Council President
John Lombardi was named to take his place... More
stories
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Standing
Up for Dissent: John Nichols writes, in The Nation, Every
year Greensboro, North Carolina, holds a Fourth of July parade in which local
organizations form the units. This year members of the Greensboro Peace Coalition
decided -- "after some hesitation," admits chairman Ed Whitfield --
to join the line of march. They bought an ad in the local paper, printed leaflets
and developed their own variation on this year's theme of "American Heroes":
large posters of Americans, including Mark Twain, Albert Einstein and the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr., who have spoken out against the folly of war.
Though
members had been participating in vigils since last October, when the bombing
of Afghanistan began, many expressed qualms about marching into the thick of their
hometown's annual patriotic celebration. But fifty activists showed up on the
Fourth and got the surprise of their political lives. Along the mile-and-a-half
parade route through downtown Greensboro, they were greeted mostly with applause,
and, at the end of their march, they were honored by parade organizers for "Best
Interpretation of the Theme." via
Robot Wisdom
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Share
your visions, Netizens: The
Amateur Computerist -- founded in 1988 --
is seeking submissions, including articles, poems, cartoons, stories, plays,
etc., that develop or explore
the concept of Netizen -- qualities outlined by the
late Michael Hauben: There are people online who actively
contribute to the development of the Net. These are people who understand the
value of collective work and the communal aspects of public communications. These
are the people who discuss and debate topics in a constructive manner, who e-mail
answers to people and provide help to newcomers, who maintain FAQ's, files and
other public information repositories. These are the people who discuss the nature
and role of this new communications medium. These are the people who as citizens
of the Net I realized were Netizens. ...Netizens are not just anyone who
comes online. Netizens are especially not people who come online for individual
gain or profit. They are not people who come to the Net thinking it is a service.
Rather, they are people who understand that it takes effort and action on each
and everyone's part to make the Net a regenerative and vibrant community and resource.
via
Cory Doctorow
Submissions are due Sept 30.
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Journalists
Who Survived Ground Zero ... Discuss How Their Lives Have Changed. At
Editor & Publisher. Here, in their own words (edited from
interviews last month), are reflections, both personal and professional, by some
of the journalists who were at or near Ground Zero when the Twin Towers collapsed.
They are identified here by their titles then. Many of them are featured in the
new book compiled by the Newseum, Running Toward Danger (Rowman & Littlefield),
but their stories in that volume leave off in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
For E&P, they chronicled what has happened since.
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Daypop
update: We bloggers have had to work awfully hard this week -- we've lost
our safety net. Daypop, the
search engine that scans the blogs for the most frequently mentioned news stories
and blog items, has been broken. Yesterday, Daypop developer Dan
Chan posted, I am in Rome! Daypop is down!
I just logged
on to the Internet for the first time in about a week. No idea what happened to
Daypop but I will not be back until the 13th of September to fix it! Sorry to
all the people who rely on Daypop... Unfortunately, there is no way for me to
debug what is going wrong from here. Off to Siena on the next train!
Daypop
is a good way to search for themes in blogs, and to see the Top
40 stories that interest the collective blogosphere. Blogdex
offers a Top 100, heavy on news stories, but no search.
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Top
of the art game: Communication
Arts has posted the winners of its Eighth Annual Interactive Competition.
My favorite: a thinkers' game called Queue.
via Jeffrey
Zeldman
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 Photos
from Burning Man 2002 by Deanne Fitzmaurice of the S. F. Chronicle: "It's
an annual pilgrimage to Nevada's Black Rock Desert for thousands of performance
artists who make the Burning Man festival's ephemeral, sandy settlement a mecca
for 'Net-age tribe builders at play on the playa."
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NPR:
Ellington's "lost" concert (audio). If you prefer,
there's text at All
About Jazz: Duke Ellington celebrated his 70th birthday
on April 29, 1969 as a guest of President Richard Nixon at the White House. In
addition to receiving the distinguished Medal of Freedom, Ellington witnessed
an all-star tribute concert featuring many of the day’s great jazz musicians
in their prime, which until now, was lost. Recently a cassette belonging to then
White House advisor Leonard Garment found its way to Blue Note Records and the
label enlisted Malcolm Addley and the National Archives to digitally remaster
the cassette recording. For the first time “1969: All-Star White House Tribute
to Duke Ellington” is available to the public and without a doubt one of
the great releases of the year. The tribute band featuring, among others,
Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Clark Terry, Joe Williams, J.J. Johnson, Jim Hall,
and Milt Hinton, elegantly works through twenty-seven Ellington / Strayhorn compositions,
including “Take the ‘A’ Train, “Satin Doll, “Sophisticated
Lady,” and “Mood Indigo.”
