Razib at the invaluable Gene Expression** takes an up-close and very personal look at "Arab looks" in White or not?
Continued...Well, helloooo sailor! Sign me up and pack the picnic basket. Solar super-sail could reach Mars in a month - Technology
[Click to expand]
A LICK of paint could help a spacecraft powered by a solar sail get from Earth to Mars in just one month, seven times faster than the craft that took the rovers Spirit and Opportunity to the Red Planet.
Gregory Benford of the University of California, Irvine, and his brother James, who runs aerospace research firm Microwave Sciences in Lafayette, California, envisage beaming microwave energy up from Earth to boil off volatile molecules from a specially formulated paint applied to the sail. The recoil of the molecules as they streamed off the sail would give it a significant kick that would help the craft on its way. "It's a different way of thinking about propulsion," Gregory Benford says. "We leave the engine on the ground."
I've long held a poor opinion of Geraldo Rivera, but this brief video redeems him in my eyes.
See if you don't agree. Watch Geraldo Rivera reports on a civilian casualty.
This is the result of the insurgent action.A young woman, a civilian, ...just torn to pieces by an insurgent shell.
What's the point of this insurgency?
What are they fighting for?
To kill an innocent woman who wants to go vote?
What's the point of this?
What are these "heroes" after?
This makes any civilized person absolutely sick.
This... God rest her soul... this is deplorable.
Courtesy of: johnny dollar's place
[HT: Trey Jackson / Olbermann Watch ]
A new Internet speed record for geting a catch-phrase to a concept has been set with GIVE TERROR THE FINGER -- JANUARY 31, 2005
Continued...Senator Edward M. Kennedy is now speaking at iowahawk. Since this freedom and democracy business is getting out of hand around the world, his liquid words of warning come not a minute too soon:
Continued...
"I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. . . . I have often inquired of myself what great principle or idea it was that kept the United States so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land, but that something in the Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance." -- Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural
Continued... Rev. Donald Sensing at One Hand Clapping points to a paper regarding "Intelligent Design," and does not buy in:Failure to explain the origin of species through natural causes exclusively does not mean that the cause is supernatural.
That's certainly correct as far as it goes. I'm not at all clear about "Intelligent Design," but I'm not sure that it requires that the cause be "supernatural." I understand that the proponents of ID assume or would prefer if the cause were supernatural, but I remain agnostic on that issue. It could be the workings of the hand of God, or it could be something as yet supraliminal to beings with the current set of firmware and wetware that we possess.
Continued...by CHRIS LYNCH , American Digest Sports Editor
Let me say this right up front just so I don't bury the lede - the Patriots win this game by 18. Yup, you heard me - 18 points.
I'm tempted to end this post right here. What else is there to say after you just predicted a 18 point victory? I'm tempted but I figure I owe you an explanation of how I came to that 18 point figure.
The first and most basic question is "who wins the game?" As soon as we knew the match-up everyone said the Patriots would win. Now people are starting to talk themselves into the Eagles. People are talking about Andy Reid never losing a game which he had an extra week to prepare for and things like that. However, this is a situation where the first impression was the right one. The Patriots will win. And they'll win big!
Continued...Previously Published Sunday Reading from the Archives
ABSENT BEING IN A COMA IN A CAVE somewhere on a high mountain in the middle of a cypress swamp, you cannot escape "The Runaway Bride." She is the plat du jour of our blighted age and the story of the decade so far this week. Now that she's back she'll be parsed and probed, drawn, quartered and eviscerated by the rapacious media until she's little more than a damp spot on some surgical sponge.
I hated The Runaway Bride from the first moment it was revealed she was safe and had simply freaked out and taken the geographic cure by getting gone to Vegas. Sane people have to hate Las Vegas too -- a place that advertises that when you do freak out, it is the psycho's vacation destination of choice. A pathetic reason for a town to exist, but cheap and low places need to work with what they have. After all, nobody would mistake Vegas for Vatican City until, of course, they build a 1/3rd scale model of Saint Peters and slam six thousand slots into the basilica -- something I am sure is in the planning stage.
Still Vegas is the perfect place for The Runaway Bride to select as the terminus of her bus ticket. Once you go psycho in America it seems you have to pass through at least a Vegas of the mind and soul even if your final destination is someplace much more mundane like.... Albuquerque.
Let her go.Let her go. God bless her,
Wherever she may be.
She can search, search this whole world wide over....
-- St. James Infirmary
Let's look instead at what lies far below the personalities of this pathetic drama to the deeper principles which illumine why this little tale has had such a large impact.
Father forgive the media, they know not what they do. But sometimes they do things right in spite of themselves. This is one of those stories. And no matter how many in the media beat up their peers for paying so much attention to this tawdry tale, it goes in the end to a deeper truth about ourselves and our lives.
What we are really seeing here is something that has a deep and abiding interest to humans because it is something that happens -- in their secret hearts and deeper souls -- to millions of human beings every single day. This latest passage is merely some modern passion play in which people act out on the stage of the nation our daily common tragedy entitled: Love Gone Missing.
It seems to me that if we knew the secrets of all our hearts, we'd know that love goes missing in our country thousands of times an hour. It doesn't usually go for a run, take a taxi, and grab a bus for destinations thousands of miles away, but that can often be the end of it.
Love goes missing in a moment of fear, of spite, of words spoken or left unspoken, in blink of an eye or a sentence only half-heard or remember wrongly. Love untempered by fire or by ice is a skittish thing in our lives. We think we know what it is, but we really only know what we've been told it is -- at least at the beginning.
We've been told Love is the white-hot passion that comes at the beginning of romance and is supposed to sustain itself at that level of heat across the decades. When that expectation burns through the weak vessels that we are, love goes missing -- off on a
quest to find the next pile of fuel on which to burn. Go to a Family Courthouse in any county in this country on any day of the week and you'll see, scattered about the corridors, the scorched waste, sodden ash and family rubble left by this fools' fire.
We've been told that Love is seen in the increasingly lavish weddings whose example is the 14 bridesmaids, 600 guests bash that our current poster child for Love Gone Missing fled from. With such a monstrous beginning, what love could not go missing either before or soon after. No real love can measure up to such grandiose beginnings. After all, Princess Diana had only 5 bridesmaids at her wedding and we all know about the bloody tunnel in which that love gone missing ended in a Paris night.
Wise people and scriptures all tell us that Love, if it is not to go missing, should be built carefully and slowly until what lies inside Love is seen and grasped. But our Love we are told should not be centered on the soul but on things. We are told that Love needs to be seen in the world through things -- the place setting from Tiffany's, the endless objects from the multiple registries, the proof positive of the house becoming the ever larger house as we flip our homes every three years to get our nice appreciation rise. And so we seek to buttress and shore up Love by meeting the expectations of others in the material realm. God forbid you fail those expectations, for then, in an instant of selfish decision that always opts for better and not for worse, Love Goes Missing.
I've seen love go missing in a single, secret, brief and enraged glance on Christmas Day. I've heard love go missing months before the front door slammed. I've seen it go missing in me in a hundred silent moments where I did not speak my heart and in a hundred other moments when I spoke my heart falsely and far too quick. And the only thing I think I've learned about love gone missing is to let it go -- and I'm not even sure about that no matter how often it is repeated to me. Your milage, of course, may vary.
