Review of Bakari Kitwana’s The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture: “A spokesman for the new generation of African-Americans says hip-hop can ignite a fresh wave of black activism — but first the civil rights veterans have to get out of the way.” Salon
Author Archives: FmH
Abacha’s son cleared of murder
“Nigeria’s Supreme Court clears Mohammed Abacha of ordering the murder of the wife of opposition leader Moshood Abiola.”
BBC World. [Good; now he’s free to keep sending me those emails seeking my assistance in smuggling out of the country the money he embezzled during his father’s reign.]
First synthetic virus created
“Scientists assemble a virus from scratch from the genetic blueprint for polio – and then infect and kill mice with it.”
"Dying is not good for you"
Casting a Cool Eye on Cryonics: ‘Sometimes art, like hitting, is all in the timing.
A case in point is “Dying Is Not Good for You,” a exhibition of photographs by a British artist, Jason Oddy, which opened last night at the Frederieke Taylor gallery in Chelsea.
What makes this exhibition topical is its subject: an inside look at two of the nation’s cryonic centers, one of which, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., now holds the body of the Hall of Fame hitter Ted Williams, who died last week at 83.
That development, and a family battle over the handling of Williams’s remains, has suddenly given front-page status to cryonics, whose proponents advocate deep-freezing the dead in the hopes that medical advances will make it possible to resurrect them.’ NY Times
"…conjures up creepy organ music…"
Experts Explore Sadism, But Answers Remain Elusive: “What type of people become sadists and what makes them tick? Some forensic authorities who have had firsthand experience with sadists provide some answers.” Psychiatric News
Hormone Therapy Woes
“News that hormone replacement therapy might do more harm than good offers a lesson in how marketing and a desire for medical miracles can propel use of a drug far beyond that justified by scientific data.” NY Times editorial
Sleep More Often to Sleep Less
Polyphasic Sleep Experiment: aka. Uberman sleep
Welcome. This blog was created to keep a running journal/diary of an experiment with alternative sleep methods. In particular, a small group of us are attempting to adjust to the Uberman Sleep Schedule, more technically described as a polyphasic sleep schedule.
The essence of it is a short 3 hour core sleep time in the early morning, and several 20 minute naps (every 4 hours) spaced throughout the day.
Why are we doing this? We’ll one reason is just to see if its possible. Yes, we’re freaks. But curious ones. But the main compelling reason is that we will get extra hours in the day. With a 3 hour core sleep and four 20 minute naps, we are sleeping only 4 hours and 20 minutes a day. On a full blown Uberman Schedule, you only have six 20 minutes naps, which means you are sleeping only 2 hours a day. That equals 6 extra hours a day! Time to catch up on reading, start a new hobby, learn a musical instrument, train for a new career.
Tommy Gunned?
U.S. Rep Hooted Off AIDS Stage: “About 50 AIDS activists shouted, whistled and booed their way though a speech Tuesday by U.S. Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson, who delivered the entire, inaudible address shielded by nearly a dozen Secret Service and other security agents.” Wired
InVESTigative report:
I love my Scott eVest. It’s got dozens of pockets for the PDA, cellphone, music box, Leatherman etc. I carry around with me all the time, and conduits between the pockets to pass wires inside the vest to headsets etc. (Isn’t Bluetooth supposed to make the need for this passé?) Recently Scott has come under fire for using a Playboy Bunny in its ads. Interesting to read their defensive justification , which doesn’t make all that much sense to me.
Pot Calls Kettle Black
![[pot]](https://i0.wp.com/us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20020708/thumb.1026166277.bush_pmm103.jpg "pot")
"The genie is out of the bottle…"
Nightmare scenario of antibiotic resistance has arrived, experts say.
“Medical experts have long described it as the nightmare scenario of antibiotic resistance: the day when staphylococcus aureus, cause of some of the most common and troublesome infections to afflict man, becomes resistant to the antibiotic arsenal’s weapon of last resort, vancomycin.
The nightmare scenario has arrived. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has announced the first confirmed case of vancomycin-resistant staph aureus – known in the medical world as VRSA – found last month in a Michigan man …
The news leaves experts… bleakly contemplating a future in which common staph aureus infections won’t be treatable with any antibiotics – which was the case before the discovery of penicillin changed modern medicine. Prior to penicillin, many surgical procedures which now routinely save lives would have been too dangerous because of the risk of infection.
Penicillin is now nearly useless against staph aureus; overuse of the drug fuelled resistance, a process in which the rapidly evolving bug simply learns how to evade the drug’s fire power.” National Post (Toronto) [via David Brake]
Burning Truth
Do Firefighters Like to Set Fires? ![[Arizona's Rodeo fire]](https://i0.wp.com/graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2002/07/09/science/09fire.184.jpg "Arizona's Rodeo fire")
Arson, an environmentalist in the Northwest declared confidently in newspaper accounts after the arrests, is wildfire fighters’ “dirtiest little secret.”
A former fire department engineer in Arizona told a reporter that most arson fires were started by active or retired firefighters — a fact he said he had learned in his training.
But forensic experts who study arsonists say there is no evidence to support the idea that firefighters are any more prone to sparking fires than anyone else. NY Times
7,000 times sweeter
Government approves marketing of new artificial sweetener:
“Neotame, a nonnutritive sweetener said to be 7,000 to 13,000 times sweeter than sugar, has been approved for marketing as an additive in candies, soft drinks and some other products, the Food and Drug Administration ( news – web sites) announced Friday…
FDA officials said it has “negligible if any calories,” but it is unknown if it will meet the agency’s technical requirements to be labeled, as is aspartame, was having zero calories.” Yahoo! News
Light Beverages
Light turns into glowing liquid: ‘Light can be turned into a glowing stream of liquid that splits into droplets and splatters off surfaces just like water. The researchers who’ve worked out how to do this say “liquid light” would be the ideal lifeblood for optical computing, where chips send light around optical “circuits” to process data.’ New Scientist
The Right Stuff
A kinder, gentler militia?: “In the aftermath of Sept. 11, fringe militia organizations are recasting themselves as neighborhood watch groups. But old ways die hard.” Salon
Readers of FmH may recall I was very interested in the reactions of the paramilitary Right to the 9-11 events. Early coverage focused almost exclusively on the impact on recruitment.
Substitute
Myers as Moon?: “Austin Powers star Mike Myers is in talks to star in a biopic about legendary Who drummer Keith Moon.
Myers and Who frontman Roger Daltrey have discussed plans for a forthcoming movie. The comic actor says he hopes it will come off.
Notorious hellraiser Moon died of an drug overdose in 1978 at the age of 32.” This is London
Sending "Falun Gong is Good" to World Cup viewers…
China embarrassed as Falun Gong hijacks satellite: “Embarrassed Chinese officials last night called on the international community for support in condemning recent hijackings by the Falun Gong movement of one of the China’s main television and radio satellites.” The Age
Pause to let the poet pass…
![[Kenneth Koch, 1925-2002]](https://i0.wp.com/www.poets.org/bin/poets/kkoch.jpg "Kenneth Koch, 1925-2002")
R.I.P. at 77, ‘New York school’ poet Kenneth Koch, who taught English at Columbia.
