Click on image to enlarge. A large file, but you won't be disappointed.
The landlord says your rent is late
He may have to litigate
Don't worry....... be happy
Don't worry, be happy now!
-- FILE UNDER: Just brilliant from Point Five " Dubai Ports World -- They're Just Like Us
HALLE BERRY WAS NAMED WORST ACTRESS OF 2004 by the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation for her performance in "Catwoman" and she showed up to accept her "Razzie" carrying the Oscar she won in 2002 for "Monster's Ball."
"They can't take this away from me, it's got my name on it!" she quipped. A raucous crowd cheered her on as she gave a stirring recreation of her Academy Award acceptance speech, including tears.
She thanked everyone involved in "Catwoman," a film she said took her from the top of her profession to the bottom.
"I want to thank Warner Brothers for casting me in this piece of shit," she said as she dragged her agent on stage and warned him "next time read the script first."
-- Reuters
[Morning After Score: Nine out of 18 for Lewis-- Ed]
by JEREMIAH LEWIS, American Digest Film Editor
TWO WEEKS AGO I COULDN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT what I was going to wear to the Oscars. At first I was thinking I could go with the casual chic that has so marked Michael Moore's career: trucker hat emblazoned with a Gothic 'B', large button-up number, brown, extra-wide pockets, XXXXL blue jeans (slightly worn at the thighs), tennis shoes from Payless, and a trademark leather airman's jacket.
But since he and his lamentable Fahrenheit 9/11 got burned by the Academy, Hollywood, all of Flint Michigan, and Clint Eastwood, Moore has shaved, got himself a ocean liner sized tuxedo, and even styled his hair. My counterculture hero has gone mainstream. I mourn the loss.
Then it came to me. A large, white, linen robe, a sash, sandals (made with real camel leather), and the coup de grace, a wooden cross around my neck, signifying my allegiance to Mel Gibson. I could call it "Fashion of the Christ". But then I remembered that The Passion only got three technical nods, barely worth tuning to, much less attending in person. What kind of Jesus movie can't at least get a Best Picture nomination? Especially in this golden age of tolerance.
So I decided to watch from home (actually a friend's home, since I don't get cable). In lieu hearing Hilary Swank give yet another Oscar acceptance speech wherein she forgets her husband, that she's a woman, and even an actress, I've decided to provide you, the non-homogenized milk of Oscar prognostication.
Continued...ISN'T IT REMARKABLE that one of our national political parties is out of power and yet strives daily to exercise it, while the other, which is in power, strives daily to avoid using it?
And it is even more remarkable that our third national party, unelected and self-selected, is our only political entity that has no problem at all with the exercise of its power.
If the Constitution is ever put up for revision, maybe we should take a long hard look at "Amendment, the First." Not to get the government into the business of the press, but just to acknowledge that the press is now in the business of government. That being the case, we'll want to revisit the parts about checks and balances.
I don't know about you, but I stand ready to sharpen my blue pencil.
by PAT CUMMINGS American Digest Book Editor
DAVID LISS' FIRST NOVEL, A Conspiracy of Paper , has won an Edgar Award for Best First Novel, a Barry Award and the Macavity Award. His ex-boxer detective, Benjamin Weaver, is a Jew in London in the early 1700s, estranged from his family and unwilling to re-enter that world. He has found a comfortable niche in London's newly-developing (and somewhat seamy) stock trade, serving as a liaison between lower-class thugs and thieves and their upper-class counterparts.
Weaver begins his memoir with the day a gentleman comes to him with a tale of murder to investigate—the victim, his own father. Despite his cool feelings for his late sire, Weaver is intrigued enough, and sufficiently in need of the money, to follow the clues. Slowly the ex-pugilist is drawn back into the shadowy corners of the stock trade, as he pursues the conspiracy that ended his father's life.
Continued...by JEREMIAH LEWIS, American Digest Film Editor
FRENCH DIRECTOR Jean-Pierre Jeunet infuses his latest picture, A Very Long Engagement, with the same fairy-tale sentimentality of 2001's Amelie, though with slightly more plodding and a little less success. Even if his vision and cinematic realization of the story of love and war, based on the novel of the same name by Sébastien Japrisot, are perfect, the whole of the film is somehow less than its parts, and the ending is, quite frankly, a dirty trick to play on an audience whose expectations have been dragged along for two hours and fourteen minutes.
Told through a series of flashbacks, the tale encompasses the indomitable love between Mathilde (Audrey Tautou) and Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), whose childhood friendship blossoms and becomes an engagement broken by the onset of World War I. Manech is sent to the Somme trenches, but Mathilde knows in her heart that Manech will return alive.
Continued...by CHRIS LYNCH , American Digest Sports Editor
THE RECENT NBA TRADING DEADLINE saw a rash of deals but none were as interesting as Danny Ainge and the Boston Celtics trading for the guy they so publicly traded away last year - Antoine Walker.
I'm not so much interested in whether this was a good move or a bad move by the Celtics. I am interested in the simple math this trade represents and what that math says about Danny Ainge as a General Manager.
Since taking over as Celtics General Manager, Danny Ainge has had three major trades and one minor trade that I want to examine.
First he traded Walker and Tony Delk to the Mavericks for Raef LaFrentz, Jiri Welsh and Chris Mills plus a first round draft pick in 2004.
Continued...TIRED OF SEEING THE NUMA NUMA GUY GYRATING LIKE A DEMENTED SCHNAUZER IN THE SMALL LITTLE VIDEO BOX?
Tire no more. Try the Big Screen Version!
Warning: Before clicking wrap four feet of tinfoil securely around skull to prevent earworm infestation.
THE ANDREA, SHE TYPES FOR ME: War Jumps Shark
There are days when I have absolutely no patience with our coddled, neurasthenic, infantile society, and this is one of them. I am tired of people complaining that the administration isn't acting in perfect concord with the thoughts of ten thousand people writing on the internet. I am getting tired of people complaining that the administration isn't "doing enough" for the troops, for the people, for our safety, to "explain" the war to "the people" who are apparently all deaf, dumb, and blind, and then when someone in our hapless, human government comes up with something, yells in horror: "Oh no, not that way!" And doing this all on their own personal blog which let me tell you right now is not read by Donald Rumsfeld or Condi Rice or George W. Bush because quite frankly they are too goddamn busy trying to keep a future administration several years down the line from turning half the planet into radioactive glass because our lazy asses thought that fighting a smaller, more difficult war with conventional methods like soldiers and guns was "too hard" and "our kids over there kept getting killed" and "it made us uncomfortable."HT via bitter sanity
SCOTT OTT, AKA ScrappleFace, is a very funny man. Day after day, his satire on current events brings a whiparound to the brain and a wry nod of acknowledgement. But he's not always funny, and his recent entry Leak: Draft of Bush Answer to Cindy Sheehan brings to mind what George Bush woulda, coulda, shouda said if he had people around him with more than half a brain, and less than a 100% dedication to always miss an opportunity. Full Text:
Dear Mrs. Sheehan,Continued...