For most of us, when Love Goes Missing it is not easily found again. When it goes missing it goes -- near or far in space -- a long, long way away and we don't have the town turn out to walk search grids for our family, or issue nationwide alerts, or offer $100,000 rewards. It just goes and once it goes we may struggle to find it for a time, but by that time it is far out of reach and beyond our puny power to locate.
But even if one could locate it, what good would that do? Love gone missing can't be compelled to return like some runaway bride taken through the airports with a cloak over its head -- an apprehended perpetrator of the non-crime of going missing. Love's a wild force in our too domesticated and ordered frantic lives. Once gone missing,for whatever reason, it can't be just taken back as it was even if it is found. For if love gone missing is found and returns, it always remains a shattered vessel.
Yes, I know that in the endless bromides of our modern Therapeutic State Religion one is supposed to find the heart, the mercy and the compassion and the patience to pick up every little shard of what has been shattered and, with our ample supplies of theraputic superglue, painfully and tediously put it all back together as it was. Except, of course, it can never be what it was.
Love gone missing takes with it the hostages of trust and truth but they don't come back with it if it returns. They've been buried somewhere en route and their locations long forgotten, far off the map. Even if you could accept it without them, you'd still see the fine hairline cracks in the vase you put back together together. You'd both handle the love like a rare museum object, always looking for the next soft place to store it so that it could not break or escape again. Love under constant guard will never be entirely free from the craving to go missing once again. At any time and for any reason. Sometimes for no reason of love at all.
So, like some many other things that ring deep in the changes of our hearts, we look for what to do; for how we can fix what cannot be fixed by us. If we find love gone missing and if it seems to have been returned to us we look to repair the rare and delicate thing. But it is, we find, like trying to repair a Swiss Watch with sledgehammer. Nobody human has that delicate a touch.
Perhaps it is better, in the end, to learn to let it be. Nobody says you can have only one love with one person. If there can be, and there is, room for more than one love in one life, perhaps there can be more than one love in one love. Maybe the answer, if answer there be, is not the easy answer of repair, but the harder answer of starting all over from the gross and shapeless clay of love.
Maybe you worked too fast at the first pass of love and threw on the wheel of your days a lopsided and thin pot, something that had, deep inside it, some emptiness, some pockets of thin air that you could not see from outside, but that caused it to crack inside under the long heat of our lives of days and hands. Not everything that's pretty is strong.
Perhaps the best thing to do with love gone missing is, as said before, to just let it go and get it gone. It seems cold to say that no search will find it again as it was, but that's probably the truth. At the same time, and in the always inscrutable nature of love, to know that love has gone missing is not the same as knowing that love itself is gone. That's the thing that we always seem to miss and that we need to remember.
Maybe, if you take the time to improve your skills on the wheel of life, you will be able at some point to take up the clay of that love and, kneading more patiently, centering more carefully, and shaping with care and constant hands a better, stronger vessel. It might not be as fine and pretty as the first more delicate one, but it could be good and serviceable and steady. Not at all as likely to shatter on a glance or a word or a silence or a shadow and just go missing. Like all things made here on the great wheel, it could in time just be coming around again.
I can't be alone in thinking that the single most obscene and disgusting ad-spams infesting the Web today are the pulsing phalloid come-ons served up by LowerMyBills.
These ads go right to the top of my "Don't point. Don't click" list.
I don't know about anybody else, but if making money off of blogs involves dropping this sort of soul-sucking link into the page, include me out.
Long ago, when I was an editor of books, one of my best moments was finding and publishing Science Made Stupid by Tom Weller. The book was profoundly insane and insanely funny and rightfully won a Hugo when it was published all the way back in 1986.
Tom Weller was, and I presume is, one of my oldest friends. We go all the way back to Encina High School in 1960. Later we would be roomates for a brief period at the University of California at Berkeley. My first, but not my last, experience with LSD took place with Tom and a couple of other friends and had something to do with a yellow Porsche. I'm not sure exactly what, but it was very important, man.
Later, Tom would become, with David Goines, a graphic designer in Berkeley for a number of groups such as Country Joe and the Fish. Always a strange duck, Tom was both of that era at Berkeley and outside it. He remains there and in much the same state today.
Continued...
STRAIGHT TALK FROM OUTSIDE THE STRAIT JACKET:
Cobb: Piling On Joel Whatshisname
Look at that Malcolm X video again. What you will hear is straight talk. We owe it to ourselves and our nation to bring about the change that will bring straight talk back to the center of our communications with each other. Until then, this is not America and we are not men and women.
YOU WILL ALL, I HOPE, pardon me if I take a moment out to preen. I promise it won't become a habit. For those that missed this small page's moment in the sun when Rush Limbaugh read and extended excerpt from my essay, "The Voice of the Neuter is Heard Throughout the Land," I have made and placed on the site that particular excerpt from this morning's radio show. To listen to the "Voce del Oro" read just click the link below:
I've been enjoying a correspondence with a young poet of late. There's nothing like writing to someone else who shares your interest in an arcane subject to draw out your own thoughts or reflections on that area. He recently finished a long work in which a number of formal issues regarding sestinas and sonnets arose. He asked for help on these problems and I agreed to help. Not because I know more, but because I've seen more.
For those who don't pay a lot of attention to the technical aspects of poetics, I can only assure you that if you commit yourself to a long poem with a number of its elements cast in classical forms ( Instead of just spewing your immediate issues across the page and breaking the lines at an arbitrary point.), the job of "getting it right" increases exponentially. The only poets who do not know how hard this is are those that have never attempted it. And they are legion in this blighted age of writers' workshops and writing an inchoate slab of feelings down the bones.
The poet in question had finally come to the first end point of the work, submitted it to a publication, and was burned out. This is not uncommon. This morning he wrote, "May it be months before I ever write another d**m poem."
If only it were that easy. When you permit yourself to seriously attend to this faded art, you'll find over time that you are only finished with poetry when poetry is finished with you. That does happen. Sometimes for months or even years. This I know.
Continued...IF YOU ARE INTERESTED in reading some essays posted here over the years, I've got a little list here just for you. Just click ....
Continued...
Click to Enlarge
Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten came out of left field in the late 1980s to dominate bestseller lists around the world like no other non-ficton book in memory. It was so successful that, at one point, it was number one on the Times' bestseller list in hardcover and in paperback with his second book, It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It occupying the second slot on the hardcover list. A perfect publishing trifecta.
Over the years, Fulghum came out with many more books -- all in the vein of plain-spoken stories from life that held deeper and universal meanings; a philosophy of Everyman, if you will. Their appeal reached across linguistic and cultural boundaries and sold tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages. They continue to sell to this day.
For reasons that I won't go into here, -- but may tell another time -- I've watched this publishing phenomenon from a unique, somewhat inside, perspective. Suffice it to say that for Fulghum and everyone else involved it was, for ten years, a wild ride. A ride that might have continued, as these publishing things do, for many more years except for one wild card in the equation, Robert Fulghum.