One Train May Hide Another
(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya)
In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line--
Then it is safe to go on reading.
In a family one sister may conceal another,
So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view
Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.
One father or one brother may hide the man,
If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.
So always standing in front of something the other
As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.
One wish may hide another. And one person's reputation may hide
The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another
On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you're not necessarily safe;
One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia
Antica one tomb
May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide another,
One small complaint may hide a great one.
One injustice may hide another--one colonial may hide another,
One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath
may hide another bath
As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.
One idea may hide another: Life is simple
Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein
One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory
One invention may hide another invention,
One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows.
One dark red, or one blue, or one purple--this is a painting
By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass,
These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin
May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The obstetrician
Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but
One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.
A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides
Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in
A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag
Bigger than her mother's bag and successfully hides it.
In offering to pick up the daughter's bag one finds oneself confronted by
the mother's
And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker
May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee
Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love
or the same love
As when "I love you" suddenly rings false and one discovers
The better love lingering behind, as when "I'm full of doubts"
Hides "I'm certain about something and it is that"
And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the
Garden of Eden
Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve.
Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.
When you come to something, stop to let it pass
So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where,
Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory
Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,
The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading
A Sentimental Journey look around
When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see
If it is standing there, it should be, stronger
And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore
May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk
May hide another, as when you're asleep there, and
One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs
Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the
foot of a tree
With one and when you get up to leave there is another
Whom you'd have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher,
One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man
May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.
You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It
can be important
To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.
Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid by Robert J. Sternberg, reviewed:
Only a few questions can be called basic to the human condition — such as “What can we eat?” or “Who created us?” — and lots of very smart people have been working on them for millennia. The “eating” thing, for instance, has been minutely parsed by agriculture, economics and the culinary arts (among other fields), while the question of origins has given us religion and several branches of the hard sciences. But there’s at least one question — as basic as any other in its topical relevance and its grounding in the ancient — that human inquiry has only recently begun seriously to address. It was asked in caves, by people clad in mastodon-hide shifts, and chances are it crossed your mind this very day. “How,” it goes, “can people be so stupid?” And who knows the answer, really? I don’t — do you? Salon
Not-quite-white supremacist goes on trial:
‘The trial begins of a mixed race US man and his partner accused of plotting to blow up Jewish and black landmarks to ignite “racial holy war”.’
BBC
All You Need is Love
Give me $1 bn, I’ll give you peace: Maharishi Yogi:
“Maharishi said that with $1 billion he could train 40,000 expert meditators, or “Vedic Pandits”, who would generate enough good vibes to save the world. His press office said $85 million toward that goal had already been raised.” The Times of India
Taking Movie Fans for a Ride
Trailer for non-existent film is really car advert:
“A car firm has made a trailer for a film which doesn’t really exist.
The trailer directed by Michael Mann and starring Benicio Del Toro is supposedly for a movie called Lucky Star.
But it is actually part of an advertising campaign for a new Mercedes-Benz range of SL-Class sports cars.” Ananova
Anniversary Bash?
Bin Laden plans fresh terror for September:
“Terrorists are planning a series of spectacular attacks on American, British and Israeli targets to coincide with the anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Centre on 11 September last year.
Intelligence agencies in the UK, southern Asia and the Middle East are detecting an increased volume of communications between suspected al-Qaeda cells as the organisation, led by the fugitive Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden, accelerates efforts to pull off a major operation in the days around the anniversary of the New York and Washington attacks.” Guardian UK
Economists Tell the Poor: ‘You’re doing better, feeling worse’
Globalization Has Helped Poor, Study Says: “Far from creating poverty as critics claim, rapid globalization of the world economy has sliced the proportion of abject poor across the planet, according to a controversial new study released on Monday.
It says that freer commerce, epitomized by the cutting of tariffs and the lifting of trade barriers, has boosted economic growth and lifted the incomes of rich and poor alike.” Reuters This may miss the point of the anti-globalization movement, which is only partly about the material costs to the world’s poor of the spread of Western-multinational-dominated capitalism. How about the spiritual impoverishment of the growth of homogeneous consumerism and the growing global reach of corporations to rape the environment and the biosphere? It also seems absurd to dismiss the relevance of evidence that the gap between the world’s richest and poorest is growing by suggesting that it is ‘only’ Africa that lags behind. Blaming the victim: “Whether the disastrous African performance is due to insufficient globalization on the continent or whether Africa’s weak governance, low education levels and fragmented civil society put the opportunities of globalization out of reach is almost impossible to tell,”says the report.
East Coast’s turn?
Quebec forest fires blanket eastern United States with smoke, apparently as far south as Washington DC. Yahoo News
Here in Boston, I haven’t yet noticed.
Sleight of Terrorist Hand
Al Qaeda Figure Hidden by U.K. Intelligence. Abu Qatada is described by some as “the spiritual leader and possible puppet master of al Qaeda’s European networks” This is interesting; the British fear arresting or deporting him for fear of terrorist reprisals, so British intelligence confines him and his family at a safe house out of the ken of official government channels. He loses contact with his network and is effectively immobilized with little risk to Britain … at least until Time magazine broke the story of this subterfuge, I guess. Reuters
Re Typing:
“Could a modern evolutionary algorithm and a huge input samplediscover a better (keyboard) arrangement?” The result ends up looking remarkably like Dvorak. [via Robot Wisdom]
Windows Assassin
SpamAssassin gets raves from users. Now its developers are apparently working on a Windows product based on the SpamAssassin engine, they say.
Eyes Wide Shut?
Tom Cruise says his children will be raised far from the States. ‘ “I think the U.S. is terrifying and it saddens me,” he told the British paper the Daily Express. “You only have to look at the state of affairs in America.” ‘ FOXNews Others who have linked to this story have accused Cruise of hypocrisy, noting how terrifying they find Scientology, of which Cruise is a devotee, to be. I’ll refrain; I’m not sure we know enough about his childrearing practices to determine if his participation in the sect is more of a threat to them than raising them in the US would be.
Is the death of the web at hand?
Court backs Danish paper’s linking ban:
Challenging the World Wide Web’s fundamental premise of linking, a Danish court ordered an Internet news service to stop linking to Web sites of Danish newspapers.
Copenhagen’s lower bailiff’s court ruled Friday that Newsbooster.com was in direct competition with the newspapers and that the links it provided to specific news articles damaged the value of the newspapers’ advertisements.Washington Post
The Danish Newspaper Publishers’ Association brought the suit on behalf of its twenty constituent newspapers, links to all of which were removed by Newsbooster when the ruling was handed down. Here, for your surfing pleasure, is the trade organization’s page of links to the involved newspapers.
