Nota Bene
Strong language warning, but it's all in a good cause. Besides, you probably need this or know someone who does.
Continued...
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Dateline: March 10, 2005 in The Brand-Extension Blight @ AMERICAN DIGEST
Please allow me to quote my favorite source, me.
FLYING: Everybody's favorite. On my first flight to Europe, everyone dressed for success. Now everyone dresses for Gold's Gym. And I'm sure the next step in TOTAL SECURITY will be to require everyone who is not of Arab descent to arrive with a note from their doctor attesting that they had a high colonic an hour before the airport to make the body cavity searches a bit more pleasant for the staff. Then there's the added coach thrill of a blood clot developing in the legs that stops your heart at 50,000 feet. Plus... no peanuts! After all, think of the allergic children! Add to that the new innovation, no pillows! I don't see why the airlines don't simply install hooks and, working in concert with government's laughable security cops, require everyone to hang from said hooks naked. It will come to that. You know it will.
He knew more than our entire government when it comes to the Middle-East and Asia. And he knew it before any in our government were born.
Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: "A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East."
-- The Naulahka
And now for something actually useful. I'm restarting my long ago DJ career over at Blip.fm, so it was time to bring this reminder to myself and others back from the Archives.
Works like a charm. Here's how to set it up.
"Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt: First Inaugural Address. U.S. Inaugural Addresses.Saturday, March 4, 1933
The last sentence is taken from Proverbs 29:18 and although the King James translation is resolved as "the people perish" that is not the only way the proverb can be understood. Here are some variations. See if they strike a chord.
Continued...Some people have all the fun.
It does basically make you look fat and naked, but you see all this stuff." - Susan Hallowell (above), Director of TSA's Security Laboratory.
The woman checking me in informed me that Delta discontinued the use of the ticket jackets as of Monday in order to help cut costs!Food goes, blankets go, seats get jammed in, pillows vanish, oxygen is reduced, peanuts change into tasteless "freeze-baked crunchy things with salt" which come two to a pack and you only get one. Don't even get me started on Homeland Security which is just biding its time until you will be required to fly naked after an anal probe by uniformed dwarf.
I know I am far from alone when I say that after years of flying many times a year, often on a whim, I am now at the point where only the most powerful forces in life -- love and death -- can get me on a plane.
Continued...
Tim Oren's Due Diligence notes in The Newspaper Biz: From 'Controlled Flight into Terrain' to 'Flat Spin'
Having grown up in a General Motors family during the 60's and early 70's, this sounds familiar. Arrogance on the part of both management and labor, a belief the customers have no alternative but to keep paying increasing costs and accept the (low) quality on offer, followed by the arrival of competition to feast on the disgruntled customer base.
Silicon Alley Insider piles on with Newspaper Ads Tank Again, Industry Shrinking Fast
"Newspapers did a brilliant job of ramping their sales smoothly throughout the 1990s by boosting ad rates at will. Those remarkably consistent and predictable sales gains were derailed by the arrival of Internet and other disruptive, new technologies that give readers and advertisers unprecedented media alternatives. Seemingly dumbfounded by the arrival of serious competition for their audiences and advertising revenues, newspapers have been struggling for more than a decade, with meager success, to regain their relevance and economic vitality."Say goodnight Gracie.
But thanks to all for stopping by. None of you are on that list. [Well, maybe a few, and you know who you are.]
"Why right to vote, without an ID, is worth fighting for" by State Sen. Mario Gallegos, D., Houston (Houston Chronicle) Translation: People can vote Democrat more than once!
"A dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants." Hamiliton -- The Federalist Papers #1
The Kevin Roderick says, "Guests at Wednesday night's fundraiser for Sen. Hillary Clinton at the Hollywood Hills home of producer Roland Emmerich are being warned not to speak with any reporters. It's part of their written instructions."