You have asked me to identify the noble cause for which your son died. I have not answered you personally out of respect for the nobility of your son's sacrifice.
OUCH! That's gonna leave a mark: Well, they’ve got their 1971
It took a while, but the left, the Democrats and the press, who have been pining away to relive the glory days of their Vietnam protests have finally managed, after two years of relentlessly negative press about the war, two years of relentlessly negative press about the President, two years of daily tabulations of dead soldiers, provided without context two years of nonsensical “we support the troops, but not the war,” gibberish and now, the Summer of Mrs. Sheehan (complete with hippies) they have finally reached the “taunting returning soldiers” point. Next we’ll hear that they are spitting on soldiers and calling them “babykillers” and then the template will be complete.Much more (with links) at the link.Except these people don’t even have the decency to taunt healthy soldiers. They’re going after the wounded.
Can we please have a sensible discussion about the continued shallowing of the gene pool in America before it is too late?
[POST AND LINK pulled by reader request. See comments. He's right.]
DONALD SENSING states the obvious but unexecuted strategy for moving forward in
Bush failing to keep the public in the loop: "The Bush administration has allowed the information status quo of the war to be maintained too long in the public eye. The information agenda has been set by the mainstream media (MSM), attenuated to a significant but not large degree by bloggers. I think the administration should begin immediately a vigorous domestic-information program to do these things:Continued...
WE RAN OUT ON THE TORRENTIAL RAINS OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, and have taken refuge up along the Canadian border at Sandpoint, Idaho about 45 minutes south of the Canadian Border.
I'd like to report that waves of Democratic Refugees from the evil empire are clogging the roads and assaulting the border outposts of the Canadian People's Republic, but I see nary a soul moving that way with anything other than bagging a moose on the mind.
More later except to note this is a VERY HEAVILY ARMED section of the country.
Robert Pool's Beyond Engineering: How Society Shapes Technology
by PAT CUMMINGS American Digest Book Editor
This is a very different book from the one I began writing four years ago... In 1991, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provided grants to some two dozen writers to create a series of books on technology. Because technology has shaped the modern world so profoundly, Sloan wanted to give the general, non-technical reader some place to go in order to learn about the invention of television or X-rays or the development of birth control pills. This would be it. Sloan asked that each book in the series... be accessible to readers with no background in science or engineering... I took nuclear power...Robert Pool, author of the controversial look at the biological basis of gender, Eve's Rib, and longtime contributor to several distinguished science and technical journals, did not realize what a complex topic he had chosen. Originally, he intended to write "a straight-forward treatment of the commercial nuclear industry—its history, its problems, and its potential for the future." Instead, he discovered a Byzantine maze of inter-connected choices, society shaping technology, rather than the opposite. Beyond Engineering completes the circle, reflecting what he discovered back to the general, non-technical public in very accessible terms.
—Introduction to Beyond Engineering [emphasis mine]
History and Momentum begins this journey into complexity with a look at how society has shaped the choices made in providing electricity to the user. Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla; Szilard, Einstein and Rickover—choices made by these men before 1950 determined the economy of future decisions in the power industry. Pool then looks at The Power of Ideas, giving us a background on the concept of paradigm shift in molding scientific inquiry, before exploring how the "endless power source" paradigm shifted irretrievably to an "evil destructive nuclear polluter" view of nuclear power.
Continued...
A NEW POLL OUT TODAY CONFIRMS THE INEVITABLE Most Think Clinton Will Run in '08
Two-thirds of Americans believe Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton will run for president, but only one-third believe she can win, according to a national poll released Wednesday.The first is no surprise, but the mere 33% of people who even "believe" she can win has to be chilling for Mrs. Clinton's ambitions. To have come so far and yet fallen so low. How can she possibly recover? How can she have a candle's chance of grabbing the gold ring, of cashing in her big chip, of getting what is rightfully hers, of glomming on to the big one for which she has endured so much humiliation?
There is, my friends, only one way. Only one ticket will work for her and the Democrats: CLINTON-CLINTON in 08!
That's right. Hillary for President. Bill for Veep. After all, the XXII amendent doesn't say anything about the office of the Vice-President, does it? And Bill's never held that office even once. As far as Bill becoming the President again should anything happen to Mrs. Clinton, well the XXII amendment only forbids being "elected" to the office.
Say what you will, you've got to admit its a pretty slick ticket.
Many have taken and will take this theory as pure satire or, at best, a poor joke. Still others will note the Constitutional flaw, but deep within the heart of the Democratic Party you can be sure some solons will hear of it and go, "Really? Hummmmm... Well, all we'd have to do is repeal the 12th Amendment. They'd never see that coming."
[Ed. Note: American Digest would like to apologize in advance for any gastrointestinal upsets that this item may cause among its readers.]
CAN ANYONE send me the link that confirms that while Dick Cheney was hiding from the press in an undisclosed locaton last week that he took the time to get Maureen Dowd with child?
I'd like to get ahead of the rest of the blogosphere on this breaking story. Seems to me it is either grounds for aduletry or grounds for impeachement or grounds for being fired or all three.
I WAS GOBSMACKED BY THE "Mommy is a Democrat" kids book yesterday (The Poster Child for Pap ). I'm gobsmacked again when a Google search brought me to the Preschool Education Music & Songs : Holiday > Earth Day page. This is a list of songs set to the tunes that "everybody" knows that seek to implant a healthy respect for the earth. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Still, if you scan the page, you'll see more than one tune that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. It really is starting to look like "Brave New World" in the kinder classrooms.
The one that induced nausea in me was the follwing "revision" of "Jesus Loves Me." Keep in mind that this is not a parody site, but a source of "lesson material" for teachers across America to draw from. How deeply they draw, I don't know.
Another of these deathless ditties has the lyrics:God's Good Earth
added 4-17-01
Original Author Unknown
Sung to: "Jesus Loves Me"
Let's take care of God's good earth,
water, forest, air, and soil
Don't toss out that used time foil
Ride your bike and don't burn oil.
CHORUS
Love one another
Share with each other
Save God's good earth
And learn to do with less
Only buy the things you need
Enjoy the simple things in life
Do a hobby, play some game...
Eat at home, invite some friends
We will walk instead of riding, you all come.Jesus wept.
We will walk instead of riding, you all come.
We will walk instead of riding,
We'll save gas 'cause no one's driving
To the happy Earth Day party, you all come.