The body in question:
Dispute arises over Ted Williams’ remains. His son wants his body cryogenically preserved and Alcor Life Extension has taken possession of his remains. Others, led by his estranged daughter, want to respect his wish to be cremated. She suggests her half-brother’s motive may be to sell the baseball great’s DNA, or cloning rights, at some time in the future. “I will rescue my father’s body,” she vows. Salon
Fluid Intake Dept:
Study: Beer Builds Strong Bones:
“Scientists have kept the secret to strong bones bottled up for years. Now, a new study has raised the bar on the list of nutrients that could have benefits. …(T)he good news is pouring out — beer builds bones.”
Yahoo! News OTOH:
Drinking Too Much Water Can Kill You: Report: “A new review of three deaths of US military recruits highlights the dangers of drinking too much water. Yahoo! News
Visual Searching
Garrett Vreeland says:
“just caught this, at windows versiontracker: ephoto. a knockoff of apple’s iphoto, but it does visual searches. sketch a drawing of what you’re looking for, and it’ll try to match it. intriguing. oh, it also runs on os x …”
‘Natural’ Artists:
![[cosmic; Crumb]](https://i0.wp.com/www.crumbmuseum.com/cosmic2.jpg "It's Cosmic")
The Crumbs: A Family of Artists: Members of the Crumb family — R. Crumb, his older brother, his daughter, and her mother — will be featured in five exhibits in Manhattan in upcoming months. NY Times
Related: Here’s the Crumb Museum; a Salon portrait from last year, asking whether “the bull-goose legend of underground comix the Brueghel of our time or the purveyor of an arrested juvenile vision?”; the Crumb Products outlet, run by R. Crumb’s son Jesse and offering “original art,
autographed underground comics and books,
limited edition figurines,
prints and posters”; ![[Stoned Again]](https://i0.wp.com/www.lambiek.net/artists/crumb/crumb_stoned_agin.jpg "Stoned Again")
the Lambiek Gallery’s Crumb site; the Toonopedia Crumb pages; and (!) a limited-edition Crumb collaboration with Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch
and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship:
Any collaboration between Charles Bukowski and R. Crumb is a notable event. Each man is a consummate example of the anti-establishment artist who calls society to task for its foibles and failures. With humor and scathing satire Bukowski and Crumb have exemplified this important tradition.
These unpublished last journals by Bukowski candidly detail the events of his daily life, which R. Crumb has brilliantly illustrated with five full color hand printed serigraphs and six full page black-and-white illustrations.
Succeeding in Business
Paul Krugman: “President Bush profited personally from aggressive accounting identical to the recent scams that have shocked the nation.” NY Times op-ed
FmH mailing list (again)
You can get every posting (or a daily digest of all posts) to FmH as an email, by subscribing to the FmH mailing list at Yahoo Groups. If there is interest, the mailing list can also be for discussion of posts or issues. I could change the comment icon at the end of each post so it points to the mailing list instead of my own email address, if this takes off. [I prefer this to the script-based commenting systems several of which I tried a number of months ago and which continue to proliferate… and which invariably break, or slow down page loads by a significant factor, or both. — FmH]
Declare E-Mail Independence
Net Effect — Simson Garfinkel: “More than 630,000 AT&T customers were forced to make this change. They could have used the occasion to simply and inexpensively assert their electronic individuality and independence. Instead, the majority behaved like good sheep and did what they were told: moved from one mega-corporate address that they didn’t own to another. Baa-a-a-a! Baa-a-a-a!” MIT Technology Review Access to the rest of the article at Tech Review requires a subscription, but you can subscribe to Simson Garfinkel’s mailing list simsoft@nitroba.com for unrestricted access to his writing on digital freedom and cyberculture.
Annals of the Invasion of Privacy (cont’d.):
Rental car tracking spurs suit… again. Budget Rent-a-Car is apparently tracking its customers in Arizona with GPS, using the data they collect on routes driven and speeds over those routes to impose extra charges without their customers’ foreknowledge. A Connecticut rental agency which created a furor by doing the same thing was ordered by a state consumer protection agency to refund fines it had levied on renters who had been speeding. Arizona Daily Star [via Slashdot]
Was Atkins Right?
What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?:
“At the very moment that the government started telling Americans to eat less fat, we got fatter. The truths about why we gain weight and why it is so hard to lose it just might turn out to be much different from what we have been led to think.
(…)The crucial example of how the low-fat recommendations were oversimplified is shown by the impact — potentially lethal, in fact — of low-fat diets on triglycerides, which are the component molecules of fat. By the late 60’s, researchers had shown that high triglyceride levels were at least as common in heart-disease patients as high L.D.L. cholesterol, and that eating a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet would, for many people, raise their triglyceride levels, lower their H.D.L. levels and accentuate what Gerry Reaven, an endocrinologist at Stanford University, called Syndrome X. This is a cluster of conditions that can lead to heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.
It took Reaven a decade to convince his peers that Syndrome X was a legitimate health concern, in part because to accept its reality is to accept that low-fat diets will increase the risk of heart disease in a third of the population…” NY Times Magazine
Closing-the-Barn-Door Dept:
"It’s a snakehead but it’s not James Carville…"
Maureen Dowd: Have You Seen This Fish?:
‘Over this hot holiday weekend, people here have been more absorbed with the search for the noxious and elusive Snakehead than the search for the noxious and elusive Evildoer.
Forty miles east of Washington, in a scummy pond in Crofton, Md., hidden behind a shopping center, biologists have discovered an ichthyological Andromeda strain.
Lurking beneath the algae is a walking fish that can breathe air and waddle on land for days, dubbed Frankenfish by the locals and “the baddest bunny in the bush” by a Maryland Department of Natural Resources biologist, Bob Lunsford.’ NY Times
Finding Their Inner Trader…
Portfolios Depressed, Traders Seek Therapy: “Instead of simply seeking psychological help from their therapists, traders and hedge fund managers now expect investment advice too.: NY Times
RIP John Frankenheimer
Resilient Director of Feature Films and TV Movies Dies at 72: “John Frankenheimer, one of the foremost directors of the 1960’s with classic films like The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, Birdman of Alcatraz and The Train, died of a massive stroke today from complications after spinal surgery. He was 72.
Mr. Frankenheimer, whose career stumbled badly in the late 1970’s and 1980’s because of personal problems and alcoholism, came back in the 1990’s with significant television work that was flourishing at the time of his death.” NY Times
Annals of the Invasion of Privacy (cont’d.):
Rental car tracking spurs suit… again. Budget Rent-a-Car is apparently tracking its customers in Arizona with GPS, using the data they collect on routes driven and speeds over those routes to impose extra charges without their customers’ foreknowledge. A Connecticut rental agency which created a furor by doing the same thing was ordered by a state consumer protection agency to refund fines it had levied on renters who had been speeding. Arizona Daily Star [via Slashdot]
Don’t tread on me…
Stars, stripes and terror searches on Fourth of July: “…(A)ter an increase in intercepted al-Qaeda communications in recent days, President Bush’s national security advisers considered raising it to orange.