There's
a review at JazzReview.com
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An
Alternative to Microsoft Gains Support in High Places: (NYT, reg req) Governments
around the world, afraid that Microsoft has become too powerful in critical software
markets, have begun working to ensure an alternative. More than two dozen
countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America, including China and Germany, are
now encouraging their government agencies to use "open source" software
— developed by communities of programmers who distribute the code without
charge and donate their labor to cooperatively debug, modify and otherwise improve
the software...
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Stopping
The Privatization Of Public Knowledge: What was
once a limited legal practice has exploded in recent years into a full-fledged
cultural pathology. "One member of a self-appointed committee of copyright
lawyers has boasted that they have developed restrictions on every means of transmission
of thought except smell, taste and extrasensory perception," observed one
critic. It's part of the new market fundamentalism. Americans are so habituated
to thinking about property as tangible things owned by individuals -- this is
mine! -- that we have trouble understanding that some of the most valuable wealth
we own is collective and social in character.
The author,
David Bollier, is the director of the Information Commons Project at the New
America Foundation and a senior fellow at the Normal Lear Center at the USC
Annenberg School for Communications.
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Update:
Yesterday's Napster pages have changed. What we saw is
reproduced here. Today, the bye.jpg link is gone and the main
Napster link seems to be revived and hinting at a future: Napster -- Work
in progress. by the tie you read this, it may all be different. Back late
Monday.
September 5, 2002 Evicted
from a giant oak tree: It's a beautiful
house in a great
tree, but now it has an eviction notice stapled to it. Thelma Caballero and
her husband, Besh Serdahely, both 50, have lived for 12 years in a tree house
halfway up San Bruno Mountain, with a view of San Francisco Bay. The Chronicle
reports, Last week, after authorities had ignored the
couple for years, two rangers and a sheriff's deputy trekked the half-mile trail
that leads from the Brisbane industrial park, up the eastern slope of San Bruno
Mountain, through amber waves of poison oak, to the tree house. The deputy arrested
Serdahely, a 50-year-old laborer, on a 5-year-old misdemeanor warrant from Mendocino
County and took him away in handcuffs. The rangers said Caballero, 50,
a former housekeeper from Honduras, must leave by the end of the month and take
her stuff with her, or face another visit from the deputy.
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Today,
the world makes no sense. Twice: 1. CBS News: Plans
For Iraq Attack Began On 9/11: CBS News has learned that
barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon,
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans
for striking Iraq — even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein
to the attacks. That's according to notes taken by aides who were with Rumsfeld
in the National Military Command Center on Sept. 11 – notes that show exactly
where the road toward war with Iraq began, reports CBS News National Security
Correspondent David Martin.
2. Molly Ivins, Fort Worth (Texas)
Star-Telegram: Dirtied
by Iraqi oil Excuse me: I don't want to be tacky or anything,
but hasn't it occurred to anyone in Washington that sending Vice President Dick
Cheney out to champion an invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein
is a "murderous dictator" is somewhere between bad taste and flaming
hypocrisy? When Dick Cheney was CEO of the oilfield supply firm Halliburton,
the company did $23.8 million in business with Saddam Hussein, the evildoer "prepared
to share his weapons of mass destruction with terrorists." So if Saddam
is "the world's worst leader," how come Cheney sold him the equipment
to get his dilapidated oil fields up and running so he could afford to build weapons
of mass destruction?
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Two
ways to say good-bye: Napster leaves
with dignity, and leaves
'em laughing.
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Hot
time, cool music: Providence's annual Hot Club Waterfront Festival is this
weekend, and the music promises to be first-rate. Journal music writer Vaughn
Watson writes of the Sunday lineup, A fine Sunday lineup brings
out the road-warrior names and longtime Rhode Island rockers. Al Kooper and The
Funky Faculty play; Kooper played keys with Bob Dylan in his original Newport
"gone electric" set in 1965. Also on the lineup: The Duke Robillard
Band, still jamming on its stellar disk, Living With The Blues (Stony Plain),
and The Dino Club, home of veteran Providence songwriter rocker Mark Cutler (formerly
of The Schemers, which with The Amazing Crowns is the only Rhode Island band to
win Boston's WBCN Rock 'n' Roll Rumble. The Schemers won it in '83; Crowns in
'97).