Fulghum is one of those rare individuals that you meet in life that are best described as: "A man who is himself." There's nothing in him that is derivative of others. Besides being a writer, Fulghum is also a painter, a sculptor, a Unitarian minister, a man who knows his whiskey and cigars, and his way around a poker table. He also plays a mean mandocello. For ten years he was in great demand as a speaker, and he still is. But there was a point at which he decided, against all advice to the contrary from the traditional publishing types in his karass, that he was tired of being "Captain Kindergarten," and he just folded up the tent and walked away.
He walked away and did the one thing a successful best-selling author of short inspiring essays about life should never, ever do: he wrote a novel.
But he did not write a novel that looked like or felt like or read like any novel you have ever read. It was a "Novel-In-A-Box." Take a look. Take a long look.Take a very long look at the photographs of this work. And then come back. I'll wait here.
Robert Fulghum New Novel - IntroductionThey say that the novel is a mature art form. They say that, aside from tone and subject, nothing new can be done with it. But here's a novel that incorporates artifacts, music, color journals, illustrations, and even more. A novel that comes with a selection of objects that have meaning in the warp and the woof of the story, that operate as talismans. This is clearly something new in the realm of the novel. Something so startling that it takes your breath away to see it.My novel, Third Wish, began as a what-if? adventure. More than anything else, I'm a storyteller by trade. But my stories have always been short. Could I write a really long story? Why not? Commercial publication was not my original goal. I wanted to write a book I would want to read - one I would want to keep and read again - one that was a product of a life I would have to live to write it. A keepsake. If there was only one copy, so be it.
You would think that American book-publishing, given a chance to innovate, and working with an author who has tens of millions of readers around the world, would jump at the chance to publish this in some form or another. And you would be dead wrong.
You'd be wrong because you fail to comprehend just how deep into American publishing the creative brain rot goes. When this book was "offered" to American publishers not one could even begin to imagine how it could be done, and not one could even bring themselves to take a flyer on finding out how it could be done. Every single one of them, as well as an agent or two, passed. Were they right?
Continued...The Macintosh turned 21 this week, but what was it like on the day it was born? Now you can see it in
hosted at Trunkmonkey.com
"Never seen video footage of the introduction of the Macintosh in January 1984 was published for the first time on the Internet today. Renowned Mac user Scott Knaster kept that Betamax video tape for 21 years, and German media agency TextLab has unearthed this only surviving video tape of the launch."
but one thing I've never seen,and for some unknown reason would really like to see, is
1) A Cow
2) On a pole
3) With antlers.
Is that too much to ask?
Continued...BY JEREMIAH LEWIS, American Digest Film Editor
(2005) Rated R -- 3 stars out of 5
When you stand in line for a ticket to Assault on Precinct 13, hand your money over with a smile, and gleefully stroll down that long dark hallway to Theatre 7, odds are you aren't there for
- David Mametesque dialogue
- Scintillating drama
- The pathos of a humanity-laden, emotionally charged period piece
- A high-caliber comedy in the style of Some Like It Hot or His Girl Friday. (After all, Brian Dennehy never came close to convincing me he was worth his weight in anything other than, well, his weight.)
Nevertheless, should you find yourself in that line, paying that money, and wearing that smile of contented brainlessness, you can do worse than to watch the remake of John Carpenter's 1976 Assault on Precinct 13. This modern day retelling has been updated with a few twists, a different cast of characters, and a John Carpenter-less score, but otherwise it is the same picture.
Continued...
Having lived in New York City on and off across three decades, I'm often asked by potential visitors to suggest something that they simply have to do when visiting. One thing that invariably goes to the top of the list is, "Take the Circle Line."
Sophisticated people just as invariably look askance and say,"But isn't that the most cheesy touristy thing you can do?" To which the answer is, "No. It is the second most cheesy touristy thing you can do. First cheese log is riding a double-decker bus through Soho on Saturday looking at the Bridge-And-Tunnel crowd as if they were hipsters on their way to Andy Warhol's loft."
The Circle Line is, believe it or not, the single best orientation tool for a first, second, or N-time visitor to New York. I gets you a bit off the island and then, in good weather, takes you all the way around it in a, well, circle. Along the way, you get an informed, if at times laconic, lecture from your guide on the past and present of Manhattan. (Why are there no large skyscraper developments between Wall Street and Midtown? The bedrock slopes down under loose fill after Wall Street and doesn't rise up again until midtown making foundations in between an expensive and risky business. It's called "Canal Street" for a reason. )
When you're done with the Circle Line what you're left with, besides factoids and a wonderfully cheesy photograph of you in front of a life preserver, is an invaluable sense of context when you're roaming Manhattan. Getting off the island places you on the island like no other experience.
So when my wife, Sheryl, went to New York on business last week and she asked me for some suggestions I said, of course, "Circle Line." (She's been to the city numerous times before, but this time was meeting with a colleague who'd never been.) A few days later, with a huge blizzard bearing down on the city, she escaped a day early and avoided being pent up on the 41st floor of the Marriott Marquis on Times Square with only 30 theaters and unlimited room service to dull the suffering. (Whew, a close one.)
But before she left she did get a chance to take the Circle Line -- in 14 degree weather with ice floes on the Hudson knocking on the hull. Still it was a great cruise around a great city at twilight. She brought back a lot of stunning photographs and has arranged them with essential commentary. Now you can take The Circle Line too at Snow strands travelers in New York. But luckily, I was not among them.
Dress warm.
In a great riff of Brain Jazz , Joy McCann at Dean's World picks up my essay on Robert Fulghum's Novel-In-A-Box, Third Wish, and kicks it up a notch by looking at other innovators in the novel.
The second-most physically adventurous publishing venture has to be the Griffin and Sabine books, which tell the story of a romantic correspondence betweeen two artists. The postcards are made by one of the characters, and are pasted into the sheets of the books. The letters are in envelopes that are glued into the books' pages. It is truly like reading hand-written letters. When Professor Purkinje turned me on to these books, he pronounced them "the best thing in the world." Fact is, they were pretty damned conceptually hot. I ought to read them all the way through; it's good stuff. And they are physically stunning.What follows is an illuminating essay on elements of the career of Winnie the Pooh creator A. A. Milne. Much of which you didn't know, but will be glad to learn.But innovation in publishing doesn't just involve putting books into boxes with trinkets, or making the reader fish a letter out of an envelope. Sometimes it means going to the mat with one's agent:
There's a lot of talk and a little bit of surprise snapping about the blogs today over the fact that Michael Moore's 911 failed to be nominated for an Oscar. No mystery to me. I just "follow the money."
Hollywood dodged an big Internet bullet by passing on 911. It had occurred to me months ago, and I am willing to bet that it occurred to others as well, that if 911 got an Oscar, the response from the net and the Blogosphere would have been, "Let's make April the Nobody-Goes-To-The-Movies Month."
And we could have made it happen. And it would have hurt. Big time.
Again, consciously or unconsciously, twisted ideals are fine but in the end Hollywood always votes its pocketbook.