That, in effect, would have cancelled the July 4 festivities by mobilising the Armed Forces and restricting access to public events.
Instead, it has resorted to security measures that are only marginally less draconian; as Americans gear up for a defiant celebration of their founding principles, they are surrounded by reminders of the threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…” Times of London
The new gilded age …
… and its discontents: “Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz talks about the corporate looting spree and Bush’s woeful mismanagement of the economy.” Salon
Put alternative medicine back in its box:
“The failings of contemporary medical practice are best confronted from the rational basis of scientific medicine, not by a retreat into the mystical traditions of alternative health,” says Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick in another of his eminently wise sp!ked columns.
On the other hand…
“It seems what we think we know about lefties is not right at all.” National Post
Desert Storm with a twist:
US maps out Iraq invasion A document leaked to the New York Times has detailed the logistics of a possible all-out invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. BBC
How One Spam Leads to Another
“If you want to be your own boss and make money working from home while increasing the size of your penis and shopping for cut-rate electronic products from China — you’re in luck.
The quantity of e-mailed advertising pitches for these and other fabulous opportunities is about to increase dramatically, according to research by Bob West, an anti-spam activist.” Wired
Boy meets grill
Man fires up monster grill: “Neighbors thought Michael Goldman was crazy when they saw the crane lift his 1,800-pound barbecue grill into the air, over his house, around the trees and into his back yard…” Columbus Ledger-Enquirer
Russia going red again?
Russia proposes manned mission to Mars Miami Herald [via Slashdot]
Sleep Late, Sleep Often…
“Power Nap” Prevents Burnout; Morning Sleep Perfects A Skill:
“Evidence is mounting that sleep – even a nap – appears to enhance information processing and learning. New experiments by NIMH grantee Alan Hobson, M.D., Robert Stickgold, Ph.D., and colleagues at Harvard University show that a midday snooze reverses information overload and that a 20 percent overnight improvement in learning a motor skill is largely traceable to a late stage of sleep that some early risers might be missing.” Science Daily
Sample Victimization
Woman sues over unsolicited Prozac mailing. In my continuing coverage of the pharmaceutical industry’s lack of scruples, this takes the cake (so far). This Florida woman, who took Prozac briefly seven years ago but not since, and from a different pharmacy (although part of the same national mega-chain; don’t get me started on that aspect of the story!), opened her mailbox to find a free, unsolicited sample box of the new once-a-week formulation of Prozac being pushed by Eli Lilly to hold on to market share as the patent on the original formulation expires. The pharmacy chain that did the mailing — funded by Lilly to the approximate tune of $63 wholesale for the four pills — says it was only responding to doctor’s orders, and indeed Lilly had apparently arranged for an area medical practice to provide prescriptions to the pharmacy. A form letter congratulated recipients of the samples on taking the first step toward their recovery, after instructing them to stop their daily Prozac one day before taking the first of the weekly pills. Obvious problems with this picture include the fact that someone accessed her confidential prescribing record for marketing purposes; the lack of control over who received and opened the mail (children?); the potential public exposure of the fact that she was, or had been, treated for depression if the delivered package was conspicuous; the lack of any medical decision-making about whether a switch to the weekly form was medically indicated, and whether it was safe in conjunction with whatever other medical conditions she had or other medications she was taking; and the scumsucking bottom-feeding behavior of the MDs who Lilly probably hired to sign bunches of these ‘prescriptions’ for their patients and former patients. My question — for every recipient of these samples who protests and/or files suit, how many simply start taking the freebies, with or without stopping their existing Prozac (if they’re on it) as instructed in the form letter? SJ Mercury News
On summer reading
A journey and a book are perfect companions: Alain de Botton explores the pleasures and quirks of summer reading, especially when travelling. He endorses ‘reading against the grain’ — that is, books ‘inappropriate’ to the locale to which we have travelled — which I love to do. He also finds it a ‘cherished illusion’ that we will have scads of time to read while travelling, but I actually do get a far greater density of reading for pure pleasure done while away than at home. [probably because I take a break from weblogging!] And 165 short book reviews from the 9th century, and one man’s view of ten top novels on campus, from a writer who teaches Shakespeare at a Montreal university. [links courtesy of Robot Wisdom]
Sdrawkcab
Revolting
Eight Cities in Patriot Act Revolt: “Over the last three months, the Massachusetts cities of Cambridge, Northampton and Amherst and the township of Leverett, as well as the town of Carrboro, N.C., all passed resolutions that call the USA Patriot Act a threat to the civil rights of the residents of their communities.” ABC
Guardian readers’ weblogs:
FmH gets a notice in The Guardian‘s collection of weblog links. Thanks to whichever Follower mentioned us to them, and a hearty welcome to any readers coming this way from there.
Ickes rants:
Heard on Metafilter: ‘Former BBC anchor David Ickes, who claimed he was “the son of god” in 1991 has got a new job at the Sci-Fi channel ranting. In Network, anchor Howard Beale has an on air nervous breakdown. Instead of taking him off the air, the network gives him a weekly show to rant to the nation. Oddly, Icke’s idea about reality is very similar to Philip K. Dick’s Valis, Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles and a recent mefi discussion.’ The Guardian asks, also about Ickes: “Would Canada take seriously his warnings of power-hungry extraterrestrial reptiles or would he be dismissed as an anti-Semitic bigot?”
Bush’s Insider Trading
Bush’s Insider Connections Preceded Huge Profit on Stock Deal: “It has been widely reported that Texas Gov. George W. Bush made money over the years with a little help from his friends. But new details show that he served on an energy corporation’s board and was able to realize a huge profit by selling his stock in the corporation because an accounting sleight-of-hand concealed it was losing large sums of money. Shortly after he sold, the stock price plummeted. That profit helped make him a multimillionaire.” public i What will the Administration do to try to close this barn door after the horse is gone?
RSS?
I feed RSS now, having just discovered the feature is enabled in Blogger Pro. You’re welcome to it; the file you want is http://gelwan.com/follow_rss.xml.
