This letter to the editor of Slate suggests that you have only yourself to blame if you grow frustrated reading the Kausfiles:

“I often make the mistake of trying to read Mickey Kaus the same way I’d read, say, Tim Noah or George Will – that is, as political commentary. When I attempt this, I leave Kaus’s columns feeling, dazed, confused, somewhat violated, yet strangely dreamlike… as if I’d been mugged and molested by the Pillsbury Doughboy. This is because Kaus isn’t writing poltical commentary. He’s writing a Page 2 gossip column. He just happens to be using Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton instead of Ben and J-Lo.

How else to explain the style of Kaus’s writing, which presents itself as opinionated yet lazily unintellectual, fawning yet derisive, biased yet blankly removed? To read Kaus is to read the world of politics not as a real world of actual ideas and events, but as a darling game, where points are scored, winners are glamorous, and all’s well as long as it’s all a lark in the end.”

Boy punished for talking about gay mom: “LAFAYETTE, Louisiana (AP) — A 7-year-old boy was scolded and forced to write ‘I will never use the word ‘gay’ in school again’ after he told a classmate about his lesbian mother, the American Civil Liberties Union alleged Monday.” —CNN

“According to new observations… from NASA’s IMAGE spacecraft and the joint NASA/European Space Agency Cluster satellites, immense cracks sometimes develop in Earth’s magnetosphere and remain open for hours. This allows the solar wind to gush through and power stormy space weather.” —NASA

Eric Wagoner says, “Jorn has been located. While I do not have word from him personally, it appears he is, quite literally, ‘getting away from it all’. Those near him, who had feared the worst, are glad he is safe and are respecting Jorn’s wishes to keep him out of sight.” [thanks to walker]

Paul Krugman: “Inviting Bush supporters to a fund-raiser, the host wrote, ‘I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.’ No surprise there. But Walden O’Dell — who says that he wasn’t talking about his business operations — happens to be the chief executive of Diebold Inc., whose touch-screen voting machines are in increasingly widespread use across the United States.” — New York Times op-ed. [Still no surprise. — FmH]

” ‘No One May Ever Have This Knowledge Again: Letters to Mount Wilson Observatory 1915-1935‘ is a fantastic, antiquated display of faded letters to astronomers from crackpots and simple people who have found the key to the secrets of Mars, the climate of the moon, and the holes in the sky. On loan from the observatory’s archives along with archaic scientific devices and irresistible old newsreel footage in a dramatically dim installation, it’s charming and almost beyond belief. ‘I hear that Einstein intends to visit your observatory in the near future,’ writes a self-described clodhopper. ‘Hope he will, but he, with our help, should be careful not to go off on a tangent, for if a straight line is crooked, a curved line is straight.’ The show touches down (in New York) thanks to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, David Wilson’s fictional but actual museum-as-a-work-of-art in Los Angeles. The artist-curator, who’s a master at blending fiction and fact, insists everything is real. This time, perhaps, we should believe him.” —The Village Voice . This is something I need to see the next time I am down in New York!

A guide to holiday gift-giving, antiwar-style. —The Village Voice

It’s called America. “Since hundreds of thousands if not millions of our fellow citizens think that what people like Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, and Bill Maher say is perspicuous and persuasive, is it not plausible to suggest that the most meaningful political alliance in this country is between the rich and the chronically stupid? Rule by a powerful, privileged class of the wealthy and their dependents we clearly have, and we already have a name for it: oligarchy. But what about the rule of the stupid? Sot-archy? Perhaps our hybrid form of governance should be called ‘sotoligarchy.'” —The Village Voice

…They’re not all buying Bush. “Military funerals and lost jobs haunt Bush in the heartland. Can Republicans still take the red states for granted?” —The Village Voice

“Jorn Barger, editor of Robot Wisdom, is missing. He resides in Socorro, New Mexico, and was last seen there by his housemate in very early October. Most if not all of his possessions, including his ID card, are still at his residence.

Jorn is a prolific Usenet poster, but his last posting took place on September 30. His last posting on Slashdot was also on September 30. He last accessed his website via an FTP connection from Socorro on October 1.

If you have heard from Jorn since the end of September, or have any notion of his whereabouts, please contact Eric Wagoner at whereisjorn@ericwagoner.com.

Jorn Barger is one of the earliest webloggers, and indeed coined the term ‘weblog’. Jorn’s vocal political opinions, particularly his views on the mid-east conflicts (that have at times moved well into vitriol), have turned many people against him, but still… he’s missing, both virtually and physically, and I for one would like to know where he is.”

Jorn was one of the inspirations for FmH and the attention generated by a generous plug he gave me early on in FmH’s existence helped my site take off. For awhile, he read FmH closely, appreciating and echoing some of the more arcane links I found from time to time, always credited. My sense of kinship with him as a weblogger was reinforced by Jim Higgins’ appreciative July, 2000 piece in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel singling out both of us for his weblog-naive reading audience. We share similar tastes in reading as well. Iris Murdoch, Walker Percy, Colin Wilson, Martin Amis’ London Fields, Le Carré, Nabokov, Pynchon and, most reverently, Joyce, give me ‘images to think with’, as he puts it, too. Here is an illuminating 1999 interview with Jorn that captures some of his funky irreverence. If you are interested in learning more about him, start with his eponymous saga here and go to this accounting of some of the resonances he had left on the web long prior to Robot Wisdom and the racism controversy, here. Barger even rates a Wikipedia entry of his own. Here is an interesting concept — he has been compiling what he calls his musical autobiography, running notes chronicling what he has been listening to year by year.