Reader Frank McQuiggan of East Providence wrote to say,
In today's paper, Vaughn Watson ... notes that one of the bands
playing will be Al
Kooper and the Funky Faculty (review) and that Kooper played keyboards for
Bob Dylan. Though this is true, it is hardly the highlight of his career. Kooper
was a founding member of both the Blues Project and Blood, Sweat and Tears. Several
albums are considered some of the best rock albums ever. These include BS&T's
Child is Father to the Man, Super Session with Steve Stills and
Mike Bloomfield and The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper.
Kooper and his band are not 'road warriors" but faculty at the extremely
prestigious Berklee College
of Music in Boston.
Vaughn ran out of space, but I'm with
Frank here. I wore out Super
Session, which contains the definitive version of Season
of the Witch.  | AL
KOOPER |
Dr. Al -- he holds two honorary doctorates,
including one from Berklee -- was an Associate Professor of Music Production and
Engineering at Berklee from 1997-2000; he had to stop teaching when, according
to the bio on his site, his vision seriously deteriorated. “As long as
I’ve got my hands and my ears, I can still see my way clear to performing
the music I love," Kooper said. The Funky Faculty comprises Berklee
Professor of Contemporary Writing and Production Bob Doezema, guitar; Associate
Professor of Ear Training Daryl Lowery, flute and saxophones; Associate Professor
of Brass Jeff Stout, trumpet; Associate Professor of Percussion Larry Finn, drums;
and Associate Professor of Professional Music Tom Stein, bass. And, for
those who have forgotten Duke Robillard, who's also on tap Sunday, is the founder
of Roomful of Blues. Here's
the schedule. Friday: Max
Creek, Loose
Change, Ricky
Valente, Young
Neal and The Vipers, Concert starts at 5 p.m. Saturday: Black
47, Gruvis Malt,
Jon Tierney & The Truth, The
Complaints, Big
Nazo and Punjab; music starts at 2 p.m. Sunday: Al
Kooper and The Funky Faculty, The Duke
Robillard Band, The
Dino Club; starting at 2 p.m.
The
Hot Club (map) is at 575 S. Water St., between Point Street and the hurricane
barrier. (There's a map here.) Parking will be tough -- prepare to walk a few
blocks. Call 401-861-9007 for more info.
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In
support of a public culture: News.com reports (University
to challenge copyright laws) that an anonymous donor has contributed $1 million
to Duke University to fund advocacy and research aimed at curtailing the recent
expansion of copyright law. James Boyle, a Duke law professor
and co-director of the school's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, says
that the center is likely to look skeptically at recent laws like the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and a measure that extended duration of copyrights
by 20 years. "This is an attempt to figure out the balance between
intellectual property and the public domain," Boyle said. "How much
protection do we need?...If you want to have a rich culture and an innovative
society, you have to leave a large amount of material freely available for all
to use."
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The
"Not the Best Weblog" Project:
The (U.K.) Guardian Unlimited is is running a
competition to find the best British weblog; tomorrow is the deadline for
entries. Plasticbag.org is countering the decidely uncollegial contest with... a
piece of code to post or stick in your template that will add the "Not the
Best" box onto your site. The box includes a link to every British weblogger
who decided not to participate in the Guardian's Best British Blog competition.
If you didn't enter and you send in your site's URL, we'll add it to the box and
it'll be updated on everyone's sites immediately.
Everybody
wins.
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Secret
pleasures of the idle mind: You know you love them -- the truly weird stories
of UFOs, crop circles, mantis aliens, ghosts and much, much more that might just
be true, somewhere, in some dimension, and maybe even here, now. Ken
Layne's Weird Files hopes to serve them while they're hot. Layne, a freelance
journalist whose "normal" (i.e. not paranormal) blog is at kenlayne.com,
hopes to syndicate Weird Files to newspapers. via Carla
Passino at Poynter.org
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September
4, 2002 Dark
Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion This
is a reproduction of the award-winning Dark Alliance website, which first appeared
Aug. 18, 1996, as part of a series I wrote for the San Jose Mercury News. This
innovative website was seen by millions worldwide and acclaimed as the first Internet-based
expose in journalism history. In the wake of a furious controversy, the site vanished
from the Web in 1998. It has been reproduced here for historical purposes and
is in no way affiliated with the San Jose Mercury News.
-- Gary Webb
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Date
expectations: What's up with US women? My early adolescence included such
quaint lore as "You don't chase a streetcar after you've caught it."
