The Oops List “The air force has never officially admitted that nuclear weapons were involved in this accident” — a phrase that can be said over and over again, as the author of this article has assembled evidence from a variety of sources that there have been many more accidents involving our nuclear weapons than the U.S. has let on. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Call for men to get HRT. “Middle-aged men should receive hormone
therapy to treat the andropause – the male
equivalent of the menopause, say doctors.

The Andropause Society has been formed to
raise awareness of the problem amongst
doctors and their patients.

But there is debate amongst the medical
profession over whether the male menopause
actually exists.” BBC

New proof of Timothy McVeigh’s innocence and an explanation for his silence to date. “The truth must be told! I’m sorry, Timothy, but I can’t be quiet anymore! The reason Timothy has been quiet for so long is because the day he was arrested, A microscopic chip was inserted into the lower part of his left
ear! This chip not only tortured him by playing death metal and christmas classics but it made him unable to speak. Then thin slices of razor blades were inserted between his liver and urapoopilikeno causing sharp pains to
travel through his hands every time he was near paper!
Timothy is really the son of God! Jesus was actually his twin brother caused by an accident that resulted from the virgin mary doing jumping jacks in gym class when she was in 7th grade. She was pregnant since she
was born and The gym class injury tore her right ovary in half resulting in the dividing of Gods’ yet to be born son.” There’s alot more to chew on here…

Why the Fuss Over Condi Rice? by Anne Applebaum This issue has nagged at me too. The American self-congratulation about the appointment of minorities and women does not so much speak to how far we’ve come against racism and sexism as it does to how far we have to go. “Why is it, in fact, that the appointment of women and
minorities to high office is such a big deal in the United
States? It isn’t necessarily such a big deal everywhere else.” And, lest this appears to be about Dubya alone, recall how big a deal a Jewish vice-presidential candidate was. Pitiful. Slate

Here’s some background on Powell and Rice, also from Slate:

Last weekend President-elect George W. Bush appointed
Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state
and national security adviser, respectively. To read an
“Assessment” of Powell, click here; for one of Rice, click
here. In 1997 Slate’s Franklin Foer argued that the
“affirmative action” that produced Gen. Powell was a
laudable type of reverse discrimination. (Click here to read
the article.) Last summer Slate’s Jacob Weisberg praised
Powell for “calling the GOP’s bluff” at their “minority
extravaganza” of a convention. (To read the article, click
here. Earlier this year Slate’s David Greenberg argued that
the GOP’s treatment of blacks has declined since the days
of Lincoln. (Click here to read the article.)

Meanwhile, the mainstream press, including Time magazine in declaring Dubya its “Person of the Year”, is really doing an awful lot of damning with faint praise. Or is it praising with faint damns as they did throughout the campaign coverage? Slate

And, by the way, did you notice how much “the lady (and the illegitimate son’s other appointments as well) doth protest too much”? They all take pains to tell us how Bush, far from being an intellectual lightweight overshadowed by his appointments and unprepared for the rigors of the Presidency, will really be leading us. Ah, yes, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” Can you say “figurehead?” I predict the next administration will be fertile ground for the resurrection of conspiracy theory. Palace intrigues will make for some entertaining reading…

By the way, has anyone resurrected this old chestnut which has been on my mind recently with Dubya’s election? For almost two centuries, the U.S. President elected every twentieth year has died in office. (Ronald Reagan broke the mold only if you don’t believe he was brain-dead before the end of his second term. As a young psychiatric resident, I was interviewed by the press during his second election campaign in 1983-84 about my concerns that he was already showing signs of the Alzheimer’s dementia with which he would not be diagnosed officially until after he left office years later.) JFK, elected in 1960; FDR in 1940; Harding (1920), the other three assassination victims McKinley (1900), Garfield (1880), and Lincoln (1860); and William H. Harrison (1840). Here‘s an almanac listing of the Presidents’ terms if you want to verify this. Should we prepare for a President Cheney? If he doesn’t succomb to his cardiac disease before the illegitimate son’s projected demise?

But enough morbidity and dread, and enough of U.S. Presidential politics for awhile already…

404 Research Lab: “404 is your friend!” The 404 of the week; a tutorial on making 404 pages for webmasters; random 404’s, and more. If you don’t know what a ‘404’ is… then you haven’t been websurfing, really.

The destruction of Lhasa. Much of the old center of the city, which is the capital of Tibet, is roped off. Although unconfirmed, it appears that it is being readied for demolition. The Chinese seem to have stepped up their war on Tibetan separatism to include its cultural heritage. The Tibet Heritage Fund, an NGO dedicated to the preservation of Tibetan architecture, was expelled from Lhasa this summer. The Fund had collaborated in the restoration of 76 buildings as old as the seventh century AD, using traditional materials and keeping endangered skills alive by utilizing local artisans. All of this seems a response to the humiliation China suffered with the January 2000 defection of the Karmapa Lama to join the Dalai Lama ‘s expatriate Tibetan community in Dharmsala, India. Up until that time, China had been using preservation and restoration of Tibetan monasteries (destroyed during the Cultural Revolution) as an apparent means of ingratiating itself with pro-Tibet foreign opinion.

The strategy had been to make Tibet a touristic showcase while turning Tibetans
themselves into a deracinated minority—similar to what the US, for example, did
to Hawaii. But all signs indicate Beijing’s policy, oppressive at the best of times. is
moving towards forced assimilation.

