Politics and the Novel: a symposium. “We asked a
number of writers to consider the following questions:
Which novel (or novels) prompted (or deepened) your own political
awakening? How old were you when you read it and what effect did it have
upon you? Do you think the novel today is able to embrace or sustain a
deliberately political purpose consistent with a writer’s aesthetic or artistic
obligations? Which two or three political novels (past or present) do you
regard as exemplary, and why?” LA Times
So film critic Stanley Kauffmann loves an old foreign film only to find that he panned it in a review forty years ago. Reflecting on the critic’s changes of heart, he finds himself in good company.
The plain,
discomfiting fact is that every one of us who has
watched plays and films or read books or listened to
music or looked at painting and architecture is, in some
measure, self-deceived. Filed away in the recesses of
our minds are thousands of opinions that we have
accumulated through our lives, and they make us think
that we know what we think on all those subjects. We
do not. All we know is what we once thought, and any
earlier view of a work, if tested, might be hugely
different from what we would think now.
The New Republic
Frantic Russian Effort to Rescue Crew of Sub. I can’t imagine many more gruesome ways of dying. One almost hopes no one is conscious on the sub to anticipate their impending freezing and suffocation. New York Times
Road Warriors With Laptops. Using bumper-to-bumper traffic constructively.
“If you’re in the office or your apartment, there are at
least 15 things you could be doing, but in the car, there’s
nothing else to do but focus on the call. Plus you’re moving
forward. Mentally, it puts me in the zone, and I can really
concentrate on the phone.” New York Times
Seeing Pessimism’s Place in a Smiley-Faced World. Some psychologists have ‘had enough of the “tyranny of the positive attitude” which prescribes cheerfulness and optimism as a formula for
success, resilience and good health, and equates negativity
with failure, vulnerability and general unhealthiness…While positive thinking has its advantages, they argue, a
little whining now and then is not such a bad thing.
Pessimism, in some circumstances, may have its place. And
the unrelieved pressure to be upbeat, they assert, may gloss
over individual needs and differences, and may make some
people feel worse instead of better.’ New York TimesI’m reminded of what Douglas Adams said:
For a moment, he felt good about this.
A moment or two later he felt bad about feeling good about it.
Then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling
good about it and, satisfied, drove on into the night.
(So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish)
Hate Sites Bash Lieberman. Not being a devotee of hate sites, I was waiting with curiosity for someone to look into the extent of their reaction. It was a good bet that Sen. Liebeman’s selection would draw the recrement out into the open. Not that anti-Semites’ bias will affect the election, as it’s likely they wouldn’t’ve voted for the Gore ticket no matter who held the second spot…although a reader points out that the Democrats will have to contend not only with the brand of anti-Semitism espoused by ultra-right-wing crazies but the more significant issue of black anti-Semitism, which seems never to go away. For example, Dallas NAACP President Lee Alcorn’s reactions to the vice-presidential selection recently earned him a suspension and repudiation by national NAACP leadership. Wired, Washington Post
Death Row Roll Call has a calendar of the executions scheduled for the current month. Death penalty opponents or those concerned about a particular death sentence can click on the name of a condemned prisoner to send letters to the pertinent governor requesting a stay of execution. The Nation
Boom Box. Buy TiVo or ReplayTV (the set-top “black boxes” with hard drives that promise the ultimate in TV-viewing convenience) and destroy the mass-marketing economy, the author begins by saying, because they perfect the promise of the VCR to allow time-shifting and skipping commercials. (By the way, if you’re buying one of these, Replay has a true instantaneous 30-second skip button, the length of a typical commercial, while TiVo just has fast-, faster- and fastest-forward so you still waste your time being exposed to a subliminal version of the advertising content. The mass marketers got to TiVo in time, but not to Replay.) But then he goes wrong and focuses for the rest of the article on the way these boxes spy on you, collecting a precise profile of your viewing tastes — not hour-by-hour so much as second-by-second. In fact, the set-top boxes themselves are being sold at an enormous loss with the real profit coming from TiVO’s and Replay’s data-mining. And he doesn’t bat an eye at the privacy implications of this; his point is that it will destroy the mass-market economy, both promising and requiring true targeted niche advertising and “boutique” marketing.