WITH THE INCREASING SHRINKAGE OF ACADEMIA INTO ARMED HAMLETS OF PAP and circumstantial evidence, and with the coming removal of Harvard's President Summers to a Red Guard-style re-education camp, it makes Top of the World's suggestion, Send Your Kids to Trucking School, seem not just reasonable, but smart:
Some parents in my home town start to worry about college admissions when their kids turn 11.He amplifies this at his page, but more and more I think the basic concept is sound. True, his daughters point out that it would take you away from home to much, but so what? If that's a problem, air-conditioning repair in the sunbelt would keep your kids in high clover all their working lives. Or, if that's too airy a task, fall back on the old standby, plumbing.For years, I've thought it makes more economic sense to send your kids to trucking school when they turn 18. It takes a few weeks. Then co-sign for a Peterbilt tractor. It's all a matter of opportunity cost.
The tads can start earning right away. So if college costs $50K a year, the college-bound will cost $200K in four years (and it often takes longer). Meanwhile, the truckers will be earning, say $50K a year. At the end of four years, your trucker kids will be $400K ahead. And at the end of four years, most college kids will either be (a) going into occupations with mediocre pay, like teaching; (b) going to graduate school; or (c) going into rehab.
Last month, a faucet in my yard began leaking at high speed from behind the shut-off valve. Water flowing everywhere including down under the foundation. It was seven in the evening when I discovered this and there was no recourse but to call a plumber up from town. First plumber, out on a job. Second plumber, on a job with another stacked up but could come by at around midnight. Third
Continued...by JEREMIAH LEWIS, American Digest Film Editor
DESPERATELY SEEKING TWO HOURS OF AMUSEMENT, I watched Constantine over the weekend. A gravelly, chainsmoking anti-hero epic, Constantine is a reworked American version of the original British Vendetta/DC Comics' Hellblazer series by Alan Moore, whose previous beloved works, From Hell and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen have received less than extraordinary screen translations. Constantine has a few things going for it.
1). Keanu Reeves. Say what you want about the Lebanese actor's onscreen chops, he's a fun guy to watch. This one's no exception, as he plays the supernatural detective with a "What the hell is your problem?" attitude that seems so very endearing for some reason.
2). A decent script. It isn't perfect, but it shares a similar love for the material as the Spiderman scripts, whilst not needing to get hung up on every single detail from the original comics. It's dark and witty, but plays the basic plot straight.
3). Director Francis Lawrence. Constantine is Lawrence's feature debut, and he's got some sequences that are pretty interesting. Overall, the look of the film is comicbookish, with the right amount of fun to give it a face.
The story is a bit convoluted, and sometimes sacrifices depth for skin-deep plot tanglings. Los
Continued...IN A TAPE MADE SECRETLY YESTERDAY AFTERNOON BY DOUG WEED , ONE OF HUNTER THOMPSON'S "BEST FRIENDS," the tortured genius of American Journalism 1972-1973 can be heard saying quite distinctly, "What? What?! You're telling me that that chimp Bush smoked dope? That's it! I'm outta here!"
I USED TO RUN A MAGAZINE IN SAN FRANCISCO BACK IN THE 70s. I ran it out of the basement of a firehouse in North Beach under the offices of Scanlan's magazine. Scanlan's was the scam magazine of Warren Hinckle, a man whose record of conning money out of Bay Area millionaires stood unbroken for decades until the arrival of David Talbot and Salon.
Warren liked to drink and spend other people's money on himself and writers. Naturally such a honey pot was going to attract Hunter. He liked to drink and spend other people's money on articles he might or might not write. Sometimes the small staff working with me and the larger staff working the con with Warren would decide to drink together. We liked to drink at our bar of choice up at the end of the alley, Andre's. And so one night, when Hunter was in town, we all went up to Andre's for a non-stop night of drinking.
Andre was an elegant French-Canadian who ran an elegant bar. He was old-school and could mix any drink anyone could name and it was always perfect. He was polished, polite, and a good listener. But he was a pro and usually knew when you'd had enough. Then he politely asked you to leave. If you ignored him, he had a very large mallet with a three foot handle behind the bar and you didn't ignore that.
So there we were, eight or ten of us I think, hanging around and drinking with "Hunter S. Thompson, man!" And, as they would, Warren and Hunter got into a drinking contest -- sort of like watching a match between Ali and Frazier in their prime.
It went on and on long past the point where I could or would keep up. It was getting late and Andre announced to the assembled cross-eyed drunks, that he was giving us our last round. The regulars took him at his word, but Hunter had to push the envelope. Except with Andre there was no envelope. Just a polite, "Non."
The next thing I know there's a gun in Hunter's hand and three rounds into the ceiling of the bar. (Did I mention that there were apartments where people were sleeping above the bar?)
Then I think there was a blur of Andre, in suit and tie, coming over the bar with the mallet. Then more blurs and everybody is out on the street dragging a semi-conscious Hunter back down the alley mumbling something about getting his gun back. After that I don't remember much and, frankly, haven't thought all that much about Thompson in the three decades that have intervened.
This morning I think even less of him. Yesterday, it would seem, he left in the same way that he lived -- gun-crazy, thoughtless, self-obsessed and selfish to the last second. A gunshot suicide at home, leaving his wife and son to discover and deal with his ruined corpse and clean up the room. What a man.
IN THIS POST-PATRIOT ACT ERA, perhaps the Feds are getting just a bit too enthusiastic about intellectual property thieves, what?
Federal effort to dead off TV piracy challenged | CNET News.com
Well, if you're gonna be that snippy about it, I'll re-up my Netflix suscription.
DECORATED IRAQ TANK PLATOON LEADER NEIL PRAKASH guides us to ARMOR GEDDON: Fallujah THE Movie
Nerts to Harrison Ford and his movie. Here's the REAL deal on Fallujah. U.S. ARMY's TF2-2IN created it. Combat Engineer - SPC Ronald Camp edited it. S2 blessed off on it. Jonathan Hanson is hosting it. Thanks.Soundtrack: SepulteraSPC Camp of 82nd Engineers. Helluva job with the music, footage and timing. Oh and good job fighting in Fallujah too, Soldier.
Crystal Method: Trip Like I Do, Name of the Game
Fatboy Slim/Steppenwolfe: Magic Carpet Ride
Torrent connections and other downloads can be found @ RedSix's Downloads
I'm also hosting a 50 Megabyte Quicktime download at THIS LOCATION. It's a looong download so place it in the background and posses yourself of patience.
While you wait you could do worse that read Prakash's stunning descriptions for a tanker's fighting life in Iraq at ARMOR GEDDON
It is, quite simply, the best first-hand writing available on what it's like inside a 21st century battle.
by CHRIS LYNCH , American Digest Sports Editor
TODAY IS THE NBA ALL-STARS GAME. The game has special meaning for my wife and me. Our first date was to watch the NBA All-Star game so today marks our unofficial anniversary.