I’d never run across The Art Newspaper, the visual arts publication covering this issue, either online or in print before.

Whitbread celebs oust ‘real critics’. The Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize are apparently in a war of words over the latter’s growing inclusion of celebrities, as oppposed to literary types, on its judges’ panel. Maximizing the TV audience for the awards ceremonies, which are broadcast live, seems to be a preoccupation. The Whitbread emphasizes that it “is not a literary prize in any
way. It is about good books that are
enjoyed. These judges provide a very
useful ordinary perspective”. The Guardian

Just when you thought it was safe to leave your computer desk: The Museum of Television and Radio will make some
of the greatest programs of all time available on the
Internet starting next year.

The collection features almost every radio and TV
broadcast ever aired. “We’re going to begin with a couple hundred, and then we’re going to add on a weekly basis. Over
time, we eventually hope to have a clip for every
program in our collection,” said a spokesperson. NY Post

Cleaned-Up CDs Don’t Clean Up. Music manufacturers have been producing sanitized versions of recordings with “explicit content” (as it’s called in this post-Tipper-Gore cultural univese) for sale in the likes of Walmart and K-Mart, who said they wouldn’t put CDs with advisory labels on their shelves, mindful as they were of their Mom-‘n’-apple pie heartland image. But, thankfully, consumers don’t seem to be flocking to buy the cleaned-up models. Hey, Walmart, get the message: the fans are looking for the ones with the warning labels! LA Times

A special section on vitriol in the art world! First, Getting a bum rap in court of public opinion: Often, there’s no rhyme, reason why hip-hop musicians are suspect, writes an African American music critic in the Boston Herald. Recent events suggest to some — populist black activist leader Al Sharpton and former O.J. Simpson attorney [will he ever live it down? does he want to?] Johnnie Cochran among them — that there is a ‘hip-hop profiling’ subgenre of ‘racial profiling’ abroad in the land, and that

we should expect people, especially police, to
distinguish between fantasy and reality. Just because someone poses
with guns on an album cover, brags about taking drugs, puffs up what
they would do to their enemies if given the chance, or mercilessly
harangues “soft” rappers as fake does not make them a criminal.

No one, for example, ever strip-searched country singer Johnny Cash
just because he sang, “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”
Cash has, in fact, sung so many songs about offing people that a
recent compilation of his music includes an entire CD of murder songs.

We’ve also seen a huge public outpouring of sympathy for Robert
Downey Jr. – a gifted but drug-addled white actor. Yet no one rushed
to the defense of Ol’ Dirty Bastard – a gifted but drug-addled black
rapper with essentially the same problems – when he was rearrested
after fleeing court-ordered rehabilitation.

Next, the New York Press‘s Godfrey Cheshire rakes New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane over the coals for his review of the attention-getting film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. “As a piece of prose, Lane’s polite
rave for Ang Lee’s film is competent enough, if typically gaseous and cute. But as film criticism it’s
something far less innocuous, a riot of errors and absurdities that would make the shoddiest
webzine blush. What’s at issue here has nothing to do with ‘opinion,’ or whether one likes or dislikes Crouching
Tiger. It has to do with the critic’s basic grasp of his subject…” Cheshire apparently had alot of fun writing this one. Our rootless, decontextualized, global-market entertainment industry provides fertile ground for this kind of thing, with the multiple layers of cultural dissonance arising when a reviewer trying to import London sensibilities to the New Yorker writes about a hybrid of an art film and the Chinese martial arts genre by an expatriate Asian director working in the American film industry but eschewing Hollywood…

Turning from music and film to the literary world — “McGill failed me — I was mad as hell”…mad enough to kill, apparently. Nega Mezlekia is a prize-winning author of the memoir Notes from the Hyena’s Belly: memories of my Ethiopian Boyhood.Affter a highly visible ugly falling-out with the Vancouver writer who had worked as an editor for him and claimed that she had helped write most of the book, McGill University officials last week approached her for a copy of I Can’t Recognize Myself Anymore, the partially completed subsequent volume of his memoirs on which she had worked as well until they parted company. The University is particularly interested in passages describing a carefully researched plan to hunt down and kill “six people in the department and all higher university officials I could find” in the wake of a bitter academic dispute with a thesis advisor he accused of trying to take credit for his PhD thesis on the behavior of reinforced concrete. Mr Mezlekia apparently went so far as to cross the border to Detroit to purchase the firepower he needed, at which point he describes a spiritual conversion which led him to abandon the plan and return to Montreal to finish his thesis in peace.

The inventory of hardware that I needed for the task consisted of two Colt-45 hand guns
with ten-round magazines; a Heckler and Koch SP89 machine gun with a 30-shot magazine,
four hand grenades, a bulletproof vest, and a half a dozen pair of handcuffs. As
well, I had to purchase high mass bullets with reliable four or five-petal expansion ribs for
maximum stopping power, and a few additional attachments for the Heckler and Koch SP89.
No thought frustrated the imagination more than the thought that someone you had left for
dead recovered, while you served time for your crime, or worse. That had happened to Dr.
Valeri Fabrikant [an academic who killed four people at Concordia University in 1992], and I
would be stupid to repeat his mistake. The National Post