Here’s where I think the yarn he spins is built on a specious premise. It’s likely you won’t be able to opt out of having your demographics reported back, and certainly most Americans are not concerned enough (about their privacy and the battle for their minds waged by advertisers and the commercial concerns they represent) to resist buying these things if they make TV viewing so much more convenient. So predictions of their massive penetration into viewers’ households over the next decade are probably accurate. (I won’t be buying one — unless someone figures a way to opt out iof, or hack out, the bidirectionality — because (a) my family and I are just not that interested in convenient TV viewing, and we don’t believe there’s ever going to be worthwhile content as long as the point of programming remains selling advertising time; (b) we won’t collaborate so readily in becoming passive consumer pawns (hell, we won’t even use a supermarket discount card because we realize that it’s not the savings, stupid, the real point of them is to track your buying habits); and (c) we can effectively program a VCR.) However, why count on the fact that a viewer will wait around looking at a commercial interruption to their favorite show long enough to even find out it targets their interests? Data indicate that 88% of commercials are killed right now by current users of these boxes, and I wouldn’t expect that to change. And there doesn’t appear to be anything about the technology that requires a bidirectional connection; sooner or later someone will begin selling a passive equivalent that connects downstream of your cable box and doesn’t upload data, just to make a good old-fashioned hardware profit as a new improved successor to the VCR. Finally, if mass-advertising on TV is dead in the water in the absence of perfect targeted niche advertising, it won’t mean the end of mass-marketing and the mass marketers as much as just a shift in their advertising media, much as big tobacco has survived after the ban on TV ads. This technology, if it kills anything, is more likely to be the death knell of the networks than the mass marketing economy. Sunday New York Times Magazine
Dead in the water. Catastrophic die-offs of native lobsters after New York began insecticide spraying to prevent West Nile virus outbreak. New Scientist
San Franciscans fight plan for glitzy museum. “…a kitschy, Las Vegas-style tourist trap…”
Visitors. New York artists salivate over the London art scene, by comparison.
“In a twist of ethical irony, media
custodian Steven Brill’s Web venture
Contentville has repelled many writers,
editors and academics since it debuted
July 5. Writers are claiming that Brill is
selling their copyrighted articles by
licensing them through little-known
library archiving companies that now
want a piece of the e-commerce booty.
The e-commerce site — also funded by
Microsoft, NBC, CBS and Primedia —
promises that readers will rejoice at its
menu of books, articles, TV transcripts
and old speeches, for sale starting at $2.95
each. But creators and publishers are
accusing Brill of turning a blind eye as
partners EBSCO (magazine articles) and
Bell & Howell (dissertations) seemingly
stretched the terms of licensing clauses…” Feed
First draft of McCain’s R2K speech:
“Dick, I remember after your second — maybe your third —
heart attack, I remember visiting you in the convalescent
center. You looked so sickly my friend, like you weren’t
going to make it, and I remember we had a real
heart-to-heart. In addition to talking with you about your
DUI conviction, your five military deferments during the
Vietnam War, and your votes against outlawing cop-killer
bullets and plastic guns, we talked about how much you
love your country, and in particular how much you love its
oil.
America, Dick, needs you.” Salon
Review: The many meanings of ‘Nymphomania’. A social history of the concept. Have we managed to immprove on Kinsey’s quip: “A nymphomaniac is someone who has more sex
than you do” ? CNN.com
Rights for People, Not for Cultures. Should cultures have an intrinsic right to survive? What does cultural survival mean, in fact?
Play about my life is stupid, says Hawking. The cosmologist has attacked the forthcoming
play God and Stephen Hawking as “deeply offensive,
stupid and worthless.”
Rethinking the Dancing Mania. Thoughtful essay by Australian sociologist on the dancing frenzies that swept Europe during the Middle Ages. Psychopathology? Mass hysteria? Deviant religious sects? Ergot poisoning? Skeptical Inquirer
Self-destruct: Many difficult diseases with which modern medicine grapples are autoimmune. It’s been fruitful to seek infections that may precipitate the autoimmune attack on a body’s organs. Now it appears that “infection with a rotavirus, the commonest cause of
gastro-enteritis in children, may lead to childhood diabetes.
Although this suggests that rotavirus vaccines could help
prevent diabetes, it also raises fears that the vaccines
themselves could trigger the disease.” New Scientist
A game of polo with a headless goat, kiss-the-girl-or-get-horsewhipped, and other excitements. The Sunday Times of London
Give It Away. “…while the U.S. media
represent France as silly, U.S. academics seek out
those French thinkers who seem to fit the bill.