In the post below I pointed to Mike Godwin's new weblog Godwin's Law as much for its wonderfully retro design as for its content. Pointing makes you click and when I did I came across this wonderfully Godwinesque series of postings on the Wikipedia kerfuffle. If you'd like to get caught up on this debate with the aid of a good guide, here are some excerpts:
Godwin's Law - Thoughts on Wikipedia, Part I
The question ought not to be whether you should trust Wikipedia (for whatever value of "trust" you want to use), but why you should give your trust to traditional publications (where errors and distortions persist, when they occur, for decades and even centuries).Godwin's Law - Thoughts on Wikipedia, Part II
My reaction when someone complains about an inaccuracy in Wikipedia is always this: Why didn't you fix it? Because, you know, you had the power to do so.Godwin's Law - Interlude: the Larger Wikipedia Debate
Clay Shirky: "It's not that it doesn't matter what academics think of the Wikipedia -- it would obviously be better to have as many smart people using it as possible. The problem is that the only thing that would make the academics happy would be to shoehorn it into the kind of filter, then publish model that is broken, and would make the Wikipedia broken as well."Godwin's Law - Thoughts on Wikipedia, Part III
Wikipedia, with all its flaws, is an amazing accomplishment, and it stands for the proposition that, whatever its vulnerabilities, most of us want to promote the truth, to share knowledge, to make it available for everybody else, and to make the world better.Godwin's Law - Picky About Wikipedia
Most of us who have long been interested in the Cargo Cults will already have noted that hardly anyone ever tries to stir up fear, uncertainty, and doubt about them, because they're not perceived as any kind of threat. By contrast, various corporations (and the occasional affiliated foundation) sure keep beating the tribal drum about the general badness of open-source software, the free-culture movement, and entities like Creative Commons. Surely if the latter were really all that Cargo-Cultish they'd be so irrelevant that no one would propagandize against them.
"I needed a book .... and for my sins they gave me one ..... when it was over I'd always want another."
One of the continuing pleasures of publishing on the web, is that you can, if you are lucky, encounter people who share your obsessions to a greater degree than you ever thought possible. It is always a relief to know that, no matter how obsessed with an area of life you may be, there is always somebody higher up the ladder. In that way, you can hope for a little warning when they start rolling up the network.
Like many who write for a living and for their own satisfaction, I've been a lifelong "constant reader." At times my credit card bill seems to confirm that the entire staff of Amazon must be on my personal payroll. Long Sunday shopping trips with my wife? No problem as long as the mall has a bookstore. Going somewhere where I might have to wait for more than 30 seconds? I've got two books in the backseat and a case of books in the trunk of my car.
I pour over the latest Levenger catalog like other men consume Sports Illustrated, Popular Science, and Outdoor Life. (I thirst for the Luxe Laplander, but it far too expensive an indulgence. I own two Flag Wallets [with refills] and I am manfully resisting The Annotation Station ), but I can feel my resolve fading.)
I compulsively check the "Where's My Stuff" page at Amazon, even though I've selected "Free Shipping" and I know the order won't even leave until next week. ( "Why? Why did you do that, when for just a few dollars more...." ) When the shipment does leave, I like to get the tracking number and watch it move towards my front door. I have done this so compulsively that one morning I refreshed the tracking page and saw "Delivered" just as my doorbell rang and there they were. Impressive or insane? You decide.
Scrutiny with No Profiling. It's a wonderful thing.
Via reader "forebob1." [1.1 megabytes. Windows Media Player.]
by PAT CUMMINGS American Digest Book Editor
Amatav Ghosh: The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery
In The Calcutta Chromosome, author Amitav Ghosh has written a fever-bright mystery story about an historic event.
In 1898 in Calcutta, Sir Ronald Ross* solved a riddle: how is malaria transmitted?
"Malaria was the cold fusion of his day, the Sunday papers were scrambling to get it on the covers. And it figures: malaria's probably the all-time killer among diseases. Next to the common cold it's just about the most prevalent disease on the planet..."Into the historical tale that traces the intense competition between Pasteur in Paris, Ambrose Laveran in Algeria, and Ronald Ross in India, Ghosh introduces the mystery: a LifeWatch worker named L. Murugan investigating (in 1995) how Ross came up with his idea. Continued...
T hey seek a dedication
No passion prints on stone,
Their reveries -- of clouds.
Their benedictions -- moans.
Not one can name their masters,
Nor indenture's date reveal.
Doomed to ride the animal
That runs within the wheel.
ROBERT'S RULES OF SURVIVAL: "10. Anything that is not managed will deteriorate. If you want to uncover problems you don't know about, take a few moments and look closely at the areas you haven't examined for a while. I guarantee you problems will be there."
BECAUSE YOU. ARE. SPECIAL. The Apple iProduct: "Your life. In a small, plastic case."
BLOGDAMNED IF YOU DO, BLOGDAMNED IF YOU DON'T -- A concerned emailer asks why I am not getting back to work after posting the item below that begins "I'M GETTING RIGHT BACK TO WORK." As I said last night to my blogdamned wife, "Right now, for better or worse, blogging is my work, and yes dear, I promise to work the phrase 'my blogdamned wife' into a post just as soon as possible. No, not just because you thought of it."
KOTTKE CHATS WITH "CALL PAUL TO HAUL." HAS EPIPHANY:Craigslist and cottage industries
I'd never really thought about it before, but in some ways, CL helps lots of people build businesses cheaper and more effectively than more "robust", complex, and expensive enterprise software solutions. Movers are just one example. CL can help you find employees for your business. If you've got a van, you can pick up free furniture and electronics around the city, fix or refurbish, and sell it. You can start a business doing computer troubleshooting, piano lessons, buying and fixing up old motorcycles, or escort and sensual massage services.Following which a commenter expresses a wish and discloses an opportunity: "Wish CL was more "robust" in smaller cities, e.g. Tucson. Guess that's just the way it goes, but seems like bad luck since small cities have a lot of cottage industry potential."
CLUELESS USERS IS WHAT THE Pew Internet & American Life Project: Search Engine Users sees:
Only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or "sponsored" results and unpaid results. And only one in six say they can always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not. This finding is ironic, since nearly half of all users say they would stop using search engines if they thought engines were not being clear about how they presented paid results.
I'M GETTING RIGHT BACK TO WORK right after I post this pointer to the ever-popular Getting Back To Work: A Personal Productivity Toolkit.
WHEN ARCHITECTS ATTACK:Will Alsop's Supercity promises more terror and despair for England.
Imagine a future in which the vast M62 corridor is a singular entity, a huge coast to coast 'SuperCity', 80 miles long and 15 miles wide. Here city limits are blurred, its inhabitants live in Liverpool, shop in Leeds and go clubbing in Manchester. Using the latest forms of advanced transportation, SuperCity residents could wake up by the Mersey and commute to an office overlooking the Humber. Air travel from a central hub puts the world on our doorstep. What impact will this have on the traditional definition of a city and the people who work, rest and play in this radical new landscape?You'd think decades of social rot and other disasters of urban "planning" in the council flats would have taught them the answers to that. Imagine.