The P.J. O'Rourke says, "I suggest a Celebrity Tax with a low-end base rate of, mmm, 100 percent.... Given the modest talent of current celebrities and the immodest example they set for impressionable youth, we'll call it a 'Value Subtracted Tax.' "
Continued...SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ASKS: "Is it possible that urging the overweight or mildly obese to cut calories and lose weight
Continued...ROCKENOMICS: "As Coldplay's recording budgets have grown, so have its reverberation times."
HOW TO BUILD A Gauss Rifle at home in your spare time: "This very simple toy uses a magnetic chain reaction to launch a steel marble at a target at high speed."
IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME: Stop or I'll Shoot This Koran: "Sure," I said. "I use Korans for everything: Oven mitts, ash trays, air sickness bags and car wash shammies. You never know when one'll come in handy."
Continued..."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?
ON CAMPUS
It's a disgrace that some of the nation's law schools, objecting to the Pentagon's "discrimination policies," refuse to permit military recruiters to make their pitch on campus, relegating them instead to unofficial off-campus venues. Law students pondering their first career move can be wined and dined by fancy firms that set up recruitment tables at campus job fairs, but they have to stroll over to the local Day's Inn to seek out the lonely military recruiter.
To put it another way, the same liberals who object that the military includes too many lower-class kids won't let military recruiters near the schools that contain students who will soon join the upper-class elite. It's almost enough to make us contemplate restoring the draft, starting with law school students. -- The Wall Street Journal
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?
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)
What are you doing up so late, staring at the computer screen reading this? For that matter, what am I doing up late writing this at 11pm? Are we all nuts?I don't know about you but I'm posting this at 11:54 PM. I'd go to sleep, but I have to finish reading this exceptional study in larks vs. owls so I can understand why I can't go to sleep.
If someone ever has the bad taste to parody "Rawhide" with "Rawblog," (Humm...) we're sure the refrain will begin with "Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling...." But why scroll, when you can click? To eliminate that carpal tunnel stress for our readers, here are a few of the posts for the last week or so that would be worth a click if you missed them.
We considered the institutionalization of 43% of American voters in It's Happydale for the Democrats, but the blogsphere as a whole decided to go with a fat kid and Roumanian pop songs -- Numa Numa Original Discovered and Decoded. Go figure.
On a more serious note, it might be time to take a look at: RULES? IN A KNIFE FIGHT?: Redrafting the Rules of Engagement in the First Terrorist War, but if sampling the variety of the web suits your mood we suggest: Blogs of Wonder and Delight. If you've got the time after that, please consider our suggestion for a safer and saner America: Why Someone Doesn't Sue the ACLU on General Principles is Beyond Me.
Our film critic, Jeremiah Lewis swam through the latest Bill Murray mistranslation. Verdict? The Life Aquatic: A Beached Whale of a Movie **
In the long March of Apple to conquer the world with the iPod, we noticed that the President has been assimilated -- Here's to the Crazy Ones: Verbatim from Apple.com. -- but the holy war of Mac vs. PC continues: And the Reason You Still Use a Windows Machine Is?
Pat Cummings, our book editor and constant reader, found a lot to like paging through Steven Pinker: Words and Rules -- Not the How, But the Why, while our old friend, Tom Parker, came up with a way to make near-Earth space more interesting -- Racing Rovers on the Moon? Yes! No word yet from JPL or NASA.
We confessed to compassion fatigue with The Deluge. Seeing the rest of the nation, or at least the media, pivot from the Tsunami disaster to Brad and Jen, it was sadly prescient.
A vast chasm opened in the American Digest staff when Jeremiah Lewis pronounced Sideways: Not Just a Good Vintage, A Great Vintage, but I found it to be, well, slight with Getting Sideways on "Sideways" -- Less Here Than Meets the Critical Eye
While the rest of the blogsphere was taking a slow victory lap around Rathergate, we glanced instead at the leading "What Me Liberal?" news outlet in the nation and didn't find a lot of good news: The Moose is Back at the New York Times.
In the realm of helpful hints to our readers we pointed to a dynamic use of Flickr with Organizing Complex Projects.