As a result, some of the most interesting scholars
in France today you never hear about at all.” David Graeber, a Yale anthropologist, profiles the Maussians. In These Times
Decline and Fall (cont’d.): The Taste of Fear. Village Voice profile of the new phenomenon of “surfing” atop New York City subway trains. So far in 2000, three deaths and two critically injuries are identified with the practice.
Ripples and Puddles (Hans Moravec): “Like little ripples on the surface of a deep,
turbulent pool, calculation and other kinds of
procedural thought are possible only when the
turbulence is quelled. Humans achieve quiescence
imperfectly by intense concentration. Much easier
to discard the pesky abyss altogether: ripples are
safer in a shallow pan. Numbers are better
manipulated as calculus stones or abacus beads
than in human memory.” Edge
The Jedediahs vs. the Daves: Does Irony Illuminate Or Corrupt? Stop me if I get too ironic; I agree with this essayist that most irony-mongers use it to convey an insupportable superiority, an attempt at a wink of the eye at an audience only too happy to share in the knowing joke. New York Times
“The police are everywhere,” said one Los Angeles resident.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever seen the LAPD walking the beat.” Reuters
Peruvian Plant Extracts Active Against TB, Other Diseases. A medical research team from Washington University, two Peruvian universities, and the GD Searle pharmaceutical company collaborating wiht the Aguaruna, an indigenous people of Peru, have found that extracts from more than 40% of plants identified by the Aguaruna as having healing properties were active in pharmacological assays. Searle will develop drugs from the medicinal plants under study.
Man Given Wish to Die When Eye Blink Fails
A British judge has granted a 19 y.o. man severely
disabled with motor neuron disease his wish to die when he loses his final means of
communicating by blinking his left eye, newspapers said Friday. Reuters
Annals of the Age of Depravity (cont’d.): Road rage taken to new a level (8/10/2000). On a back road near St. Paul MN, a man gave the finger to an erratic driver who swerved to hit him when he passed the weaving car. He was followed home and, with a ring on the doorbell half an hour later, had a cup of acid thrown in his face. Police still seek the monster who did this. [via Obscure Store]
Reno to commission outside review of
FBI’s e-mail surveillance software . “The Justice
Department will contract a major university to conduct an independent analysis of the FBI’s
“Carnivore” e-mail surveillance system, Attorney General Janet Reno said Thursday.” UCSD is being considered. Nando Times
Netscape 6 preview release 2 is out. I can’t get bookmarks to work right. Netscape plans one more beta release this year before releasing the final by the
end of the year. Wired
A brief guide to post-’60’s American fiction: The introductory chapter to The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors.
Anne Applebaum, a London political columnist working on a history of Soviet concentration camps, writes about Russia’s Dying Democracy
But if
there was any silver lining to the chaos and corruption of the
Yeltsin years, it was that at least something resembling a free
press together with what was starting to look like democratic
political parties remained in their wake. Now, although some
elements of informal civil society are still intact …, the press is less and less free and the
democratic politicians are vanishing fast. Why destroy them?
Couldn’t economic reform have been carried out within the
framework of democracy?Clearly, Putin thinks not. And the dangers are clear. While some
in the West will applaud any attempt to force through some
economic reform, Putin’s elimination of his potential opponents
leaves open not only the possibility of a relatively benign, even
“progressive” dictatorship, but for far less benign future
dictatorships led, perhaps, by Putin’s assassin, or by his
bodyguard, or whoever. When the palace coup happens, nobody
will be around to object.
Slate
The fight to free the West Memphis 3: “Six years after the conviction of three young men in the
‘Paradise Lost’ triple homicide, a burgeoning movement
insists they’re innocent.” I was convinced after I saw the first film several years ago…Salon
Vegetarian Mothers Have More Girls. “A British study of how diet affects the health of
new mothers and their babies produced the surprise finding that
vegetarian women are more likely to have girls, one of the report’s
authors said on Tuesday.”
Top 10 Morose Records of all time, by NME. Joy Division have two albums on the list.