AS ROBERT REDFORD DECLARES SUNDANCE to be an island of Freedom in a vast sea of Repression -- "I like to think of this festival as a festival of dissent, and I'd like to celebrate that" (AP) -- Jason at LIBERTAS thinks Redford does not go far enough:
Sundance should be a kind of permanent 'festival of dissent.' After all, Mr. Redford has never really been given the chance by Hollywood to express himself fully. EVEN THOUGH MR. REDFORD CONTROLS A FILM FESTIVAL, A FILM INSTITUTE, A PRODUCTION COMPANY, HIS OWN CABLE CHANNEL, A SKI RESORT AND A POPULAR CLOTHING CATALOGUE, CAN WE REALLY SAY HE'S EVER HAD THE OPPORTUNITIES HE DESERVED? Sadly we cannot, because Mr. Redford deserves ALL of these things... and more.
APPLE'S ON TRACK TO SELL A BILLION SONGS BY THE END OF 2005: Apple iTunes sales tally hits 250m -- The Register
"More than 250m songs have been paid for and downloaded from Apple's iTunes Music Store, the Mac maker boasted today."
GLENN REYNOLDS notes this morning that he has been nominated for a Wired Magazine Rave Award.
Reynolds denies the nomination has anything to do with last Fall's spate of wireless blogging from the dark backrooms at The Tire Shop surrounded by empty water bottles and glow-sticks, but insists he still feels very warm and loving towards the nominating committee.
by JEREMIAH LEWIS, American Digest Film Editor
Caught between two worlds, Vera Drake floats along an ephemeral plane of the unconscious. It is both a tale of good intentions (and you know where those lead), and a veiled (and vague) social drama that plays out like yesterday's politics.
Writer/director Mike Leigh doesn't put a whole lot of spin on what could have been a tightly wound spool of leftist rhetoric. And he places the story at a comfortable distance--England in the 1950's--so that its controversial subject can be digested with as little burping as possible. Leigh barely engages these issues to the audience though, settling for a dark cinematic expression of objectivity.
Instead of a pro- or anti-abortion film, Vera Drake is an intimate portrait of lower class life in the 1950's Britain. Character performances overcome the limitations inherent in the stereotypes, though not enough to make Vera Drake the highlight of Leigh's career.
Glyn Hughes' Squashed Philosophers: The books which defined the way The West thinks now. Condensed and abridged to keep the substance, the style and the quotes, but ditching all that irritating verbiage.
* You post squirrel recipes on a website. * You've ever bought beer online. * You write to Hewlett-Packard to sponsor a NASCAR team. * You've modeled your new 'Daisy Dukes' for a webcam. * You have a celphone headset for your fishing boat. * Your robot dog is named 'Bubba'. * You paid more for your computer than you did for your house. * You subscribe to the chewing tobacco newsgroup. * Your windows wallpaper is the confederate flag. * You make John Wayne MP3s. * Your IM lists are "Hunting buddies" and "Mama'n them". * Your ringtone is a Hank Williams song. * You changed beauty shops because they didn't offer websurfing under the hair driers. * You modified your gunrack to hold a rifle AND your laptop. * You help install a wireless hotspot zone in your favorite Honky Tonk. * You've ever called Graceland to tell them their webcam was down. * You have your monster truck magazine collection on CD-ROM. * You've ever been to a computer show wearing a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt. * You've used your shoe's spike heel to pry out a DVD that was stuck in the player. * Your ISP's office is on a gravel road. * You sent your husband an Ecard of Dolly Parton on the first day of deer season. * You have Harley Davidson stickers on your mouse. * Your Windows sound files are all steel guitar. * You wrote a really cool flash animation that involves Jack Daniels. * You've ever emailed a digital photo of your new tattoo. * You know the GPS coordinates of your deer stand and duck blind. * You've used a photo editor to see what you'd look like in Tammy Faye makeup. * You've used a locking CD case to close a bag of salsa chips. * You've ever gotten Kripsy Kreme icing INSIDE your PDA. * You've ever spilled moonshine on your Blackberry. * You wired your grandma's outhouse with broadband just for giggles. * You have a satellite photo of the Dallas Cowboys' Cheerleaders on your wall. * You've ever painted a URL on an overpass.
Email, we get email, we get stacks and stacks of email....
"But of course we support our troops! How can you possibly think of us as bad Americans?"
"Sgt. 1st Class Jeff Due, right, a U.S. Army recruiter, is surrounded by protesters at Seattle Central Community College, Thursday, Jan. 20, 2005, in Seattle. After about a 10-minute standoff during which protesters tore up U.S Army literature, the protesters were successful in getting Due and another recruiter to leave their table under escort by campus security officers. Several hundred students walked out of classes at several Seattle colleges and universities to protest the inauguration of President Bush." -- AP
[HT -- Pool of Thought via Smash @ The Indepundit and Mudville Gazette .]
And the answer is....
There are about to be several million words written and published about Johnny Carson but Will Collier at Vodkapundit pretty much says it all in 97 words:
I really feel sorry for people who weren't old enough to see and appreciate Carson while he was still on the air. He was just So. Damn. Good. His successors, on every network, are decidedly pale reflections, and I doubt any of them would seriously argue that Carson was head and shoulders above anybody else who's ever hosted a talk show, anywhere. His blend of great good humor, high taste, low comedy, and refusal to condescend to anybody, regardless of who they were or where they came from, almost certainly can't be duplicated in today's mass media.
My father-in-law, Bob, sometimes forwards jokes. Always a pleasure. This morning one popped in that I hadn't seen before and, like many jokes, it struck me that there's a larger truth hidden in the humor. Don't stop me if you've heard it before.
A young boy, about eight years old, was at the store picking out a large box of laundry detergent. The grocer walked over and, trying to be friendly, asked the boy if he had a lot of laundry to do.Continued..."Oh, no laundry," the boy said. "I'm going to wash my dog."
"But you shouldn't use this to wash your dog. It's very powerful and if you wash your dog in this, he'll get sick. In fact, it might even kill him."
But the boy was not stopped by this and carried the detergent to the counter and paid for it, even as the grocer still tried to talk him out of washing his dog.
About a week later the boy was back in the store doing some shopping. The grocer asked the boy how his dog was doing.
"Oh, he died," the boy said.
The grocer said, "I tried to tell you not to use that detergent on your dog."
"Well," the boy replied, "I don't think it was the detergent that killed him."
"Oh I'm sorry. How did he die?"
Michael B of 2blowhards.com takes a Parthian shot at the auto-da-fé of Harvard's Larry Summers currently being played out in the smallest brains of academia, and helps my evolving theory of The Buttinsky Party.
As far as I can tell, Regular People, bless 'em, never disbelieved that gals and guys differ somewhat, and on deep levels. Regular People know this from experience, and aren't about to let theory-spinners tell them otherwise. But I'd have guessed that even our academic elites -- however self-regarding, self-deceiving, self-important, and naive we know them to be -- had abandoned their attachment to the ideology of "everyone is alike in every possible way and the only thing that explains differences in outcomes is Pure Evil, except when it has to do with academic elites being smarter than everyone else."Hilarity ensures in the comments as some defenders of The Buttinskys take the position of "hold your tongue about truth and lie for the greater good."I'm surprised to discover that so many are still in such high-minded denial of basic facts of life, aren't you? God knows I wouldn't ever have expected Elite People to say, "We made a mistake. Sorry. We'll try to do better now." No, they're too puffed-up proud and full of grandstanding moral fury ever to eat humble pie, however much good that might do them, and however much good it might do the world. But I was under the impression that they'd moved on a bit -- that they'd let go of their Blank Slate insanity, if only to embrace some other kind of fashionable nonsense.