I had thought the sexual revolution and rock 'n' roll women had swept all that
into the Victorian past. If Englishman Robert Kelsey's experience isn't tainted
by personal gnomeness, it seems a generation of New York women are leaping back
onto those lonely lofty pedestals: ...We were clearly attracted
to each other. I was sure she wanted to invite me up but was fighting the urge
- as if some behavioural standard was in the way. Janet was just the latest
in a string of similar encounters. In my despair I complained to a female colleague,
to be told that Janet, and millions of American women like her, were following
The Rules. The
Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr Right is a little
book by two witches called Ellen Fakeorgasm and Sherrie Spinster. The Rules state
that men know what they want and they love to chase. And for women to make themselves
attractive they have to run away. When the man of your dreams approaches, it says,
you must brush him off - persistently. Only then will he value you as a special
person. This draws him in and, like a Venus flytrap, the gates of marriage crash
behind him.
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Florida
Microsoft users to sue en masse Florida Microsoft users
can go ahead with a class action lawsuit against the company, a federal judge
has ruled. Circuit Judge Bernard Shapiro of Miami rejected Microsoft's challenges
to the class action. The software giant had claimed that the plantiffs could not
quantify alleged overcharges and be said to share common issues. The lawsuit
claims that Microsoft violated a state law against unfair trade practices by adopting
an anticompetitive approach to sales of its operating system and applications
software. The lawsuit covers anyone in Florida who bought a personal computer
with MS-Dos, Windows 95, Windows 98, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word or Microsoft
Excel after 15 November 1995.
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Plastic
island paradise: Can't afford waterfront property? You can make your own. A
British carpenter who dreamed of living on a private sunshine isle built himself
one using 250,000 plastic bottles. Richie Sowa spent four years making the
floating Spiral Island, which measures 66ft by 54ft, weighs 60 tons and has three
sandy beaches. The mangrove-covered paradise, which is anchored off the
coast of Mexico, includes a two-bedroom house with a large living room and kitchen.
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New
"entertainment" PCs restrict copying: And less costs more, from
News.com
Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday released additional
details about digital entertainment PCs coming for the holidays. But new anti-copying
technology could hamper sales, say analysts and potential buyers. The new
consumer computers run Windows XP Media Center Edition, a variation of Microsoft's
flagship operating system. Besides normal PC functions, Windows Media Center PCs
offer a second user interface through which people can access the operating systems'
digital media features via a remote control. HP, as well as Samsung, will start
offering the new systems sometime before the holiday-shopping season, with HP's
models selling in the high $1,500 range to around $2,000. ...Consumers
can legally record television programs to VHS tapes for personal use and view
them on another VCR in the household. Microsoft has taken a more conservative
approach by thwarting the sharing of programs recorded digitally.
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Geek
Volunteer Overseas: An unemployed dot-commer tried to find an organization
that would put him and his idealism to good use -- and it wasn't easy. But... In
less than a week I will be flying to Kenya. For the next nine months I will be
volunteering as a Computer Instructor in a small college in rural Kenya. This
article is the prelude to what, I hope, will be a series of articles that will
provide first-hand glimpses into the ups and downs of working as a tech volunteer
overseas.
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What
revolution are you? A quiz.
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September
3, 2002 A very sad Letter
from Larry: Onetime New Bedford Standard Times reporter Larry Novick and
his wife Victoria left Providence in May, retiring to Victoria's native Cape Verde.
We have been publishing the expat's dispatches. This
is tough:
 MINDELO,
SAO VICENTE, CAPE VERDE -- Victoria Antonia (Dos Santos) Novick, "Toia",
73, died here Sunday at the Hospital Baptista de Sousa from complications due
to lung cancer. Formerly of Providence, she was the wife of Lawrence
Novick, also of Mindelo, and mother of Julia (Dos Santos) Perry of Pawtucket and
Orlando Dos Santos of Norwich, Conn. Interment took place yesterday in Mindelo.
(Please get the obit published and let her friends know. She was sick for
two weeks and died comfortably. The wake and funeral were the most comforting
imaginable. The mourning at the "house of the dead person" continues
for a week with all decorations removed from the walls. Once I get myself together.
I'll write about it.)
Victoria was an intelligent and gracious
woman. Our thoughts go out to her family, and to Larry, without her, half a world
away. Earlier Letters from Larry: August
22, August
5, June
25, May
23
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Chris
Matthews' last newspaper column: The TV pundit leaves the pages of the
San Francisco Chronicle with kind words for columnists he thinks do (and did)
it better, and a blunt warning about Iraq: I hate this war that's
coming in Iraq. I don't think we'll be proud of it. Oppose this war because it
will create a millennium of hatred and the suicidal terrorism that comes with
it. You talk about Bush trying to avenge his father. What about the tens of millions
of Arab sons who will want to finish a fight we start next spring in Baghdad?
via Jim
Romenesko
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Ann
Coulter's last column, in one paper: The Centre Daily Times of State College,
Pa., cancels right-wing best-seller (Slander) Ann
Coulter's column: ... Ann, you're mean -- vicious, really
-- which is why we do not believe that you in any way serve the public good. On
a late summer morning almost a year ago, all of us -- Republicans, Democrats and
everyone else -- witnessed what hate is capable of. Since that day, Americans
have tried to remember that they are on the same side, regardless of differences
in skin color, nation of origin, religion or political viewpoint. It has not always
been easy because, more than ever, those who are different can seem more threatening.