Back in college I met my future wife at a dance. We hit it off and found we had similar interests. Among those interests was basketball and specifically the Boston Celtics. This was the mid-80's and the Celtics were riding high with Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Dennis Johnson, Robert Parish and Danny Ainge. That night at the dance we agreed to go out on a date. The date was to meet at my dorm room the next day to watch the NBA All-Star Game.
Many things have changed in our lives since that first date. We've been married for close to fifteen years and we have four kids. Many things have also changed in the NBA but those changes don't seem to be as positive.
Nothing shows the changes to the NBA better than the All-Star game. The action today will be all dunks and three pointers. The focus on those two things at the expense of all else has all but rendered the NBA unwatchable.
Back in the 80's the slogan was "the NBA - its FANtastic." Today's slogan should be "the NBA - its not FUNdamental." Somehow along the way NBA players have forgotten how to throw a bounce pass or shoot a bank shot. The fundamentals are missing from today's game and that makes the NBA difficult to watch. A game of nothing but dunks and three-pointers gets boring quick.
There is no better percentage shot in basketball than a bank shot but yet the only players who seem to use a bank shot today are Tim Duncan and some European players. It is the lack of an accurate mid-range shot by the players today that has depressed scoring in the NBA. Games with final scores in the mid-80's are the norm today and those games are boring.
My wife is representative of the fans the NBA has lost. She used to be able to name every player on the Celtics and she knew the name of each member of the All-Star team from both the East and West. Today she'd be lucky to name two players for the Celtics. The NBA no longer holds her interest because its boring.
I just hope that she still finds life with me interesting.
AMERICAN DIGEST SPORTS EDITOR Chris Lynch serves his own brew daily at A Large Regular, and contributes to SportsPages.com. Lynch can be reached at chris.lynch@gmail.com
BREAKING: IN THE BIGGEST FOLLOW-UP TO A NON-STORY SINCE, WELL, MY NEXT POST -- IN WHICH I'LL REPORT THAT BRIT HUME HAS YET TO RESIGN UNDER PRESSURE FROM LIBERAL ACTIVISTS UPSET OVER HIS NOT BEING A LIBERAL ACTIVIST HIMSELF -- JEFF GANNON TELLS CNN'S ANDERSON COOPER AND THE WASHINGTON POST'S HOWARD KURTZ THAT HE FOLLOWED WHITE HOUSE DAY PASS PROTOCOL, SUBMITTED TO A CURSORY SECURITY CHECK UNDER HIS REAL NAME, DID NOT HAVE SPECIAL ACCESS TO THE LEAKED CIA PLAME DOCUMENTS, AND THAT YES, THOSE PICTURES ARE OF HIS C**K, BUT, LIKE, SO WHAT? (UPDATED)-- Jeff Goldstein at protein wisdom
Isn't it amazing that the most ideologically purile LefTogs such as Kos and Atrios, in their thirst to have a scalp of their own to balance those of Rather and Jordan, would choose to out a gay man with a shaved head and a chest wax?
Speaking of which, where's Andrew Sullivan on this issue?
" Eason Jordan does not believe the U.S. military is trying to kill journalists. Mr. Jordan simply pointed out the facts..." -- Original CNN "clarification"
Submitted for your approval:
1. Journalism is the assembling and telling of stories.
2. At bottom, journalists are story tellers.
3. Better journalists are better story tellers.
"Call me Karnog."
JOURNALISM MAY WELL be the real "oldest profession." Eons ago in the dawn time, the first news reports were stories told about the hunt when the hunters returned to camp. Some hunters were better at telling stories than others. They put in facts, they named names, they had sources, they knew when to drop in human interest and local color.
After a time, the tribe shut the other hunters up. "Just let Karnog tell it." And Karnog's stature rose in the tribe. He was valued. He got better cuts of the meat. He got the plumper women. He started to have 'visions' about the world as it really was behind the curtain of the senses. He gave the tribe "all the news that was fit to chant;" he brought them "the word."
As their tribal memory, Karnog was protected by the other hunters. After all, he had the power to make them look either good or bad; to make the tribe like or despise them. In some cases, Karnog could assemble un-named sources ('The Gods') and have chiefs run out of tribal office. Karnog became the gatekeeper. Many in the tribe wanted to be a Karnog but, if they couldn't, they'd be a great audience.
Karnog kept and expanded his power by "improving" his stories. If a hunt was a little boring, no problem. Karnog would embroider it. Just a little. Just a very little bit. Perhaps he'd add a fact from here and another fact from there, a source on this and a source on that. After several iterations of this, the story Karnog told about the hunt had a lot of facts in it from other stories. That really didn't matter because everything in the story was a fact. The story had become false, but all the facts were true.
And the crowd Karnog was preaching too, since they were of his tribe, loved his new slightly embroidered story even more. They'd ask him to tell it again the next time they were all together and he would, embroidering it just a little more, just a very little more. And so it went down through the centuries until you had, well, the first collection of war stories in the history of journalism, The Illiad, from the 8th century BC.
Fast forward 2,800 years. Eason Jordan is telling his Iraq war stories for the Nth time to a meeting of his Transnational Tribe in Davos, Switzerland. He's got a lot of these stories and his Tribe loves to hear him tell them because he can tell them their way. He is of them and he knows what they want to hear. He's told these stories before, a few times in public, but probably many more times over drinks and dinner around the world. And as usual, he adds just a stitch or two of extra embroidery.
Continued...
YOU SAY 'BUT.. BUT... THERE'S NO SUCH THING.' WE SAY, 'THERE IS NOW.' -- Mission: McDonald's Bathroom Attendant [Illustrated with a movie too.]
Evelyn, the female employee, must have alerted the management. A gentleman wearing a tie entered just as Simmons was explaining the McDonalds philosophy to a customer, "We don't want to be a part of the same fast food culture as everyone else. McDonalds is the biggest, the best, and this is Broadway!"The manager enters
The manager didn't know how to respond. He stuttered for a moment and finally burst out with "Y-Y-You don't have any authorization to do this."
"Yes, I do," Simmons responded. "I'm Todd. I'm from the corporate office."
The Manager shook his head and gave his name, Ted. "This is part of a special promotion. They didn't send you a memo or a fax?"
Manager: "I'll call. They didn't tell me anything about this. Lemme call."
Agent Simmons: "We started in Akron, Ohio and the Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon."
Manager: "You're sure you're in the right McDonalds?"
Agent Simmons: "I hope so. I sure hope so!"
Manager: "No problem."