And finally, for sports fans everwhere, Chris Lynch pulled out a page from his X-Files with The Curse of the Simpsons and Big League Baseball. He also had some NFL picks, but we won't go there, okay. Maybe this week.
Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.
-- Dylan Thomas
Last Saturday at the local cinema in Laguna Beach, we went to see the opening of "The Incredibles." Other than state the obvious that it was, indeed, incredible, I won't bother to add to the 386,457 reviews of this film.
I did note one thing that struck me. The film is on many levels state-of-the-art, and the sound track does no less. The sound track is so dense and so fully-packed that it frankly overwhelmed the equipment of this little local theater. The staff either didn't know how to balance the speakers or the speakers themselves couldn't cope with the sound track. Either way, a lot of the track was incomprehensible during the last 40 minutes of the film.
But this theater is a decent, local business. It lost no time in having a staff member stand out in front at the end of the film, and offer free passes or money back to anyone who felt they hadn't been satisfied by the film's outcome. There were a lot of takers. It was the decent thing to do.
Which made me think: If you make a film that promises a satisfying outcome to millions and millions of people, and if you make millions upon millions of dollars with this promise, and if that film, in the end, doesn't deliver a satisfying outcome to the millions who bought tickets, shouldn't you offer to give them their money back?
Wouldn't that be the least, the very least, decent thing to do?
Nine days into the votingI just noticed this morning that American Digest is a nominee in Wizbang's 2004 Weblog Awards in the Best Essayist category.
I am more than flattered to be on any list that includes my personal favorites, James Lileks, Victor Davis Hanson, and Roger Simon among others.
I confess that I voted for myself because, as the saying goes, "If I am not for myself, who is?," but I note that everyone in the category is worth of a vote so I suggest, if you've got the time, to head to the link above and vote.
Then head off into the rest of the exhaustive awards categories. An amazing effort by Kevin at Wizbang -- even though I still do not get the reason behind giving everyone a fresh vote every day across 12 days. It has been explained to me very s l o w l y, but it still doesn't penetrate my noggin.
All Democrats who are just fed up! already, take note of Dutch Blogger Zacht Ei's item : Three in ten Dutch want to flee the country
According to a national survey, 28 percent of all Dutch would leave the country if they had the opportunity. Admittedly, my first emotional response to the Van Gogh murder was: "That's it. I'm moving to the USA."Seems like the perfect chance to swap lives, kids. Upsides: No Bush and plenty of weed for your bongs! Downsides: Three bullets in the chest and a knife stuck in your torso if you dare to whisper a bad thing about Islam. So, hey, what's the worry? Start packing. You'll fit right in.
AFTER NO LITTLE EFFORT I'm pleased to report that I've secured a house in the Queen Anne section of Seattle. The movers deliver next Tuesday and at some point soon after that I should be able to resume ranting at regular intervals.
A brief note about comments:
As many know, "comment spam" is a vile and unceasing problem in the blog world. Usually I weed out these noxious items as part of my early-morning ritual, but after being away last week I returned to find that more than 1,500 comment spams of particularly odious content had been posted to the page.
The result is that I am still, in fits and starts, working to remove them. But in the meantime I've set comments off by default.
In the near future we will install a more advanced blogging system and I'll be able to return things to normal, but in the interim please bear with me.
If you do have something you would like included, please email it to me at the link under the Jasper Johns' American flag in the upper right hand corner. I'll do my best to fit it in.
Thank you.
Roger Simon rolls the entire "plan" of the Kerry squad into a nice tight package:
The brutal truth is that the basic subject of the entire election, of the future going forward, is the neocon argument that (militant if necessary) export of democracy is the only viable solution to endless (possibly nuclear) conflagration . Bush bought into it to one degree or another. The Democrats seem to oppose it. I emphasize the seem because all they offer in opposition is a vague "plan." What this plan is is a mystery to everyone. I think there is a reason for that. There is no other plan.