Annals of the Age of Depravity (cont’d.): Chrome Wheels May Have Led to Family’s Killing. “An Arizona teenager has been
charged with the brutal killing of a woman and her two young
children — a crime that may have been committed for the chrome
wheels from the victim’s Ford Thunderbird. Police say the killings appear to have been the result of a carjacking on Friday in the parking lot of
the family’s Tucson apartment complex. The mother’s body was found in the lot at about 4:30
p.m.; the (6- and 7-year-old) children’s bodies were discovered about a half-hour later… a
short drive away.”
Oh, what a pity: Lilly Set Back by Appeals Court Ruling on Prozac. The company’s proprietary rights protecting it against generic competitors are not extended through 2003 as it had hoped. Competing versions might appear in the marketplace as soon as Feb. 2001.
What’s at Stake in the Verizon Strike? Does organized labor have a place in the “new economy”? Slate
Pinochet Ruled No Longer Immune From Prosecution. Despite this unprecedented ruling, Pinochet is still a long way from being prosecuted and the country is gearing up for a fight about whether his health shold preclude his standing trial or even being examined for fitness to stand trial in the first place. The decision pits the administration of President Ricardo Lagos — the first Socialist in power since Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende in 1973 — against the hierarchical military, not in the least because it clears the way for many other prosecution of Pinochet-era officers. The court ruled that the “Desaparecidos” of the junta era be considerd kidnappped and that, since the kidnappings are still in progress, the crimes are exempt from the amnesty Pinochet declared on political crimes during the early years of his rule. The military warns that vulnerability to prosecution may dissuade them from coming forward with any information they may have on the Disappeareds, as they had previously promised to do. Could we be heading for another right-wing overthrow of a democratic Socialist Chilean government? New York Times
Why It Sounded So Familiar . Former Clinton speechwriter says Bush echoes both themes and specific language from Clinton speeches. Washington Post
Armed Occupation at Vodka Plant.
Two rival directors
backed by armed guards occupied different
wings of the company that makes
Stolichnaya vodka today, in a dispute for
control over one of Russia’s most
renowned distilleries. ABC News
The Surrealist Compliment Generator, e.g.: “An ocean-going tin of crosseyed mussels could never match the melodious burblings of
your sister’s husband.”
Democrats’ lecture to Hollywood angers industry leaders. The “Responsible Entertainment” provision in the “Valuing Our Families” section of the Democratic Platform, asking Hollywood to tone down its product, is another example of how the Democrats strategy to beat the Republicans is apparently to be better Republicans.
Alot that’s of interest in the New York Times tonight, as you’ll see from the blinks below. Jorn Barger is suggesting that unregistered users may have to use “http://channel.nytimes.com…” instead of “…www10.nytimes…” Since I’m registered with ’em, there’s no way for me to tell if “www10” is still working. Can somebody please let me know? Thanks…
IBM’s Linux-powered wristwatch PDA: “…no ordinary wristwatches, however. On one hand, they’re bulkier, and the
rechargeable lithium-polymer battery lasts only two to four days. Yet the watches have as much
memory and storage space as an older desktop computer. In two years, IBM expects battery life to
improve to last several months…
About two-dozen of the prototypes have been created so far. The watches run on an ARM-based
EP7211 processor made by Cirrus Logic and have 8MB of memory to run programs and 8MB of flash
memory to substitute for a hard disk. The watches also include an infrared and wireless radio
connection and a touch-screen display. The watch can tell time and has a calendar and to-do list that
can remind the wearer of appointments…” A photo is here.
How Culture Molds Habits of Thought. Richard Nisbett’s work indicates that culture shapes not only the content of thought but manner of thinking — degree of tolerance for ambiguity, distribution of attention among foreground and context, linearity, categorization, induction vs. deduction, etc. While there is a long and venerable (although not mainstream) tradition of speculation that this is true, Nisbett’s work is apparently the first based on tighly-controlled empirical investigation. This New York Times article highlights one interesting implication —
When it came to interpreting events in the social world, the
Asians seemed similarly sensitive to context, and quicker
than the Americans to detect when people’s behavior was
determined by situational pressures.
Psychologists have long documented what they call the
fundamental attribution error, the tendency for people to
explain human behavior in terms of the traits of individual
actors, even when powerful situational forces are at work.
Told that a man has been instructed to give a speech
endorsing a particular presidential candidate, for example,
most people will still believe that the speaker believes what
he is saying.
Yet Asians, according to Dr. Nisbett and his colleagues, may
in some situations be less susceptible to such errors,
indicating that they do not describe a universal way of
thinking, but merely the way that Americans think.