JUST WHEN YOU THINK YOU'VE GOT NUMA NUMA OUT OF YOUR HEAD, IT WORMS ITS WAY BACK IN!
[Note: If the global rush to Numa Numa is clogging bandwidth at the irritating Newpics, try this one at eBaum's World numanuma - Crazy dancer weird techno - O-Zone-Dragostea Din Tei ]
[UPDATE: ANDREW SULLIVAN ALERT!: Numa Numa has now reached THE HISPANIC VILLAGE PEOPLE. [Video] with "Marica Quien? Marica Tu!" -- AKA Pluma Pluma Gay [lyrics]. This is the definitive Queer Eye Numa Numa Makeover. This version centers around a closet and coming out from said closet. It takes awhile to load, but it is worth it. ]
I have one friend who was deeply infected by this idworm in January when it first surged across the web from an obscure teenager's bedroom in New Jersey. He presented with a nearly lethal level of NumaNuma Tourette's syndrome, and it looked like he was sinking fast. But with the intervention of high levels of Lithium, electroshock therapy, and the talking cure, he's been doing better of late.
In the last few days he seems to be less likely to gyrate wildly about his house thrusting his arms into the air and numanumaing in a most arresting fashion. The unfortunate calls of his neighbors to the police following his nightly raving on the sidewalk have become almost a thing of the past. All his friends were relieved when it became apparant that this particular crisis had passed. The nature of these episodes becomes more disturbing still when you reflect that he looks like an older and less sedate version of the kid in the video.
Alas, all this came to an end today when he innocently tuned into the Today Show between the Jello course and the lithium served to him by the day nurse. There, utterly unprepared, he was exposed to Matt Laurer presenting the video and the story behind it. His day nurse, recognizing it instantly, fought uselessly with him for the remote and was forced to run to the garage and cut the power to the house. It was too late.
Late this afternoon, after climbing to the roof of his home in an upscale neighborhood in South Florida and NumaNumaing through a bull horn for three hours, the Fort Lauderdale SWAT team ended the stand-off, and he was carted off to the cheers of the neighbors and the approving howls of their pets. It was the end of yet another sad story concerning this dreaded mental virus that has afflicted millions of Americans.
On Jonathan Weiner's Time, Love, Memory : A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior
by PAT CUMMINGS American Digest Book Editor
Not since the Age of Enlightenment had the world seen such a crew of intellectual cutthroats, divinely assured of their rights of succession and their place in history. The philosophes of the Enlightenment also had their share of tall, thin, prognathous young men, and many of their contemporaries found them (in the words of Horace Walpole) "solemn, arrogant, dictatorial coxcombs—I need not say superlatively disagreeable."Time, Love, Memory by Jonathan Weiner is the tale of these "intellectual cutthroats" who tracked down the mechanism of Mendelian inheritance, DNA. From Watson and Crick (whose names are famous) to Brooklyn-born Seymour Benzer (whose name is virtually unknown, even in scientific circles outside DNA research), Weiner has put together a brilliant presentation of the unfolding of a new science.
So after the eureka of Watson and Crick, one of the challenges for the new science (which did not yet call itself molecular biology) was to connect these classical maps of the gene with the new model of the double helix. It was Benzer who thought of a way to do it. Not long after Watson and Crick announced their discovery, Benzer hit on a plan that might unite the old revolution and the new revolution: classical genetics and molecular biology.Weiner's "cast of characters" reads like a Who's Who of 20th century iconoclastic science: Richard Feynman, Max Delbrück, E.O. Wilson, geneticists Watson and Crick and Ronald Konopka, and the "Fly Room" scientists T.H. Morgan (whose name was given to the chromosome map unit "centimorgan"), Alfred Sturtevant and Ed Lewis. At the center of the tale, though, is Seymour Benzer, an innovative thinker who took the inheritance paradigm one step further, asking, can behavior be inherited?
With the discovery of the clock gene, the sense of time, mysterious for so many centuries, was no longer a mystery that could be observed only from the outside. Now it could be explored as a mechanism from the inside. The discovery implied that behavior itself could now be charted and mapped as precisely as any other aspect of inheritance. Qualities that people had always thought of... as if they were supernatural, might be mapped right alongside qualities as mundane as eye pigment.Benzer's band of "cutthroat intellectuals" would have to battle for the new paradigm, with both the scientific community and outside it. Weiner's book is, therefore a war story; but one in which the victories are celebrated by all combatants, and coups are bloodless. For those interested in behavioral science, genetics, or the concept of paradigm change, it is a fascinating read.
Pat Cummings, constant reader, also reviews books at his site Paper Frigate, and at Blogcritics as well. He can be emailed here.]
FRANCIS PORRETTO @ Eternity Road applies his prodigious hammer to an unstruck nail in the discussion of the New Infonauts versus the Ancient Ones:
[W]hat is the nature of the Internet's power? Is it the ability to shout past the "gatekeepers" of print and broadcast journalism? Has the Commentariat tapped into sources of information that had previously been kept under lock and key? Or is "distributed intelligence" proving itself superior to the more concentrated forms that prevail in the offices of executive directors and editors-in-chief?This point about note-taking is well taken. Indeed, it is probably the blogworld's single techno trick that MSM has yet to catch onto, and has no hope of ever being able to emulate.There's some substance to all of those. However, insufficient attention is being given to a practice that should be familiar to any reporter: note-taking.
The Internet's communications capacity is prodigious, but its memory -- its ability to retain facts and statements, and to retrieve them at need -- is near to miraculous. When millions of avid note-takers are on the case, all of them proficient with Google and many also armed with LexisNexis, it becomes all but impossible to slip cleanly away from one's past words and deeds. Someone will remember -- and given the powers of the search engines and the retentiveness of the Internet, he'll find the citations he needs to call his target to account.
And it is not merely the "note-taking" of being able to run Google faster than a speeding bullet. Google is still at the stone ax level of information tools since it must do so much for so many. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of MSM researchers just come up on the plain vanilla Google, enter the search term, hit "I'm feeling lucky" and work the first ten results that come up. They don't set their home page to "Advanced Search," and running Boolean operations on the most fundamental level eludes them. The ones sitting in offices and seeking to impress their non-typing bosses may run Nexis-Lexis but have no idea how to weed it. Result: way too much information of a superficial sort.
Google (Advanced Search) is amazing, but more powerful still is a slowly acquired personal note-base. Since my interests are, to say the least, broad I am more interested in note-taking software than any other kind. As far as Macs go, I've pretty much tried them all. The one that suits me down to the ground is an application called NoteTaker from AquaMinds. I could write thousands of words of praise for this brilliant software but I'll save that for another time. Suffice it to say that, over time, NoteTaker has become my own personal and local Google.