I wonder if my cluelessness about these people has to do with the fact that I've given up having anything but passing interactions with them. Blank Slaters have nothing to tell me I haven't heard a zillion times before. And what's the point of dealing with fanatics more than is necessary? I don't know about you, but I find that trying to hash out (or even joke about) intellectual/artistic /political matters with Blank-Slate maniacs saps energy that I need for more important matters, like programming the Tivo and taking naps.
The difference in detection range between an ordinary vessel and Visby creates a considerable zone where the Visby can see but not be seen.
Just the thing for those boating runs from Jamaica to the Florida Keys:The barely visible Visby
The Visby Class corvette is the first vessel in the world to have fully developed stealth technology, combined with high operational versatility. The outstanding stealth properties fundamentally change the ship's survivability and improve its mission effectiveness.Much more might be signaled if the Columbian Navy orders up one or two dozen.Visby is a flexible surface combatant, designed for a wide range of roles: anti-surface warfare (ASuW), anti-submarine warfare (ASW), mine countermeasures (MCM), patrol and much more.
Free Screen Cleaning [Be patient. It is, after all, free.]
Out of pocket a penny? The market will take a pound of flesh:
EBay, one of the world's largest e-commerce companies, also came in one penny under Wall Street's expectations for the fourth quarter, with a profit of $205.4 million, or 30 cents a share. That compares with $142.5 million (21 cents) in the same period of 2003. -- EBay Shares PlungeIn this case it was about $19 billion worth of flesh as the pump-and-dump specialists on Wall Street dumped off that much in market capitalization. Reasons were many and excuses more if you listened to the word and the rumors coming out of the online giant, but it may well be that, at last, the endlessly complicated EBay home page has hit the limit of what buyers and sellers can comprehend.
Oh, yes, raising prices up to 50% on all your customers doesn't help matters either.
[Matin Tobias has the gruesome details of this fleecing at Deep Green Crystals: E-Bay drops a bombshell!]
This is the kind of monopolistic move that sets both buyers and sellers against you, but then it has been many a year since EBay management cared about that, hasn't it? Whitman's EBay has always been, like the CEO herself, as ethically sketchy as the unbundled software it sells. No reason to straighten out now. Unless, of course, an awakened Justice Department decides to get all Microsoft on them. [Right. Sure. And the latest of Porcine aviation is? -- Ed.]
If you don't believe it, ask yourself how unclued a company has to be to help cheat the Girl Scouts. [HT/ Om Malik]
From an interview with Mary Czerwinski, enior Researcher and Group Manager of VIBE [Visualization and Interaction Research Group] in at Microsoft Research.ACM: Ubiquity
UBIQUITY: What are we talking about when we say "large displays"?CZERWINSKI: Let's just imagine in the future that you have your walls around your office as your displays, or at least as additional display surfaces. So instead of actually having piles of papers on your desk, you might actually have — literally might have a visual design of piles of windows on your displays around you. And you may have a very large display like let's say a 42-inch or a 50-inch screen in front of you that you're working on, you know, as more of a personal workspace. But then you'll use your walls as additional display space so you can lay everything out, keeping it visible, so you can monitor what's going on in those separate tasks if you will. In contrast, you'll be working very closely and personally with information on your desktop.
How, when my emerald voices pray
In the crystal heart, and the bright chimes
Sound along the shoals of day,
Shall I not search the among the stones
For your mist-shadowed silent lips,
And listen in my vaults of bone
For those wave-shattered psalms of sea
That promise soon , O my bright shade!,
The flame that bends my soul to thee?
For is not thought the trace of flame,
That sign seen once in silhouette
Between the edge of stars and earth,
That place where winds on waters step?
And if I read in heaven pale
These ancient signs, these lines on slate
That in translation, told our tale
As if our tale was marked on bone
Banked in halls of bronze and stone,
Would you believe these runic marks
No man can read or waking see;
Would you emerge from stone to say
Our history begins today?
I speak, I know, I know, at slant,
And seldom cleave the circle straight,
But your geometries enchant,
And I stand frozen at your gate.
Yet still I sense our centers touch,
As deep as senses hope to know,
In that rose room that hovers high
Above all memory of snow.
And so above the ocean I,
Released from arms and earth entire,
Relive within this room of steel
The ashen memory of your fire --
That in such mansions once I slept,
Most fortunate of all blessed men,
And breathed your breath,
Embraced your heart,
That my stilled heart might beat again.
by CHRIS LYNCH , American Digest Sports Editor
It's down to the final four. Just two more games until we have a Super Bowl Champion.
I'm so excited
and I just can't hide it.
I'm about to lose control
and I think I like it.
Atlanta at Philadelphia
The line opened with the Eagles giving 5 points. It went to 5.5 mid-week and it is now at Eagles giving 6.
When I first saw the line I thought the Falcons were the pick. I'm a big believer in sticking with first impressions but here I'm going to make an exception. Let me explain my thinking.
Both teams have excellent defenses. They're about equal as far as I'm concerned.
Both teams have MVP-caliber quarterbacks but here I was giving the edge to Atlanta. Face it -- if the draft was tomorrow Michael Vick gets picked ahead of Donovan McNabb.
My last impression of Vick was of him looking great against the Rams. But that was against the Rams and it was inside at the Georgia Dome. Tomorrow's game is outside against the much tougher Iggle defense. Being against the Eagle D is key but playing outside is keyer (Hey - just trying to add a word to the lexicon).
It will be cold. The ground will be frozen and slick and there may even be some snow flurries remaining from today's big storm. At the very least the wind will whip snow from the stands and sidelines onto the field. These kinds of conditions do not favor the quick-muscle twitch QB's. These conditions are perfect for bottling up the lightning in a bottle Michael Vick. These conditions are much better for the home town Donovan McNabb.
With Vick neutralized - what do the Falcons have left? Nothing. Thus the change of heart.
Take the Eagles and give the six points.
New England at Pittsburgh
Continued...For one week, keep careful track on a 3x5 card of how many times the following things happen:
1) Times you say "You effing idiot!" to your television and punch at the remote while asking your spouse, "Okay, I get that Alan Colmes is Laurel but does that mean...?"
2) Times you say "You effing idiot!" when reading the Op-Ed page in your newspaper, roll it up and hit the dog.
3) Times you say "You effing idiot!" to your car radio, hit scan and settle on Dr. Laura.
4) Times you say "You effing idiot!" while scanning cover lines of magazines at the news stand, and take the change out of the blind newsie's cup as a "fine."
5) Times you say "You effing idiot!" during the final 5 minutes of the 40 minute infomercial before the $9.00 movie starts at your local multiplex and set a fire in the men's room's paper towel bin.