But we're trying because what we have in America is worth keeping. And,
Ann, you're not helping. You do nothing to elevate our spirits, to celebrate the
great bond that holds us this unruly people together and makes us a nation. via
Jim
Romenesko
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Fan
sues New England Patriots: This is a complicated one. A
former Providence police officer is suing the New England Patriots after the team
revoked his season tickets when his wife tried to auction their seats [to one
game] on eBay. John Reis, 47, of Warwick, is an 18-year season-ticket holder
and avid Pats fan with three seats in the 34th row of Gillette Stadium, right
at the 50-yard line. Now he finds himself involved in two separate court
actions with the team. He's suing the Patriots in federal court for the return
of his tickets and damages, and has filed a criminal assault and battery complaint
against Patriots security chief Mark Briggs.
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Cool
science: A self-organising electronic circuit has stunned engineers by
turning itself into a radio receiver. Okay, I don't exactly get it either. But
they thought it would just oscillate, instead it found a part of itself that could
be an antenna and started broadcasting: This accidental reinvention
of the radio followed an experiment to see if an automated design process, that
uses an evolutionary computer program, could be used to "breed" an electronic
circuit called an oscillator. An oscillator produces a repetitive electronic signal,
usually in the form of a sine wave... Instead, it was behaving more like
a radio receiver, picking up a signal from a nearby computer and delivering it
as an output. In essence, the evolving circuit had cheated, relaying oscillations
generated elsewhere, rather than generating its own.
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Roots
of grass-roots action online: Seattle Times columnist Paul
Andrews links to a 1995 interview
with Jim Warren, one of the Net's earlier heroes (founder and publisher of
InfoWorld, Dr. Dobb's Journal and more) who's been quiet lately. Warren relates
a fascinating tale about the Internet as a potent grass-roots political action
tool. I've edited heavily; it's worth reading the whole process, but here's the
plot outline and the punchline: In 1993 a freshman member of
the Lower House of the California Legislature... dropped a bill in the hopper,
that would mandate that all state legislative information... would be made available
to the public by dial-up access by computer modem. ... ... she mentioned
that they really didn't have any constituents who they could identify that would
support it, and I said "What do you mean?! There are LOTS of people who would
support free, public access by computer net -- particularly in a state like California
which is a high-tech state -- to the legislative information. All you need is
evidence of their interest -- of a constituency that supports this?" And
this is perhaps one of the key things in all this babbling that I'm doing right
now. She said "Oh! Ten or fifteen letters or faxes supporting this legislation
would be a strong showing of support!" And I sort of blurted out: "You
mean out of 31 million Californians?" And she says "Oh yes!" ...
It was passed and signed into law in the end of 1993, took effect in January of
1994. Today, that legislative information system typically gets 50 to 60 thousand
hits a month, in people requesting information from it. ... And the point is:
ANYBODY CAN DO THIS!.
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Poetic
license by laureates of the menu: I missed this last week (but we had
wondered how restaurants kept exotic fresh ingredients around just in case we
stopped by, hadn't you?). MSNBC reports, In this age of gourmet
everything, a restaurant menu offering Argentine steak, wasabi-encrusted fish,
or a cheese plate of camembert isn’t unusual. It is, however, impossible. That
is because wasabi [a $70 per pound root] is almost always horseradish; it is illegal
to import beef from Argentina; and U.S. law bars cheese makers from using the
raw milk that is an essential ingredient of real French cheese. Call it
gourmet cuisine’s dirty little secret: A lot of it is fake.
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The
Bloggys: One man has taken the whole notion of awards into his own hands.
No applications. No entrance fees. You can vote for the best in Best New Blog,
Best Design, Most Posts, News Hound, and Blog of the Month.
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Hugo
Award winners: The 2002 Hugo Awards for science fiction writing were presented
Sunday evening, September 1, 2002, at the World Science Fiction Convention in
San Jose, Calif. Best novel: American Gods by
Neil Gaiman. There's a photo topping the list of winners. Nobody looks
alien or robotic. They look like... writers.
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Stunning
African photography site: AfricanAperture.com
Subterranean
Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features
& interactive producer of projo.com | 