Think, for example, about McCain’s endorsement of George W. last week at the convention.
A Nuclear War Feared Possible Over Kashmir Secret U.S. intelligence estimates after the Kargil incident lie behind President Clinton’s recent pronouncements that the Indian subcontinent is “the most dangerous place in the world.” Kargil showed that the bilateral presence of nuclear armaments has not acted as a deterrent against new conflicts. Analysts also warn that the expected expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal if the U.S. builds the National Missile Defense would add further momentum to the Indian-Pakistani arms race. The continuing demonstration of American contempt for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty also cripples U.S. plausibility in asking, as Clinton did when he recently addressed the Indian parliament, that the combatants abandon their nuclear arsenals. We’ve also lost leverage over Pakistan and probably nadvertently fueled its nuclear ambitions by failing to resume economic and military
assistance to Pakistan that Congress cut off in 1990 because
of the Pakistani nuclear program, according to former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Robert Oakley. It appears that each country could deliver in the vicinity of twenty-five atomic weapons to the other’s population centers by bomber and/or missile. New York Times
Palm Introduces New Models. Hoping to become the must-have style accessory for the less-geeky fashion-conscious… New York Times
The skinny on the West Nile virus, and what to expect from it: ‘…the current frenzied focus on
West Nile will ebb eventually, and it will be added to the
growing list of diseases on the fringe – never as familiar as
flu or rabies or even meningitis, but something always to
consider when a bird dies, or an old man spikes a fever in
the summertime.
“It will become one of the diseases in America that we have
to watch for. And we should be getting
ready for the next one.” ‘ New York Times
Reading Glasses, as Inevitable as Death and Taxes. Or Are They?
“Finding a better fix for presbyopia is rapidly becoming the
Holy Grail of experimental ophthalmology, especially as
researchers and entrepreneurs begin to calculate the profits
that might accrue from curing an annoyance affecting every
single adult in the population.
But the basic disagreements as to why the process occurs
have meant that viable solutions are slow to emerge, and
are extremely controversial when they do.” New York Times
New Tactic in Physics: Hiding the Answer. Observer bias may turn out to be as much of a problem in particle physics as in the human sciences, and physicists are resorting to a version of the time-honored “double-blind” methodology to protect their objectivity. New York Times
“Cyberterrorists”? Are you listening? Here’s your roadmap. ZDNet
The Perseid meteor shower peaks on August 12 and coincides with a moonset spectacle. “This year the bright, nearly-full Moon
will outshine the Perseids most of the night, but
for an hour between moonset and sunrise on
Saturday morning, star gazers could witness a
brief but beautiful meteor shower. The setting
Moon may put on a show of its own Saturday.
Wildfires and dust storms have filled parts of
our atmosphere with aerosols. A low-hanging Moon
seen through such dusty air can take on a
beautiful pink or orange hue.”
Gender-based differences in response to stress tied to hormonal influence. Testosterone governs “fight or flight”, and oxytocin mitigates for “tend and befriend,” reports new research. USA Today
R.I.P. Sir Alec Guinness, at 86. This New York Times obituary mentions all the right things — Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Ladykillers, Tunes of Glory, Bridge on the River Kwai — as well as the Obi-Wan Kenobi roles for which most remember him most recently. I’ve cherished other aspects of his craft as well — his TV characterizations of one of my favorite characters, John Le Carre’s George Smiley; and the film version of one of my favorite novels, Joyce Carey’s The Horse’s Mouth, in which he not only nailed the central role on the head but wrote the screenplay. I wish I’d seen some of his Shakespearean stage acting.
Of Sir Alec’s acting technique, Kenneth Tynan, the late critic,
writer and director, once said:
My point is that the people
Guinness plays best are all iceberg characters, nine-tenths
concealed, whose fascination lies not in how they look but in
how their minds work. The parts he plays are, so to speak,
injected hypodermically, not tattooed all over him; the
latter is the star’s way, and Guinness shrinks from it.
Sir Alec, I’ll miss you and treasure your memory. I’m heading out to the video store…
I didn’t realize it, but my dial-up access is into the first ISP.
Anti-Breastfeeding Lobby in Force at R2K. ‘ “Breast-feeding is an immoral act,” he
deadpanned. “It leaves people with an oral
fixation. And the worst part of it is, the child
doesn’t have a choice.” ‘ Not clear if this was for real or a hoax [via Obscure Store]
Ron Reagan Less Than a Fan of George W.
