ConnectNet.org: enter your zipcode and this site spits out a list of computer centers with public internet access nearby. Thirty sites came up when I plugged my zipcode in. Obvious question: how are the ‘net-less going to access this information in the first place? I know, I know, you can do a public service by printing out the data and disseminating it locally where it’s likely to do good.

Very excited to read the news, via Metaforage, that Laurie Anderson is releasing a new recording in August; and look at the list of collaborators! I think I’m sorry, however, that it is not the studio version of the music from her touring production “Songs and Stories from Moby Dick” that it was originally intended to be.

Rebecca Blood pointed me to The Mirror Project, “a growing community of

like-minded individuals who have snapped their

likenesses in a variety of reflective surfaces.

You are more than welcome to join us in our

reckless pursuit of what some consider

narcissism.”

Micro$oft has announced they’re about to close down Listbot. The FmH mailing list has not seeen much traffic anyway. So I’m removing references to it. The icon will now just direct your comment to me via email. I tried and didn’t like BlogVoices, mostly because its slow server made FmH grind to a halt sometimes while the page was loading. If you know of another way to graft a comment/discussion function onto a Blogger weblog, please let me know.

Czech Study for Philip Morris found smokers’ early deaths helped finances; the company cites the cost-savings from the accelerated demise of smokers as a ‘positive benefit’ of smoking to society! CNN

Insidious: Industry Spoof on Lorax: “From Truax, a children’s book by Terri Birkett, modeled on Dr. Seuss’s Lorax and funded by the Hardwood Forest Foundation and the

National Oak Flooring Manufacturers Association. Four hundred thousand copies of Truax have been distributed to elementary schools

nationwide.” Probably only meaningful to you if you’re familiar with The Lorax.

picture of internet: “A bot is out on the internet every half hour and looks for images which it puts together to a giantic picture – the picture of internet. This is samples from all over the internet. The bot surfs pretty strange and

takes strange ways to spread out its ways as much as possible. Sometimes it follow links that it doesn’t should visit… but that doesn’t happen too often.” [via MetaFilter]

Deconstructing the Dead: Skeptic Michael Shermer, in Scientific American: ” A well-known illusion… is the alleged ability of mediums to talk to the

dead. The hottest medium today is former ballroom-dance instructor John Edward, star of the

cable television series Crossing Over and author of the New York Times best-selling book One

Last Time. His show is so popular that he is about to be syndicated nationally on many

broadcast stations.

How does Edward appear to talk to the dead? What he does seems indistinguishable from

tricks practiced by magicians. He starts by selecting a section of the studio audience, saying

something like “I’m getting a George over here. George could be someone who passed over,

he could be someone here, he could be someone you know,” and so on. Of course, such generalizations lead to a “hit.” Once

he has targeted his subject, the “reading” begins, seemingly using three techniques…

Is this art? The Stuckists don’t think so.

A slovenly, unmade bed befouled with condoms and

tampons; a dead shark preserved in formaldehyde; human

excrement, fastidiously canned and packaged. Would you

call this art?

If the answer is a resounding no, you’re a Stuckist. You’re

stuck, outdated, fuddy-duddy and loving it. You crave the

good old days when a picture spoke a thousand words

and you could read everyone of them.

Painting was pronounced dead in the 1970s, sacrificed on

the altar of conceptualism, the art of ideas where even a butchered cow can belong in a

gallery.

Stuckists want to put painting back on its pedestal, they want to see brush strokes on

canvas and recognisable objects. Down, they say, with all the detached, “clever” stuff that

these days passes as art.

“You look at a Stuckist picture and you can see what it is,” says the Stuckist movement’s

co-founder, Charles Thomson, speaking from London, neatly resolving centuries of polemic

into a pithy definition of art. What you see is what you get. The Stuckists have devotees

around the world.

The movement was formed two years ago in reaction to the Brit-Art phenomenom

championed by British advertising tycoon and private collector Charles Saatchi, the man

behind the controversial Sensation exhibition, who famously paid £150,000 for a

soiled bed.

…Tracey Emin’s naughty rumpled bed, Damien Hirst’s

nasty dead shark and grisly cut-up cow, Chris Ofili’s profane painting of the Virgin Mary

decorated with elephant dung. In fact (and in frustration), it was Emin who gave the

Stuckists their name, denouncing her former lover, painter Billy Childish as “stuck, stuck,

stuck”.

Childish and Thomson embraced the insult, founded the Stuckists, posted a 20-point

manifesto on the web, and encouraged other painters around the world to take up the

cause.

They redubbed Brit-Art “Brit-Shit” and claimed 19th-century rebels such as Vincent Van Gogh

and Edvard Munch as honorary members. (Does Van Gogh’s suffering have no end?)

The Age

Cheney Calls on Navy to Pay Bill to Light His Home. His official residence, on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory, racks up $186,000 annually in electricity bills! New York Times