Homeland Insecurity
“…(W)e’ve built a major black-is-white logic reversal into the very nature of the threat: Although we’ve killed countless members of the enemy group, including much of its leadership, disrupted its infrastructure, captured reams of intelligence on its activities, it’s suddenly stronger than ever before. Likewise, we ascribe substantial organizational talents to what we also describe as uniquely disorganized. This new group has become, the Times story implies, a threat not least of all because it is less a group than the former group, which itself was notable for its loose-knitness (although, in comparison with the new group, the former group was apparently a model of central governance). By the logic we are applying to Al Qaeda and its offspring, we can never prevail. Whatever we do to thwart the enemy just makes it stronger. We are always, because of our size and power and resources, necessarily weaker. (Al Qaeda has something similar, perhaps, to the ghostly powers the Vietnam-era guerrillas were credited with having over conventional military forces.)…” New York Magazine [via Adam]
R.I.P. Ted Williams
Bigger is Better…
…when it comes to the G spot: “Drugs such as Viagra should work for some women – especially if they have a big G spot. This spot, famed for producing spectacular orgasms, turns out to be awash with the enzymes that these drugs act on.” New Scientist
Netocracy:
The new power elite and life after capitalism by
Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist : “The netocracy, say pundits Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist, will be the new
power elite, controlling networks – both social and digital – and displacing
the bourgeoisie as the ruling class. Its members will understand that
equilibria and static positions are boring and artificial approximations, and
dynamic fluxes are neither. And that interesting logical structures are not
tree-like hierarchies, but are interconnected in potentially very complicated
ways – what Deleuze called the “rhizome” – just as Web pages, genes and
friendship networks are.” New Scientist
"Lord Buckley
could be described as a jazz monologist and comic known for retelling biblical and classical tales in beat lingo. He had a profound influence on a whole generation of comedians, including Robin Williams, Tommy Smothers, and Jonathan Winters, but he’s not a household name. Oliver Trager’s just-published biography, Dig Infinity!, 12 years in the making, hopes to remedy that…” Listen to a July 1st feature on Lord Buckley from NPR’s Morning Edition, including audio clips from some of his transcendent monologues.
Straighten out…
Now, I look at all you cats and kitties out there
a whippin' and a wailin' and a jumpin' up and down
and suckin' up all that juice and pattin' each other on the back
and a hippin' each other who the greatest cat in the world is.
Mr. Malenkov,
Mr. Talenkov,
Mr. Eisenhower,
Mr. Whoozerwheezer,
Mr. Whiserwhooser,
Mr. Woodhill,
Mr. Beachhill,
an' Mr. Churchill,
and all them other hills gonna get you straight,
and if they can't get you straight
they know a cat that knows a cat who'll straighten you...
Blogrolling
If you maintain a weblog with a list of recommended blogs (the term coming into favor seems to be a ‘blogroll’), you might want to consider maintaining that list with the Blogrolling Link manager instead of handcoding it into your template. When I surf to a blog I want to add to my sidebar, I can now do so with a single click, after setting up a ”Blogroll this!” link to my browser toolbar. And the will tell readers which sites have been updated recently (within the last two hours). If a weblog on my list is pinging weblogs.com, a mouseover on the link should pop up the time of the last update.
By the way, if you’re linking to me, I would appreciate it if you would use “http://gelwan.com/followme.html” as the URL. There are so many other ways out there of reaching FmH that it is very hard for me to aggregate data about who is linking to me. In the Touchgraph of links to FmH (see just below), for example, there are actually several distinct nodes for FmH using different URLs.
Fool with this…
TouchGraph GoogleBrowser V1.00: definitely deserves to be played with. Doesn’t work for me in Mozilla, may be IE-specific. And requires the Java runtime environment (JRE) 1.3+.
Beesweb
The official Richard Thompson site is up.
"Web site humming
Digit-throbbing
Fibre-strobing
Electron-dancing
Slender pathways
Pulse with fragments
All our little
Mice connected
May we grasp you
Better better
Xml you
Inter-eyebrow
Down the foggy
Chains of network
To your laptop
Stream a dream."[via Looka!]
Diplomacy bites the dust
Why the president stopped listening to Powell:
“In the seemingly endless litany of Middle East violence, it was two suicide bombings in two days last week that fractured Yasser Arafat’s tenuous relations with the Bush administration once and for all.
The president’s rose garden address on Monday not only marked a clear break with the past in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it also reflected a decisive shift in the constellation of forces within the administration itself, which have blown US policy back and forth for the past 18 months.” Guardian UK
Essentially — Colin Powell drags Bush kicking and screaming into the realms of statesmanship, only to find that Bush doesn’t have the taste, the grasp, the aptitude, or the henchmen to sustain the effort at diplomacy. Will Powell be marginalized further in the Administration, or extruded totally?
Warblogger Watch:
Keeping track” of the war exhortations of the warbloggers.”
Divided They Fight
Brendan O’Neill writes: “While President Bush and Prime Minister Blair stand shoulder to shoulder, their forces in Afghanistan can barely see eye to eye.” The American Prospect. O’Neill, a London-based journalist and editor at spiked, has his own weblog here, in which he writes more about the Bush-league US-UK fractiousness.
Also: “Senior officials in the Prime Minister’s office have launched an astonishing attack on America’s handling of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and al-Qa’eda fugitives.
They have told The Telegraph that troops carrying out house-to-house searches in the remote tribal areas of Pakistan along the Afghanistan border were “blundering” with a “march-in-shooting” approach.
The US action was “backfiring”, increasing support for terrorism and making it harder for bin Laden and his henchmen to be caught.”
And: John Simpson writes: ‘Arrogant’ Bush shakes British bedrock of Atlantic Alliance
“In 32 years of reporting on international affairs, I have never seen Britain and the United States more separated from each other: not during the terrible last years of the Vietnam War, not during President Reagan’s Iran-Contra dealings or his espousal of the crackpot Star Wars system.
The way George W Bush’s administration deals with the outside world is affecting even the most traditionally pro-American elements in British society.
On two occasions last week I met senior civil servants from government departments in London who would normally be regarded as the natural bedrock of support for the Atlantic Alliance. In both cases I found open contempt for current American policy, especially towards the Middle East.”
Telegraph UK [gratitude for all of these links to the relentless Blowback]
Prozac spotlight, jaundiced eye:
Brooke at Bittershack linked to this essay by mental health attorney Nils Riis with admiration. Now, do I just have a blindspot as a defensive psychiatrist, or is it the kind of overblown us-vs.-them diatribe someone writes just to be politically correct and pitifully self-righteous? Sentiment like this was important, true, necessary and moving to all of us in 1962 when Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But especially if Riis is a mental health advocate attorney it would be fitting forty years later for him to show some recognition that, although the legal process is adversarial, the psychiatrists and other mental health personnel caring for the psychiatrically distressed are by and large not the enemy but concerned helping professionals. Except as a literary conceit.
The ‘eagle’ character in this piece is in fact a dangerous caricature of the mentally-ill-as-romantic-hero right out of R.D. Laing and the antipsychiatry movement of the ’60’s. I know, I was there, as an ‘antipsychiatric’ psychiatric ward attendant long before I went to medical school and became a psychiatrist, clutching my volume of Laing and doing my best to convince the patients that their peer-to-peer work with me was much more important than cooperating with their psychiatrist. Both phases of my career have been equally passionate commitments to the rights and welfare of the psychiatrically ill; my thinking has just gotten abit more sophisticated and realistic and less misguided along the way. (Isn’t it usually true that there’s no scorn like that of a religious convert for the doctrine from which s/he has converted?)