6) Times you say "You effing idiot!" when passing a person sporting a blue wrist band on the street in such a way that you have to explain yourself to the officer with the camera crew from COPS standing behind him.
7) Times you say "You effing idiot!" to monitor, hit the comment button and log-in under bl0m0i@youeffingidiot.com.
If, at the end of the week, the number of "7" is greater than the total of items 1 through 6, you have left legacy media behind. Congratulations.
He who would achieve great things must first be born.
Taking better notes requires having better tools. Of all the various note taking systems I've used over the years, the best, by far, is "The Cornell Note Taking System" which was created by Walter Pauk, an emeritus professor at Cornell.
Deceptively simple, the Cornell System supplies an armature that both organizes notes and encourages review and summarization. I use it for reading, research, and for planning and organizing projects from the simple to the complex.
As an added advantage, I find that rigorous use of the Cornell system also aids and improves memory.
For a long time, I've used the templates here as the basis of notes. When I run low, I just have my laser printed spew out a few dozen. Having a pre-printed form for notes creates, I've discovered, better notes in the long run -- and it makes them more useful when you need to refer to them.
I'm making my templates available for free on the Web today in downloadable PDF format. You can use them as you wish and distribute them as you will. All I ask is that you pass them along as is.
The three files are:
1) CornellNoteSystem.pdf <--- (40kb) This is the classic explanation how the note forms are used and in what order complete with graphic examples. This is essential if the system is to work for you. If you post these forms on another site, make sure this file is always included, otherwise the forms won't make immediate sense to the user.
2) CornellNotesPlain.pdf <--- (16kb) The Cornell Note System formatted for printing on blank paper. US Letter Size. Make sure to select "Fit to Page" from the Adobe Reader Print Menu.
3) CornellNotesGraph.pdf <--- (16kb) The same structure but with a light 1/4" graph background for those who like some structure behind the structure. US Letter Size. Make sure to select "Fit to Page" from the Adobe Reader Print Menu.
That's it. And, take note, the gift must move. Pass them on.
CNN Reporter, during a question and answer session with a USMC sniper:
Reporter: "What do you feel when you shoot a terrorist?"
Marine: Looks up, shrugs, replies: "Recoil."
Lance Frizzell, a 2nd Lt Medical Platoon Leader with the Tennessee National Guard 278th Regimental Combat Team, currently serving in Northern Iraq posts an employment ad at:
Lance in Iraq: Wanted: Human Shields
Back in January '03, you may remember a group of Western liberals who volunteered to go to Iraq as human shields in case the US enforced UN resolutions that Saddam violated. Key graf:I've sort of lost track of the much-reported-on 'human shields.' I suppose they're off somewhere resting between gigs with the 'grief counselors.' Can somebody dig these people up and toss them on a plane?"...they are willing to put themselves in the firing line should US and British forces bomb Iraq. They plan to identify potential bombing targets such as power stations and bridges and act as human shields to protect them."
Well, I think I have just the job for these globe-travelers: Iraq Election Poll Worker. They are familiar with the terrain and people, they have a self-professed desire to help and they seem very articulate. However, their biggest asset is bravery. If they are willing to hunker down between Coalition Forces and a bridge, standing between a foreign terrorist and a polling precinct should be no big deal. Any takers?
Twenty-one subjects so tedious that the mere mention of them makes me want to unwind with a small shooting spree.
1) Barbara Boxer shorts. No more soundbites out of this doughnut. Preaching to the Damned, hoping to be Hillary. Let Satan take her... and her little dog John too.
2) Abu Gharib gotchas. We really, really need some fresh atrocities, folks. Wake me when Americans start attaching explosives to people's chests and setting them off.
3) "There's no mandate for George Bush." Yes. There. Is. Now. Shut. Up.
4) JibJab. Once was funny. The second sponsored-round is just puerile.
5) Careerist Feminists who can't stand a whiff of criticism without an attack of "I had to leave the room" hysteria. I thought we were supposed to be beyond the era of girlish feelings getting hurt, but I guess not.
6) The cost, the ungodly cost!, of the Inauguration. Hey, I'm not carping about the stupefying cost and utter waste of hundreds of millions on that loser-going-in John Kerry, am I? Telling others when and how to reach for their wallets is just odious, so stop it.
7) The Satanic FCC. Over-rated, over-bloated, and just plain over. The Brussels of D.C. They might care about Howard Stern, but why should you?
8) Why PCs are still a better deal than Macs. I'll admit, here and now that they are... if you like being mired in disease daily and self-inoculations that don't seem to take. Enjoy.
9) M______ J______
10) The Future of CNN. It has none. Get off the stage before the lights dim.
11) Dan Rather's denials, deals, dentures. or diapers. Let an old man turn to the wall and die in peace, why don't you?
12) How the Democrats can "win" in 2008. They can't. They won't. Game over. Why? They are drenched with the smell of fear.
13) Guantanamo and the terrible conditions thereof. If it was really that miserable you wouldn't see all the ACLU lawyers lathered up to spend a two days there, followed by two weeks in Havana in the midst of winter.
14) French anything -- including ticklers.
15) Social security is doomed, DOOMED! I tell you.
16) John Kerry vs. Howard Dean vs. Hillary Clinton vs. Barbara Boxer. Sort of like watching Dwarf wrestling in the ICU.
17) The United Nations and its plans to take $195 billion from you over the next few years. I'd pay $1,000 for a front row seat to watch the building blown into the East River. $2,000 if occupied. Above that, I'm out.
18) Any and all award shows involving television, film, or music celebrities. I will make an exception for "The Buffy Awards" in which a golden spike is driven into the hearts of the winners. Runner-ups to be nail-gunned onto "The Walk of Fame."
19) Bill O'Reilly. Unless it is a televised three-way suicide pact involving Geraldo and Barbara Walters.
20) The ticking time-bomb of Muslim demographics in Europe. Their problem. Light fuse and get away.
21) "Citizen-Journalists:" I'll grant you that a lot of our journalists aren't really citizens, but why would a decent person of a clear mind and a pure heart want to lower himself to such a level? Besides, being a "good citizen" and being a journalist seem to be so mutually exclusive these days, don't they?
[Note: Link repaired and replaced.]
Barbara Boxer: And you have not laid out an exit strategy. You've not set up a timetable.
Condi Rice: Well, if you insist.
The unstoppable NumaNumania continues as the Japanese get into the game with, as usual, kittens and a profound misunderstanding of the language (Or maybe not. Who really knows? ) with Maiyahi.
[Original NumaNuma is Here! But take care. It is toxic.]
Amy Ridenour has the first, last and middle wordon the Inaugural Costs.
Though I am oversimplifying in the service of brevity, there is more truth than fiction in the notion that money spent on inaugural festivities represents a transfer of wealth from big corporations and individuals of decent income to men and women who work for caterers, restaurants, hotels, the D.C. convention center, security firms, limousine services and printers, or who are taxi drivers or police officers on overtime.