-- Roger L. Simon: Tick-Tock
FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS I'll be in the process of relocating from Laguna Beach, California to Seattle, Washington. In the interim, I'll be driving Highway 1 up the coastline of California, Oregon, and Washington and I don't plan to push it. One thousand miles of coastline is nothing to just zoom past if you've got the chance. (See Laguna Dawn for my observations on part of this route.)
UPDATE: The Getty, Cambria, the Sur, Berkeley, Mill Valley, Stinson Beach, Bolinas, .... currently in Mendocino. The road goes on forever.
During this period, my ability and desire to update this page is likely to be intermittent. In the meantime, I've made a little list of essays and items in various categories that may be of interest to the idle browser.
Glenn Reynolds in the Wall St. Journal on why old media can't seem to bail out Kerry's swamped boat.
Ten Bullets from Stephen Green that are shooting .527 holes in the hull of said boat.
STONE SOUP MEETS GOLDILOCKS as told by Paul Shlichta at
The American Thinker
[T]he concept of the spontaneous origin of the first cell is on very shaky ground. You must start by making a quasi-primordial soup, rich in amino acids and other building blocks of life, as Stanley Miller and Harold Urey did in the 1950's. Then you must somehow stir it and shake it until the components spontaneously assemble to form long chains of DNA, RNA, proteins, and numerous other macromolecules—with all of the multi-thousand amino acid sequences exactly right and mutually compatible. Then you must continue stirring until the macromolecules sort themselves out into the proper groups and somehow surround themselves with membranes, with just the right sort of ion transport properties, to form organelles such as a nucleus, lysosomes, ribosomes, mitochondria, and all the other cellular components. Then you must keep stirring until all these organelles pack themselves into a cell membrane, with just the right composition of fluid in it. You have only a few billion years to shake up all these dice and have them all come up right at the same place and time.. Ready, set, go, and good luck -- but I don't think you're going to succeed. However, if you think this scenario is scientifically plausible, then sit down and start calculating probabilities.
Click to englarge
IT IS ALWAYS FASCINATING to see the steps behind making an amazing illustration. Case point: Kevin Hulsey's stunning cutaway of the Radiance of the Seas. As he modestly states: "Size: 36" @ 350 dpi, 640 mb CMYK File with 35 Layers / Illustration Time: 720 hrs."
Yes, 720 hours. That would be one month. Solid. 24/7. No breaks.
If he can put in those kind of hours, you can put in the five minutes it takes to read how it was done. Well worth it.
Detail from Illustration Above
We note in passing that American Digest is now at the one year mark.
For those interested in numbers, this is article # 1,590 (more or less).
All commenting has been turned off for the immediate future. We'll see about getting it going soon.
Don't touch that dial, we've taken control of your comments
We're switching over to a new software for publishing [MT 3.01 for those that are interested], and in the transition theres a new comment spam filter in place.
For now, during the transition, comments to the site are marked for "approval" before being reflected on the post. This will change soon but for now bear with us.
If you post a comment, it will appear just as soon as I can run the approval script on it. Don't think that we didn't get it just because you don't see it. It will arrive -- unless of course you are an evil spammer.
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- R-Rated Internet Writing Lesson. Hey, Y R U Not Paying Attention?
- Go Green
- The Law of the Gun
- Flying; The Prophecy from 2005
- What Did Kipling Know and When Did He Know It?
- A 'perfect' iTunes equalizer setting
- The More Things Change The More They Stay Insane
- When There Is No Vision...
- How long, oh Lord, how long before Joe Biden...
- Rats: If I'd Just Listened to My Last Wife, This Could Have Been Me!
- Jackets? We don't have to give you no steenkin' jackets!
- American Digest Daybook #216
- The News About Newspapers Is "not that bad, it's worse"
- American Digest -- 4 Years Old... Maybe 5
- Translations
- "Zeal for the Rights of the People"
- Crisp Clickables
- Drive-By
- Drive-By
- Drive-By