Laing was a genius in phenomenological description of the inner world of the schizophrenic and humanizing him or her as a distressed-One-of-Us (rather than the Other we often make our mentally ill to be in this society); I still use Laing’s 1959 The Divided Self as an unsurpassed depiction of the disease in my teaching of medical students and residents. Fine to champion resistance to stigmatization and dehumanization… but he lost me when he started to proclaim that the process of the breakdown, the psychotic episode, should not be interrupted by treatment because it represented some sort of heroic struggle to remake oneself by breaking free of the mold of the oppressive socialization paradigm of modern society. He forgot his own phenomenological insights about the unbearable suffering psychotic patients undergo, a torment that caregivers have an obligation to relieve and need considerable specialized training and technique — both psychological and psychopharmacological — to address effectively. Laing descended into irrelevancy and, ultimately, it appears, madness himself.
Riis tries to sound like Laing, or his similarly overboard American counterpart Thomas Szasz, as he goes on,
Outside the hospital, my clients face troubles far more challenging than the ones inside their heads. There is stigma, of course, often compounded by the crippling effects of poverty. There is the growing sense that the public needs protection from people with mental health problems. There are economic policies that brush aside the people who struggle hardest in day-to-day life. There is environmental degradation, the postmodern religion of unsustainable growth, consumption, and production.
Hey buddy, work for peace, social justice, human dignity, basic economic equity, environmental protection all you like. Subvert the dominant paradigm that generation by generation perfects its relentless ability to empty lives of meaning. But do a different kind of good work inside the mental hospital, one that is collaborative rather than polarizing against all those good mental health professionals working for the same ideals. Most of us in the mental health field are passionately committed to the civil rights and human dignity of our patients — unfeeling people primarily motivated in career choice to amass power, glory or riches don’t go into the psychiatric field, believe it or not — and have welcomed the advances in mental health and involuntary commitment statutes that make your diatribe little more than an unreal caricature. The troubles your clients face outside the hospital are emphatically not “far more challenging than the ones inside their heads”, except maybe the challenge of being made figureheads for the ignorant (even if, as I’ll grant you is possible, well-intentioned), misguided and self-serving agendas of people like you, Riis. Among the patient rights for which you should be advocating is their right to relief from the unimaginably tormenting and not at all romantic suffering of their psychiatric conditions.Your patients are not simply people who chose to crow in imitation of a bird of prey in a public place, no matter how loudly. There are all sorts of arbitrary social oppression and intolerance of deviance in modern society, but the mental health field in western society is not a tool of social oppression or even conformity. (There is, by the way, a less histrionic, considerable body of scholarly work within sociology and social psychology which attempts to see ‘madness’ as a result of social labelling or attribution. But, at the risk of making a blanket dismissal, I’ll make a blanket dismissal. It doesn’t work.)
As the superintendent of my psychiatric hospital and a treater of patients with the most severe mental illnesses of psychotic extent, I frequently testify at commitment hearings to keep people in the hospital when they present an imminent risk (to themselves or others around them or are so substantially impaired by their illness as to be incapable of caring for themselves in a less restrictive setting) and no recognition of their need to seek help to avert such harm. Ethically, I buy into this degree of paternalism when it is strictly based on substantial imminent risk; barring potential to harm someone, people have a right to be mentally ill, to refuse treatment, and live their lives unimpeded, and in such cases I facilitate their rapid release from the hospital in accordance with their wishes. Those that need to be committed, however, are represented or assisted at such a hearing by an attorney, usually court-appointed. The best of these attorneys know that their obligation to do what is best for their patients means being a thoughtful, supportive facilitator of their clients’ collaboration with their hospital caregivers. The worst, like Riis would probably be if I ever faced him in a courtroom, would be cutting off their clients’ noses to spite their faces, insisting on their clients’ release at all cost.
This AdBusters “Prozac spotlight” goes on, if you click the arrow down at the bottom and continue to surf, with a disclaimer. The author, he says, is not being critical of the people who work in mental health, who ‘take care of the rejects,’ ‘after all, somebody’s got to’. He boldly proclaims himself to be ‘attacking the theories of psychiatry’ instead. This is either naive or somewhat disingenuous or both, since there is perhaps less separation in psychiatry than any other healthcare discipline between theory and practice. They configure each other in a dialectical relationship shaped by the empirical experiences of thoughtful and responsible practitioners.
Moving along, we come to a long, yellow-journalism rewarming of the old stories about antidepressant-induced suicide and violence and the wrongful death lawsuits against the pharmaceutical manufacturers which have ensued. It is full of the same half-truths, poorly designed research, and irresponsible unwarranted conclusions about which I have written before. Modern antipsychiatrists have reacted with glee to the discovery of akathisia, the syndrome of agitation and restlessness various psychiatric medications can cause. Not the root of all evil, but a side effect for prescribers to be aware of and manage conscientiously. There are very few free lunches; most therpeutically useful medications, throughout medicine, have costs as well as benefits.
Finally, AdBusters assembles a useful collection of ‘mad movement’ resources that empower, dignify and support ‘survivors’, refuseniks, outsiders… and prideful lunatics.’
Note to Brooke: Whatever the depths of your clearly ambivalent feelings about your own treatment (about which you are quite candid), I fear they color your reading of Riis’ piece, which really has very little if anything to say about antidepressants or the ‘walking wounded’ depressed patients, who are even less victims of psychiatric oppression than hospital-level patients with psychotic illnesses. I agree when you write —
“The truth is, we need the drugs to be available, and they often do work temporary miracles, and that is not a minor truth. But they are not the end, only the means. They are the life-preserver in the moment of near-drowning. They are not a substitute for swimming lessons.”
In fact, I think I said much the same down below in reacting at length to last week’s New York Times piece on new antidepressant developments. And I write often here in disgust about the industrialization of psychiatry and the commodification of prescribing. But Riis, Laing, Szasz, and the otherwise perspicacious AdBusters (to which I’m a subscriber and longtime contributor, admiring and joining in their fight against ‘mental pollution’) should not be your champions on this issue…
Thanks to mark wood, here’s a more realistic view of what you get when you fight to release the patients from the psychiatric hospital — Fighting the Demons on $930 a Month by Ted Schrecker:
Imagine A psychiatric hospital in which accommodation is often unclean and sometimes unsafe; violence against patients by people just passing through is common; patients are left largely on their own to feed (or not feed) themselves; and some cannot afford the medications that enable them to function.