From deep within the Romenesko letters page , [Scroll down, pilgrim, scroll down. ] comes this fascinating inside look at how things are supposed to work at CBS News. KRISTINA BORJESSON, a producer, is not -- to say the least -- feeling too sanguine about any real reform in the future. Having worked for years at a magazine where the lawsuit du jour was a constant cost of doing business, I can attest to the elements she lists as just about the minimum necessary to take any story into print or onto the screen. How the players in the Rathergate Self-Fornication Festival were able to subvert these procedures remains the great untold story of the whole debacle. The "Why" is known if not acknowledged. The "How" remains to be seen -- at least by the public.
As an afterthought to her map of the CBS vetting procedures, BORJESSON also puts paid to the notion that Mary Mapes "broke" the Abu Ghraib.
Continued...I would like to direct your attention to a new member of the "stealth diplomat" blogs with the debut of New Sisyphus. The page has a lot of promise as shown in this brief excerpt from ": E.U. Dependence Theory: Blame Canada:
"Let's face it, the reason we do so much to maintain open shipping lanes in Asian waters and so forth is that it is most assuredly in the interests of the US to do so. We benefit directly from global peace and free commerce, so we do lotsa stuff that doesn't seem, on the surface, to be our responsibility. Dare we trust, oh, um, I'll say completely at random, THE FRENCH, with any serious responsibilities? What happens to us during the time that it takes the rest of the world to learn to be responsible adults once more? I shudder at the prospect. And there it is. That is how the left (Euro and otherwise) knows that they can continue to carp and gloat as they do. They rightly foresee an endless source of ridicule for their self-righteous moral exhibitionism because they know the US will always be around to clean up the spilled cookies and milk and restock the fridge."That is actually a quote within the post, but the argument up to and away from it will, I promise, be quite informative. New Sisyphus it placing a lot of hopes on Condi Rice. As are we all.
Okay, you've got every other vehicle in creation, right? Well, now its time for a JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank for a mere $19, 999.95.
Features:
- Carries cargo or a crew of up to five internally or on the roof.
- Piloted from within the armored shell or from an exposed standing position through the hatch.
- 6hp Tecumseh gasoline engine, top speed 40 mph.
- Includes head/tail and turn signal lights, trim and underbody lighting.
- 400 watt premium sound with PA system, plush interior, and external camera.
Item Weight: 1100.00 pounds.
Shipping Weight: 1300.00 pounds.
Dimensions: 114.00 inches x 53.00 inches x 55.00 inches
Presented, without conclusions, for your pointing and clicking pleasure:
Unusual articles from Wikipedia:Year Zero - Was there a year between 1BC and 1AD?; Bat bomb - World War II plan to bomb Japan with bats carrying tiny Incendiary bombs; Boston Molasses Disaster - Twenty-one people die when a confectionary factory explodes, sending a wave of molasses down . Matt Groening's Apple Ad: This is an ad for the Macintosh around 1989, with slideshow. Disturbing Auctions: Cranky Clown Lava Lamp, Nude Liquor Jug, Drunken Smoker Ash Tray, Troll Bottle.... The sky's the limit on that last one. PostSecret: An art project that elicited secrets from the mundane to the trivial to the frightening. Oracle finds an extra penny to boost 2005 | The Register: Remember that penny that EBay lost last week? Oracle found it. It doesn't say if it picked up the $19 billion in market value that EBay lost. Chirac to Tax the World for AIDS: "I propose today moving forward through the creation, in an experimental way, of a levy to finance the fight against AIDS," Chirac told delegates in Davos in a speech delivered by video link-up. Chirac said the levy could be imposed on a fraction of all financial transactions without hampering markets, but it could also be raised by taxing fuel for air and sea transport, or by levying $1 on every airline ticket sold in the world. Ah, ze crazy French person, he is so tres, tres amusant when picking the pockets of the whole world, no? Web Typography Style Guide : A brilliant guide that covers the basics of good typography on the web, explaining theory behind font choices, and the details of providing accessible and good looking text. HP focuses on paparazzi-proof cameras :U.S. patent application 20040202382, filed in April 2003 and published in October 2004, describes a system in which an image captured by a camera could be automatically modified based on commands sent by a remote device. [Translation:Will blur digital cameras without rapid shaking of the celebrity]
Sarah Boxer, 2001
Attitude: Check.
Trendy Hair: Check.
Transgressive; Check.
Good to go.
Jeff Jarvis takes hard look at the latest clueless twit of The New York Times, one Sarah Boxer, for endangering the lives of the Iraqi brothers who run Iraq The Model:
So here is a reporter from The New York Times -- let's repeat that, The New York Times -- speculating in print on whether an Iraqi citizen, whose only apparent weirdness and sin in her eyes is (a) publishing and (b) supporting America, is a CIA or Defense Department plant or an American.The answer is, of course, that Ms. Boxer has neither shame nor a sense of responsibility. Not only does the ham-handed manner in which she approaches this story attest to that, but her entire body of work -- such as it is. Shame is something that, if taught to her in her childhood, has been ruthlessly expunged by her education and "career." Instead of being shamed by having risked the lives of people she has never met, I'd bet real folding money that Boxer will spend the next few weeks preening in the attention her article brings her. Pats on the back and free lunches at Michaels will be her reward.Ms. Boxer, don't you think you could be putting the life of that person at risk with that kind of speculation? In your own story, you quote Ali -- one of the three blogging brothers who started IraqTheModel -- saying that "here some people would kill you for just writing to an American." And yet you go so much farther -- blithely, glibly speculating about this same man working for the CIA or the DoD -- to sex up your lead and get your story atop the front of the Arts section (I'm in the biz, Boxer, I know how the game is played).
How dare you? Have you no sense of responsibility? Have you no shame?
-- Jarvis
Jarvis rightly takes Boxer to task for her abysmal lack of basic Googling skills ( Something that seems to afflict The New York Times en masse. ):
Continued...by PAT CUMMINGS American Digest Book Editor
Georg Bauer's De re Metallica
I have omitted all those things which I have not myself seen, or have not read or heard of from persons upon whom I can rely. That which I have neither seen, nor carefully considered after reading or hearing of, I have not written about. The same rule must be understood with regard to all my instruction, whether I enjoin things which ought to be done, or describe things which are usual, or condemn things which are done. -- Agricola, Preface to De Re Metallica, 1556
The first illustrated "how-to" book for mining and metallurgy was written by the German Georg Bauer in the mid-16th century. The book has been in print and used from then to now with only minor changes were needed to accommodate modern materials. ("Bauer" was Latinized to "Agricola", probably by his teachers at the University of Leipzig.) Agricola was a teacher, philosopher and doctor as well as the world's first industrial publicist, and the opening of De re Metallica ("Concerning Metals") reflects his philosophical bent.
While re-reading it recently, I was struck by this passage in Chapter One. In the midst of a dissertation on the economics and politics of mining and the monetization of metals, Agricola diverts to make several points about the "evil" of metal weapons. It does not take much editing to apply his thoughts directly to today's debate on the "evil" of gun ownership.
The curses which are uttered against iron, copper and lead have no weight with prudent and sensible men, because if these metals were done away with, men, as their anger swelled and their fury became unbridled, would assuredly fight like wild beasts, with fists, heels, nails and teeth. They would strike each other with sticks, hit one another with stones, or dash their foes to the ground. Moreover, a