The most valuable part of NoteTaker is its ability to create clipping services. Dozens of times a day when I see something that catches my interest, I'll select it on the screen and send it to NoteTaker in the background. At the end of the day, I'll take a look at it and dispatch various items to one or several other NoteTaker notebooks I've created. Each item will have the title and the URL of the page it was clipped from. Right now I have about 36 "notebooks" with up to 50 different subject pages each. They run from about 100K up to 12 megabytes in size. And they are all indexed -- automatically in the background. I use NoteTaker for everything from notes on financial matters to exceedingly complex novels and non-fiction projects I'm working on. I literally would be lost without it.
But what this means, to return to Poretto's point is that my little corner of the web has come to possess its own clippings morgue, research library, and fact-checking bureau all inside the G4 on my desk. This is more raw news analysis power than mid-level newspapers enjoyed twenty years ago. In addition, I have my own minor life experience and fields of semi-expertise to draw on as well. Include web-rings, email loops, URL managers, groupblogs, and link orgies. Then add in the deeper linking that comes from personal affiliations and distant distributed friendships across the infinite strands of the web. Make it global. Now multiply all this by many millions of people -- each of whom knows and is something unique -- and, oh yes, tack on Google. Then factor in a blog growth rate that is becoming exponential by the month. Not only should Mainstream Media be very afraid, everybody should be very afraid. Which, of course, is no reason not to run towards this brave new world at full speed. Is it?
Continued...BOB PARSONS, THE BIG DADDY OF GODADDY, gives us a fascinating pocket biography of his life and what he's learned in “Robert, they can’t eat you!” My rules for survival. An ex-marine, his is not your standard dotcom success model, but, come to think of it, few are. Especially interesting are his rules to live by. My favorite three are grouped together:
You could do worse than taking this quick course at the Parson's School of Business.8. Be quick to decide. Remember what the Union Civil War general, Tecumseh Sherman said: “A good plan violently executed today is far and away better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”
9. Measure everything of significance. I swear this is true. Anything that is measured and watched, improves.
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.
LIBERAL ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS COLUMNIST PAUL CAMPOS continues his masterful takedown of Ward Churchill with Freedom Unused is Abused
Churchill thus represents the reductio ad absurdum of the contemporary university's willingness to subordinate all other values to affirmative action. When such a grotesque fraud - a white man pretending to be an Indian, an intellectual charlatan spewing polemical garbage festooned with phony footnotes, a shameless demagogue fabricating imaginary historical incidents to justify his pathological hatreds, an apparent plagiarist who steals and distorts the work of real scholars - manages to scam his way into a full professorship at what is still a serious research university, we know the practice of affirmative action has hit rock bottom.If you haven't been following Campos' continuing expose of every element of this fraud's life and career, this is a good place to start. But don't miss last week's look into Churchill's real ancestral line.
WHEATON COLLEGE ENGLISH PROFESSOR MICHAEL DROUT ASKS: "What do the the Wall Street Journal's snippy reaction to the Eason Jordan affair and the Journal's regular defense of CEO pay, the Ward Churchill affair and Churchill's defenders, and
some of the more common critiques of tenure, teaching and the humanities at universities have in common with a a fairly lame Michael J. Fox movie from 1987?"
Quite a lot it seems. Among Drout's many salient observations in The Secret of Their Succe$s (an article well worth reading completely, is this spot-on observation concerning the upper reaches of the media:
The problem is, that at the highest levels of journalism, the journalists aren't actually journalists, they are opinion columnists, politicians, managers and pundits. To some degree they still have the source advantage--Dan Rather can get a phone call returned by Colin Powell; the Power Line guys can't--but most of their energy goes not into reporting, but into other endeavours. And at these endeavours they have no particular edge over bloggers. In fact, because bloggers can write as many words as they need for a story, writers like Wretchard at Belmont Club or the much-missed Stephen den Beste can write argument cum research cum speculation essays that are more interesting and challenging than a predictable column by Thomas Friedman or George Will or Charles Krauthammer (when columnists go out and use their access to sources and do actual reporting, it's a different story). In short, I think the metro beat writers at most papers are probably better journalists (both as reporters and writers) than most bloggers. But the famous journalists are, perhaps surprisingly, another story. When they demonstrate that they don't use good judgment, that they can't avoid blatant and stupid bias, and when they try to argue that they deserve special privileges that other citizens don't deserve, people start to think--rightfully--that they are better ladder-climbers than perch performers.Drout then proceeds to run the Petrified Forests in our Groves of Academe through the same ruthless alembic. He blames it all on sleep-deprivation brought on by young children.
They should keep him up more often.
Frank Lynch, @ Really not worth archiving. Really. is, like so many others, confused about the Jeff Gannon gay witch hunt currently being pursued by left bloggers with empty scalp belts. He asks, "why the White House would latch on to "Jeff Gannon" as a vehicle for its political message."
My call to a senior White House Official who spoke off the record on this issue revealed the dark intent of the Neocon Satanist Cabal: "Why Gannon? Well, we were going to use Helen Thomas, but an FBI backgrounder revealed that she was not only a bottom but dead to boot."
"A recent survey in America showed that 36% of high school students think newspapers should get government approval of stories before being allowed to publish."
Kids today. What are you going to do?
PSEG, Exelon have a reason to keep nuclear plants: MoneyBut can we build new ones? Nope. That would be far too sane for this culture of, by, and for the Hybrid Buttinsky Caribou Love Party. After all, surely every single American can come up with $21,000 for a new Prius.Owning a nuclear power plant these days is sort of like having your own money tree. The plant pumps out cheap power, runs practically all the time, and rakes in big bucks in a time of skyrocketing electricity bills.
I KNOW THAT GOOGLE NEWS IS SUPPOSED TO BE RUN BY A ROBOT, but am I alone in suspecting it is a really, really stupid robot?
Let's see. From this I am supposed to think that the Hockey Season That Wasn't is more important than the India-Pakistan War That Wasn't?
Given that Google is famous for hiring very bright people, maybe it could assign an entry level janitor to empty the drool cup of its news robot from time to time.
...and don't forget to dress it up with a Welcome Squid Overlords shirt." Ur.... Okay, anything you say.
How to Make a Cheap Portable Espresso Machine:
Ska for the Skeptical:
IE7 is on the way. Be very afraid:
Five fast email productivity tips:
Design Rules of Thumb:
On SpammerX's Inside the SPAM Cartel
by PAT CUMMINGS American Digest Book Editor
I was eager to get into the book Inside the Spam Cartel, written by "SpammerX". That eagerness persisted only into the second chapter—the self-professed spammer is coy in his presentation of examples, leaves out more information than he gives, and (by far the worst sin) seems unable to mate subject and verb number, use apostophes or adverbs rationally, or spot abject incoherence in his own writing.