Even in these hardened times, the existence of such a hospital would be considered a scandal. Nevertheless, many Canadians must fight the demons of serious mental illness under precisely such conditions — no longer in hospital, but now in that abstraction called “the community.”… Toronto Star
We’ll choose our leaders
From Mohammed Dahlan, until last month head of the Palestinian Authority’s security organisation in Gaza, a member of the Fatah leadership and an adviser to Yasser Arafat, and has been regarded as a possible successor to Arafat: “Far from setting out a vision of peace, President Bush’s plan for the Middle East points instead to an American decision to give up on the peace process. What has effectively been done is to transform a series of demands of the international community and international law into a series of demands to be made of Yasser Arafat. It also gives a new meaning to the word democracy, where our leaders are to be chosen by others.” Guardian UK [via Also Not Found… ]
Pentagon Program Promotes Psychopharmacological Warfare
‘The Advantages and Limitations of Calmatives for Use as a Non-Lethal Technique, a 49 page report obtained last week by the Sunshine Project under US information freedom law, has revealed a shocking Pentagon program that is researching psychopharmacological weapons. Based on “extensive review conducted on the medical literature and new developments in the pharmaceutical industry”, the report concludes that “the development and use of [psychopharmacological weapons] is achievable and desirable.” These mind-altering weapons violate international agreements on chemical and biological warfare as well as human rights. Some of the techniques discussed in the report have already been used by the US in the “War on Terrorism”.’
This comes, [via New World Disorder]
from the Sunshine Project, “an international non-profit organization with offices in Hamburg, Germany and Austin, Texas, USA. We work against the hostile use of biotechnology in the post-Cold War era. We research and publish to strengthen the global consensus against biological warfare and to ensure that international treaties effectively prevent development and use of biological weapons.”
Is this World War III?
Dan Hartung wonders. In asking the question, naturally, the related question of when they realized it was World War II comes up. The answer is, at least to me, surprising. lake effect
Kenosis:
Politikblogging and “empty protest”, a soliloquy from garrett vreeland:
i’ve been thinking about the concept of kenosis, as interpreted by james hillman. comparing it to political weblogging styles. he concieves there are three political states: passive on the sidelines, toeing the party line … and kenosis, what hillman defines as “empty protest.” having no answers, not knowing the correct course to follow, but knowing there’s something rotten in the state of denmark. politikblogs are as ineffective as hamlet, worrying his desire for public justice like a dog with his favorite toothsome discard. they rage on impotently, endlessly, simply for the sake of releasing emotions. no utopia at the end of the journey; just neverending protests. today, now, this link is the alpha and omega. when the issue drops from the public eye, the politikblog drops it as well. there are no threads to follow, no connection to a past or a future, no resolution, no responsibility. hillman calls empty protest ‘via negativa’, the negative way. i see no politikblogger achieving public justice for any major issue; what i keep coming across is simply a string of petty private revenges. at the present time, politikbloggers devour each other over the actions of politicians who don’t even know they exist, by reinterpreting carefully selected articles and opinion pieces generated by one of a double-handful of monopolistic media machines, as seen through the rose-colored glasses of their particular political caste. truly, “empty protest” … as is this entire paragraph. politipolitikbloggers are not alone; you see, i do hamlet well too. [wink]
American mujahid describes terror fight: ” Aqil Collins, an American Muslim freedom fighter who fought in Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo, says he volunteered to infiltrate bin Laden’s camp.” CNN
Wouldn’t the sentence ‘I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign’ have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?
Andrew Lipson’s Mathematical Lego Sculptures: Klein Bottle, Moebius Strips of various sizes, etc. [via slashdot]
Judge Says Executions Violate Constitution. The assault on the death penalty continues:
‘A U.S. district judge in New York ruled yesterday that the federal death penalty is unconstitutional because it creates “undue risk” of executing innocent defendants, the latest sign that DNA exonerations of death row inmates have begun to affect the way courts and legislatures think about capital punishment.’
This ruling is based not on the usual ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ foundation but due process concerns. Washington Post
Staggering AIDS Report From U.N.:
‘The global AIDS epidemic has only just begun, reaching proportions once considered impossible in the world’s most affected countries, the United Nations says in a devastating report released Tuesday.
HIV is spreading at alarming rates in Eastern Europe and Asia and “now outstrips even the worst-case scenarios” projected by epidemiologists tracking the deadliest disease in human history, the report says.’ Wired
Why Toshiba won’t sell you the coolest laptop around: “I’ll go out on a limb and claim that without advances in speech or handwriting recognition, a laptop’s footprint can’t get substantially smaller than this and still remain usable. You can’t get any smaller without shrinking the keyboard to the point where you can’t touch-type.” Slate
Rootless…
…but at Home in a Britannia All His Own: “The mutability of identity, the way people can slip in and out of personas to fit the occasion and confound and mollify others, is exactly what engages (british novelist Hari) Kunzru in his recently published first novel, The Impressionist. The book tells the story of Pran Nath Razdan, born in early 20th-century India to an English father and an Indian mother, and his cunning efforts to obliterate his past and make a life for himself in a world in which he has no natural place.” NY Times
My place in the Political Compass: Economic Left/Right: -6.75; Authoritarian/Libertarian: -7.54. But, to echo Rebecca, you already knew that about me…
As an inveterate Gaiman fan and a father who enjoys reading odd tales to my children [note to those of you who recommended it — we gave up on Lemony Snicket in disgust…] , I’m thrilled that Neil Gaiman‘s children’s book Coraline is out today. Here is a mini-review from the weblog of Jonathan Strahan, editor of Locus:
This is just nifty. It’s a 30,000 word short novel that tells of a young girl, Coraline, who moves into an odd old apartment with her distracted and much-too-busy parents. There are eccentric neighbours upstairs and downstairs, and a door in the living room that leads to nowhere (it was bricked up when the house was subdivided into apartments). Of course, the door does open, and into a place of threatening strangenesses where Coraline will encounter her “other mother”. Gaiman clearly knows what he’s doing here. His story telling voice is perfect (Gaiman often relates in his online diary how he regularly reads stories to his youngest daughter), and the story of a brave young girl overcoming incredible obstacles is the stuff of classics. I doubt I could be more impressed.
BTW, esteemed sci-fi writer John Shirley reviews Minority Report in Locus:
It must be both heaven and hell to master something this big, and it must happen all too rarely — yet Spielberg has done it. Oh there are flaws in the film, but not fatal ones…
And the enticing part:
The metaphysical hints and suggestions in Minority Report — rather like certain episodes of the The X-Files — are tantalizing, hinting of a spiritual, or at least a more psychically inclusive reality. Rightly, they are not deeply explored; they are a kind of background luminosity, only slightly more sharply seen here than in the real world.