I was one of those who soured on Jorn, as Wagoner suggests, because of an inescapable sense that after 9-11 his views on Israel and particularly his responses to those who criticized those views crossed the line into anti-Semitism. My first clue had been a private email he sent me blasting a post in which I had skewered a Holocaust denier. At the time, I thought he had a point about my reaction being ‘kneejerk’ (since I am always vulnerable to anyone who can make a good case for being more thoughtful than it has occurred to me to be), but I was discomforted by his vehement tone. As his attitude became more public and more apparent, his interaction with me fell into place. I eventually, with something of the guilt of the patricide and the heartbreak of an idol’s toppling, stopped reading Robot Wisdom and dropped it from my blogroll, although as the issue receded into memory I had started visiting the site again more recently. Around the time his posting stopped, he had had a brief mention up on his site of difficulty he was having with his email hosting, so at first I assumed his net access had gone flaky. But as his absence persisted, that came to seem implausible for such a mercurial web presence. I don’t know much about him personally and I hope that those who, noting his disappearance, immediately jump to fearing the worst, don’t have too much more of a basis to do so. Wagoner comments in a MetaFilter thread about his disappearance,

“Apparently, this isn’t the first time that Jorn has dropped out of sight for a while, but it is the first time that it’s been this long and without any possessions. I’ve gotten the impression that the housemate is a bit of a recluse as well who just yesterday decided that something must really be wrong this time and that help was needed.”

Perhaps this post, resurrecting the anti-Semitism innuendo, will stand as a ‘troll’ and draw him out if he is anywhere it might come to his attention. In the Metafilter discussion, someone points to an offhand comment he had expressed on Robot Wisdom about retreating to a cave. Someone else concludes, “Let’s hope he’s safe and just eating mescaline in the desert” and another succinctly hopes that, if he is not found, it is simply because he does not want to be. I second that…

“Founded in part by Eric Carle, the renowned author and illustrator of more than 70 books, including the 1969 classic The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art is the first full-scale museum in this country devoted to national and international picture book art, conceived and built with the aim of celebrating the art that we are first exposed to as children. Through the exploration of images that are familiar and beloved, it is the Museum’s goal to foster connections between visual and verbal literacy and to provide visitors of all ages and backgrounds with the confidence to appreciate and enjoy art of every kind.” The website isn’t that impressive (IMHO, they ought to have some digitized selections from their collection) but the museum, which we visited this weekend, is wonderful.

The current exhibit, through mid-January 2004, explores Russian children’s book illustration from 1899 to 1939. I am not a big fan of Soviet political realism; for example, I shuddered at one political poster that said something along the lines of “Down with the traditional mythological and folkloric themes of children’s literature. Give us new children’s books!” Russian folklore is richly dense and allegorical and the pre-Soviet children’s story illustrations are fittingly beautiful accompaniments, baroque and fanciful, often Art Nouveau-flavored. They make a striking contrast to the primary colors and graphic reductionism of much modern American children’s book illustration like Carle’s (although I enjoy his innovative tissue paper collage technique), and leave me curious about the impact the genres have on the minds of the children raised under each.

Kevin Kelly’s obsession continues: “Here are my recommendations for cool tools. I include books, gadgets, software, videos, maps, hardware, materials, websites or gear that are extraordinary, little-known, or reliably handy for an individual or small group. I depend on friends and readers to suggest things they actually use. Particularly welcomed are old items that you still dote on after years of use. I only post things I like and I ignore the rest. ” And here is a Wired interview with Kelly.

And this year’s winner is: “Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s curious statement at a press briefing was named on Monday as the year’s most baffling comment by a public figure.

“Reports that say something hasn’t happened are interesting to me, because as we know, there are known unknowns; there things we know we know,” Rumsfeld told the briefing.

“We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

… Rumsfeld, whose boss President Bush is often singled out by language critics for his sometimes unusual use of English, took the booby prize ahead of a bizarre effort from actor-turned politician Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman,” was the odd statement from the new California Governor. ” —Yahoo!

“Looming competitive and regulatory pressures factored into Microsoft’s recent decision to reveal formerly secret pieces of its latest Office software, according to analysts.

Microsoft announced that starting Dec. 5, customers and partners will be able to view the unique Extensible Markup Language (XML) dialects, or ‘schemas,’ used by three of the most common Office applications: Word, Excel and InfoPath.

Microsoft has made extensive XML support one of the key selling points for Office 2003, with the widely adopted standard promising more fluid exchange of data between Office documents and enterprise computing systems.

The software giant attracted growing criticism for its refusal to reveal the XML schemas Office would use. Without access to the schemas, customers were ensured only of basic data interchange, without access to sophisticated formatting and organizational information included in Office documents.” —CNET

Reflections on the iPod’s ‘aura’ on its second birthday: “What I had been hoping to do was catch a glimpse of what’s there when you pull back all those layers — when you penetrate the aura, strip off the surface, clear away the guts. What’s under there is innovation, but where does it come from? I had given up on getting an answer to this question when I made a jokey observation that before long somebody would probably start making white headphones so that people carrying knockoffs and tape players could fool the world into thinking they had trendy iPods.

Jobs shook his head. ”But then you meet the girl, and she says, ‘Let me see what’s on your iPod.’ You pull out a tape player, and she walks away.”” —New York Times Magazine