Aside from that, the book is intriguing in a creepy way.
The topic is one every Internet user will find interesting, and SpammerX delivers a lot of detail about the process, purpose and payback of spamming. He has been somewhat careful about removing actual IP and eMail addresses and user names, although this, like all his proof-reading, is not thorough. He includes a number of examples of using HTML tags to encode spam messages that will slide through spam filters, while telling us his philosophy of spam. This philosophy boils down to: "I can do it, and you can't stop me, so it's all right. Besides, I get paid to do it."
Continued...THE PERFECT GIFT FOR THE BLOGGER IN YOUR LIFE, or, if you are a blogger, the perfect gift for yourself (And you know you deserve it.)
As regular readers know, I never ask for money on American Digest. (I might, but in the two years this site has been active, I haven't.) Don't ask me why, because I don't know, and it drives people near me crazy. Here's your chance to help return them to sanity.
I will create the first signed and numbered edition of "THE LAW OF THE BLOGGER" in two variations and limited to 150 copies of each. [See below for examples.]
Each copy will be personally printed to order in high-resolution on a Canon 9000 ink-jet. The paper will be archival, acid-free, cold-pressed Fabriano 72 pound stock -- highly suitable for framing. Each print will be numbered, approved and signed by the artist -- which would be, well, me.
The two variations you may order are:
Keep Mum. The World Has Blogs and The Law of the Blogger as a pure type treatment.
Click to enlarge
Don't be put off by the quality of the Jpegs. Here's a sample of the level of resolution in the finished print:
Click to enlarge
Cost, including shipping, will be $20.00 per print. Shipping will be via Priority Mail in a strong tube. Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back on return of the print. [Shipping included within the US only, write for details on shipping to other parts of the world.]
To order, please make a payment to my PayPal account. [No credit cards. This ain't Amazon.] If Paypal is a problem, please send me email at vanderleun@gmail.com and we'll work something out.
When ordering, be sure to include your mailing address which I won't disclose to anyone and probably won't remember anyway. If it is a gift, please tell me the address of the person you're sending it to if different from your own.
Here's the button, hit it. Think of it as DonationWare where you actually get something.
I KEEP NOTES. I keep notes on everything. Lately I've upgraded my note-keeping with the compulsive use of the the Hipster PDA -- a device that will change your life.
As a result, I've got a growing file of random notes which, at the time I took them, I felt would come in handy for something. And many have. But others just wait in card file looking for someplace to live. So, here's a few in no order other than the time they were taken. Why here and why now? Because I can.
Continued...
JAY ROSEN AT PRESSTHINK ASKS WILL COLLIER @ VODKAPUNDIT A QUESTION.
" Let me ask you something, serious question, Will: Is the point to have a dialogue with the MSM or cause its destruction?"
Much is then heard from those of us in "Commentariat." My own response was, in essence, "Quite frankly, my dear Rosen, many bloggers don't give a damn one way or the other. Dialogue or destruction aren't the only possible points.":
The point could also be to merge with [MSM] or supplant [MSM].Of course,[professional media] people could be getting upset because what used to a a single closed network of affiliations, social connections, professional associations, and a lot of nudge, nudge, wink, wink, now finds itself confronted with a much more open network of looser affiliations, social-network connections, and associations, that finds prating about professionalism without accountability noxious, with a lot of email, email, link link.
Another, perhaps deeper, source of unease among journalists collecting a check from a media company is the simultaneous revelation and discovery that there are a great many people who collect no check from any media company that are simply much better writers, editors, and checkers.
It was once the case that to assume the mantle of "writer" you had to get a job writing "for" something. Now all you need is a modem and a motive. And while I'll grant you that this means there is a lot of very bad writing swirling about, all that gets filtered out pretty quickly. What is astonishing to me is that, regardless of what subject you care to name, I can quickly discover a substantial number of people with a great deal of expertise in that area who are also quite good at expressing themselves.
And don't even get me started on the generalists....
Add to that the inescapable envy that must be felt by the "pros" as they note the vast number of online writers with solid skill sets who are also unconstrained by the "needs" and "policies" and "stylebooks" and all the other junk that media companies throw up around themselves to distinguish one apple from the next apple in the bin. Plus there's the freedom of telling it like you see it without worrying how this might affect promotion within or without the organization. On the one hand, yes, they do it for free, but on the other they are free to do it as they please. That's gotta grind like grit on the molars.
Put it all together and I don't think there's a drive to have a "dialogue" with MSM, because frankly dear Scarlett, most don't give a damn. I do think there's a yen to help MSM along to destruction but that's a fantasy ideology. MSM isn't going to any destruction that it isn't fashioning for itself. These little jabs may help it along a bit, but they aren't the determining factor.
What you've got is not some sort of battle to the death in a Hobbesian world, but simply a new species that is thriving in the online environment to an extent that MSM cannot possibly grasp, if for no other reason than that the people who still drive and direct the MSM from atop the corporations cannot, for the most part, type.
If you've ever seen the movie "The Forbin Project," you'll recall that it only got interesting when the rulers of the United States looked up and saw the message board above them begin to flash "THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM."
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UPDATE: Roger L. Simon has some parallel thoughts about writing and money at : Anonymous Grub Street
Dream Duo Not to Be
IRATE FANS OF PROGRESSIVE COOKING AND POLITICS were depressed early Tuesday when it was confirmed that, due to routine procedural matters, hopes were growing dim that Lynne Stewart and Martha Stewart would become cellmates.
"Given the time it takes to get a convicted felon like Stewart (Lynne) into the system," said Stewart (Martha)'s personal spokeswoman, Nada Pluckit, "we just don't see how we can make it happen before Martha is due to be released and start her television career."
Stewart (Lynne)'s personal spokesaman, Ahmad Akbar Finkelstein, was equally despondent: "It is an outrage against Allah, that our helpmate of many years has been denied the right to share up-close incarceration with the doyen of doilies. We were told that a collaboration between the two on book projects, Plastique for Dummies and Mullah Makeovers was a done deal in the high six figures. Again, the Jews of New York crush innocent Muslimites with no outcry from the world. We demand that Lynne Stewart be slammed into Martha Stewart's slammer this instant."
In related news, the spokestotem for "The Apprentice" confirmed rumors regarding Stewart (Lynne): "Yes, we have been in discussions with her and have signed a letter of intent to let her star in The Apprentice for the 2035 season."
On Joe Scarborough's Rome Wasn't Burnt in a Day: The Real Deal on How Politicians, Bureaucrats, and Other Washington Barbarians are Bankrupting America
by PAT CUMMINGS American Digest Book Editor
IT'S AN AMERICAN ICON: Jimmy Stewart, freshly appointed Senator, ready to take on the machine, in Mr Smith Goes to Washington.