Expletive Not Deleted:
Ford loses 2600 suit: “Online hacker magazine 2600 has emerged victorious in its campaign to retain ownership of the controversial FuckGeneralMotors.com domain…At one time FuckGeneralMotors.com (one of a series of sites 2600 registered to take shots at American corporate bigwigs, racism and the mass media in 1999) pointed at Ford. The motor company expressed concerns that the non-tech savvy would think Ford had created the site itself. ” The Register
More Philip Whalen:
THE EXPENSIVE LIFE
Tying up my plastic shoes
I realize I'm outside, this is the park & I am free
From whatever pack of nonsense & old tape loops
Play with the Ayer's dogs, Barney & Daphne
They don't ask me why I shave my head
"Cut the word lines," Burroughs recommends
Daphne & Barney fatter than ever & only I am dieting
(Crease along the dotted lines)
Loops of tacky thinking fall unloosed. The sun
Getting hotter than my flannel shirt requires
What about THE BUDDHIST REVIVAL IN CHINA?
Won't read it now... too blind to see it
Almost too blind to write this, in my room no flowers
The service station wants four bits for compresssed air
At only 16 pounds per square inch
I can see the farthest mountain.
29:VIII:87
TO THE MEMORY OF
Mr J who had been poor for years
Inherited all the money in the world
Bought a gun to blow a hole in his head
To let in air and light he said
To let me out
Today, I have my head to shave
There are lights and shadows in it
All too soon empty open ashes
Join mirthfully to earth
19:V:77
More Philip Whalen:
THE EXPENSIVE LIFE
Tying up my plastic shoes
I realize I'm outside, this is the park & I am free
From whatever pack of nonsense & old tape loops
Play with the Ayer's dogs, Barney & Daphne
They don't ask me why I shave my head
"Cut the word lines," Burroughs recommends
Daphne & Barney fatter than ever & only I am dieting
(Crease along the dotted lines)
Loops of tacky thinking fall unloosed. The sun
Getting hotter than my flannel shirt requires
What about THE BUDDHIST REVIVAL IN CHINA?
Won't read it now... too blind to see it
Almost too blind to write this, in my room no flowers
The service station wants four bits for compresssed air
At only 16 pounds per square inch
I can see the farthest mountain.
29:VIII:87
TO THE MEMORY OF
Mr J who had been poor for years
Inherited all the money in the world
Bought a gun to blow a hole in his head
To let in air and light he said
To let me out
Today, I have my head to shave
There are lights and shadows in it
All too soon empty open ashes
Join mirthfully to earth
19:V:77
More Philip Whalen:
THE EXPENSIVE LIFE
Tying up my plastic shoes
I realize I'm outside, this is the park & I am free
From whatever pack of nonsense & old tape loops
Play with the Ayer's dogs, Barney & Daphne
They don't ask me why I shave my head
"Cut the word lines," Burroughs recommends
Daphne & Barney fatter than ever & only I am dieting
(Crease along the dotted lines)
Loops of tacky thinking fall unloosed. The sun
Getting hotter than my flannel shirt requires
What about THE BUDDHIST REVIVAL IN CHINA?
Won't read it now... too blind to see it
Almost too blind to write this, in my room no flowers
The service station wants four bits for compresssed air
At only 16 pounds per square inch
I can see the farthest mountain.
29:VIII:87
TO THE MEMORY OF
Mr J who had been poor for years
Inherited all the money in the world
Bought a gun to blow a hole in his head
To let in air and light he said
To let me out
Today, I have my head to shave
There are lights and shadows in it
All too soon empty open ashes
Join mirthfully to earth
19:V:77
Today’s listen:
The Who Live at Leeds
(1995 digital remaster). Arguably the greatest live rock ‘n’ roll album ever (although Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense and the Band’s Last Waltz are right up there as all-time greats). Caught at the height of their protopunk (yes) power, before Daltry totally became a buffoon on stage and Townshend flamed out, unable to realize his grandiose vision. [Buying hint: don’t go for the deluxe edition with a second disc of a live Tommy performance unless rarities for rarities’ sake are your thing. Stick with the one-disc Leeds set and just go back to the studio version of Tommy instead.]
Decade of Protest:
Political Posters from the United States, Viet Nam and Cuba, 1965-1975: “A virtual catalog of the exhibition held at Track 16 Gallery, January 19-March 9, 1996. Exhibition and catalogue organized with the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. This catalog is reproduced by permission of Susan Martin, who edited the Smart Art Press publication.” [thanks to BookNotes for the blink]
![[Amerika is Devouring its Children]](https://i0.wp.com/lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/Graphics/Track16/devouring_children.gif "Amerika is Devouring its Children")
And, on the topic of Amerika devouring its young, read The Apocalypse of Adolescence, a harrowing Atlantic Monthly meditation on the epidemic of adolescent murdering sprees by Ron Powers, a Vermont writer trying to come to terms with the Zantop killings at Dartmouth.
Advertisements we would like to see
![[xxx]](https://i0.wp.com/www.liberalartsmafia.com/graphics/uncsam1a.jpg "xxx")
Liberal Arts Mafia
“On the surface, the desire to feel Palestinian seems utterly bizarre. But for the anti-globalisation movement, it makes a certain sense. The Palestinians live out the state that anti-globalists can only talk about. Anti-globalists claim that they are controlled by sinister outside forces, that the odds are stacked against them. Palestinians really are controlled, they really are occupied. For the human shields, the experience lends their sentiments authenticity and substance.” sp!ked
NPR Retreats, Link Stink Lingers: ” NPR.org no longer requires permission to link, but its insistence that
it will go after those who use its content ‘inappropriately’ tells
critics it still hasn’t learned its lesson.” Wired
More Philip Whalen:
THE EXPENSIVE LIFE
Tying up my plastic shoes
I realize I'm outside, this is the park & I am free
From whatever pack of nonsense & old tape loops
Play with the Ayer's dogs, Barney & Daphne
They don't ask me why I shave my head
"Cut the word lines," Burroughs recommends
Daphne & Barney fatter than ever & only I am dieting
(Crease along the dotted lines)
Loops of tacky thinking fall unloosed. The sun
Getting hotter than my flannel shirt requires
What about THE BUDDHIST REVIVAL IN CHINA?
Won't read it now... too blind to see it
Almost too blind to write this, in my room no flowers
The service station wants four bits for compresssed air
At only 16 pounds per square inch
I can see the farthest mountain.
29:VIII:87
TO THE MEMORY OF
Mr J who had been poor for years
Inherited all the money in the world
Bought a gun to blow a hole in his head
To let in air and light he said
To let me out
Today, I have my head to shave
There are lights and shadows in it
All too soon empty open ashes
Join mirthfully to earth
19:V:77
Semen acts as an antidepressant: “Women whose partners regularly wear condoms are more depressed – mood-altering hormones in semen could be the reason.” New Scientist
Eccentric people more extreme as they age, although flamboyant behavior declines, says a new study, which explains increasng eccentricity neurocentrically: “The tendency to be a little odd or eccentric can often be kept under control in younger people, as they modify their behaviour to social norms. But as people get older there is evidence of reduced plasticity of the nervous system, which makes them less adaptable and increases expression of their odd personality traits.” Perhaps, however, it is just that as people age they care less about conforming themselves to social norms? New Scientist