In the 1937 classic an idealistic Jefferson Smith... barnstorms Washington, hoping to make a difference. But the young senator is soon confronted by the awesome might of Washington's political machine... they unleash the political attack dogs, hoping to destroy the reputation of the young reformer. But our Mr. Smith fights back, defeats the political bigwigs, and watches his leaders confess their errors. He even wins the girl.Throw out that image, "Congressman Joe" Scarborough tells us. It's not how Washington really works. Continued...
FROM LETTERS TO ROMENESKO
2/14/2005 1:52:48 PM
From GERARD VAN DER LEUN: Corey Pein [letter below] ,alas, needs to take either a blogging refresher course at Columbia, or a break. He also needs to start living where the news is made, in the now. What may have been a "non-scandal" last week at this time when a Google News search on "Eason Jordan" brought up 8 sources of which 7 were blogs, now delivers over 200 sources -- mostly mainstream newspapers. And if the story means anything in terms of inside baseball at all, it means that "Yes, Corey, you do need to pay more attention, not to certain blogs, but to many." Technote to Corey: News aggregators make this a snap. Get one.
But should journalists "pander to reactionary sentiment"? Heaven forfend. Indeed, Mr. Pein tars decent journalists everywhere by thinking that they would ever pander to any sort of political sentiment. I certainly don't think the Columbia School of Journalism teaches pandering, does it? It seems to me that journalists on the media beat need to have a reportorial mind-set that is pre-judges nothing.
Mr. Pein can begin the healing by putting himself through a re-education process that does not cause his keyboard to jerk from Fox News to Pravada in less than 120 characters. Journalists who maintain this sort of mind-set are not good candidates for the media beat in today's WayNew world. I am sure that not even Mr. Pein or others at "America's Premiere Media Monitor" would argue that assigning a journalist to "report" on a subject who is on record as hating and despising the subject is the way to go here.
In short, although it seems to have eluded Pein, paying more attention to blogs in the wake of the Eason Affair has nothing of the weasel about it. Blogs should have been a staple of the media beat long ago. Reporting on them from the perspective that some are Pravda and others are pure is something that should never have been imported into the beat to begin with.
Blogs rise in value not because "a majority of Americans, journalists included, no longer accept the idea that there is a reality beyond themselves," but because a majority of Americans (journalists included?) no longer accept the version of reality dished up to them by those institutions and organizations that fund operations such as, well, The Columbia Journalism Review.
It seems to me that when somebody breaks your rice bowl you can either 1) get mad at them and try to get even; 2) weep and gnash teeth and rend garments over broken rice bowl; or 3) get a new rice bowl.
==
EXCERPT FROM LETTER BY COREY PEIN (Assistant Editor, Columbia Journalism Review): "Arguing that we need to pay more attention to certain blogs and get on top of non-scandals like "Easongate" is a weasely way of saying that journalists should pander to reactionary sentiment. But more time spent in front of computers will not save journalism. Nor will looking to Fox News as a model of integrity and audience relations.
What journalists do need to understand is why so many people prefer Pravda...."
1) The meeting and the memo from Venus that decreed that a tattoo just above the butt cleavage was no longer an optional fashion accessory for females under 30, but was now mandatory.
2) The meeting and the memo from Mars that decreed that any and all hairstyles for men under 30 and costing more than $8.00 would, by law, be indistinguishable from the hairstyle all men get by sleeping on it for eight hours.
3) The meeting and the memo from The Democratic Party Headquarters on the dark side of the moon proclaiming proudly that, after many decades of pandering to and absorbing any and all minority groups (no matter how small and harebrained), the Party would at last become what it beheld and morph into a minority itself.
Filed under "You Snooze, You Lose Track."
FROM: Journalism: Power without responsibility by Kenneth Minogue
A pseudo-philosophical commitment to evade partisanship turns at this level into a partisanship of its own. And not the least of the paradoxes we find in examining journalism is that this most Western of all practices should embrace so anti-Western a stance. The logical problem journalists face parallels that of liberals who embrace all lawful forms of freedom, only to be told that this apparent openness is itself a form of concealed partisanship. Liberalism and journalism, we might say, are virtually Siamese twins among the commitments of our civilization, and their fates are bound up together.
IN A HASTILY CONVENED NEWS CONFERENCE this morning, President George W. Bush announced that the Prisoner of War Camp at Guantanamo, Cuba, had been closed last night and all its prisoners transferred by Executive Order via the private Gulfstream fleets of George Soros and Amnesty International to Neverland Ranch in California.
Continued...Bioluminescent bacteria occur nearly everywhere, and probably most spectacularly as the rare "milky sea" phenomenon, particularly in the Indian Ocean where mariners report steaming for hours through a sea glowing with a soft white light as far as the eye can see. -- The Bioluminescence Page
There is another world above this one; or outside of this one; the way to it is thru the smoke of this one, & the hole that smoke goes through. The ladder is the way through the smoke hole; the ladder holds up, some say, the world above; it might have been a tree or pole; I think it is merely a way. -- Gary Snyder- Through the Smoke Hole
These days my wife Sheryl wakes before dawn. The sound of the automatic coffee grinder and its aroma is her alarm. Before first light today, out on the deck overlooking the Pacific, she was gazing at the sea and saw, across the flat miles of ocean stretching out to Catalina, bright flashes come and go like wet fireworks exploding under the waves. Binoculars brought the flashes closer but didn't explain them. They were scattered all across the wide water except where the full moon sliding down the sky towards the western horizon smoothed a bright white band across the slate sea.
Later, when I woke, she brought me out on the deck to see the place where she'd witnessed this strange antediluvian light show. After a few more minutes I noticed that, in the rising light, large patches of the sea were dark, as if secret islands had risen just beneath the surface. Secret until my 'compulsion to explain the mysterious' arose.
"It's most likely a large algae bloom," I claimed. "When it was dark and the algae was stirred up by waves, breaking combers probably excited and concentrated the algae. What you saw was bioluminescence."
"Bioluminescence," she said. "That's such a fine, soft word."
We watched the dark islands under the surface of the sea for awhile longer and I wished I'd seen the flashes in the pre-dawn dark.
Toward the end of his life, Carl Sagan wrote a book about how most of humanity still lives in a "demon-haunted world;" and how science drives us relentlessly out of the dark oceans of our ignorance until, like some stump-legged fish, we scramble gasping onto the thin, dry strands of our knowledge about the truth of this world.
One of those strands in my mind was 'knowing' that the miracle of rush lights within the ocean was caused by the phenomenon we label "bioluminescence."
Mystery seen, mystery solved. Wonder summed by science, our youngest and most robust religion. A rel