“The big elephant sitting in the corner is that George W. Bush is
simply unqualified for the job. He’s probably the least qualified person ever to be nominated by
a major party. …What is his accomplishment? That he’s no longer an
obnoxious drunk?“The defining moment for me was his Karla
Faye Tucker smirk, joking about a woman he would put to
death. No adult would ever do that. It wouldn’t even cross the
mind of a grown-up to joke about something like that.”
Washington Post
Corpse beheading not a shock to all. A man in Toldeo asked for a few minutes alone with the body of his uncle, then used a handsaw to behead the corpse and take the head home. Reportedly psychiatrically ill, he had published a flyer some time ago describing a method of resurrecting a loved one by consuming their brain.
Allegedly, William Gibson’s screenplay for Neuromancer, circa 1990. [via Null Device]
Motorola unveils Web-enabled car device. “The carmakers are betting that millions of drivers will be willing to pay as much as $30 a month for the Internet-access gadgets, which are
expected to be standard equipment in all new cars by 2004 or 2005.” Nando Times
Among the Mooks “As entertainment entrepreneurs align the fantasy
lands of rap, rock, wrestling and pornography, a
generation of fans grows ever more brutish.” It doesn’t exactly make its case; some of what this obviously scared and appalled observer finds “brutish” is just “different”, but on the other hand there’s plenty of “brutish” too. New York Times Magazine
Outrage over Holocaust remarks “A prominent religious leader in Israel has
caused outrage by referring to the six million
victims of the Holocaust as “reincarnated
sinners”.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who heads the country’s
third biggest political party, made the remarks
at a religious gathering in Jerusalem on
Saturday.”
Straight to the Point: “Cuban
President Fidel Castro today called George
W. Bush and Al Gore the most “boring and
insipid” presidential candidates the United
States could possibly have.” ABC
Breathe Deep To Get High. It’s widely known that the lack of oxygen in aircraft cabins contributes to the majority of air travel
woes, including tiredness, dehydration, rapid drunkenness, and most of all, air rage. However, what
few people also realise is how dramatically this cabin environment can affect their lungs.
In commercial aircraft, air pressure is rarely equal to that at sea
level. At cruising height (generally around 10,000 meters), pressurised
cabins allow comfortable respiration, but the oxygen content is only
the equivalent of the air breathed at an altitude of 2400 meters.
There are some engineering issues behind this, but it is mostly due to
penny-pinching on the part of the airlines. Pilots are routinely
instructed to disengage some of the equipment responsible for
bringing fresh air into the aircraft, meaning that a high-proportion of the air inside the plane is being
re-breathed. Shutting off the equipment means the engines don’t have to work as hard, thus saving fuel
costs.
Beyond 2000
America’s New hangup: Cell Phone Rudeness: “…seething
bystanders have had it up to here with the constant rrring of the
brave new wireless world.” CNN
Comparison of online Ulysses editions Jorn Barger’s labor of love is finally complete.
The Dawn of Micropower: “Small, local power plants offer a cheap way into (recently deregulated)
markets. Even if the power they produce is more costly
at source—which it often is—they do not suffer huge
transmission losses when sending it to consumers. On
top of that, the surplus heat they generate can be
employed for useful purposes, such as warming
buildings, whereas that from big generators located in
the middle of the countryside is usually wasted. The
result is that local power generation has now become
economically competitive.
A second reason for the rise of micropower is
environmentalism. Ever-higher emission standards have
made it unattractive to build new coal-fired plants in the
rich world. ” The demand for uninterruptible reliable power in the face of more frequent brownouts and blackouts will also help to make micropower attractive in the U.S. The Economist
Massachusetts man charged with stealing human corneas. He says he thought the foam package was filled with lobsters.
“Hollering fire in a crowded theater”
The FBI’s chief negotiator during the Waco siege says
critics and conspiracy theorists are sowing dangerous
discord. He dismisses the 1997 documentary “Waco: The Rules of Engagement” (which presents evidence that the government fired first) as tantamont to fiction, and he says the Danforth report exonerating the government deserves to be taken at face value. Salon
Beware of geeks bearing gifts: “Microsoft’s
decision to slash the price of the
Windows Millennium Edition
upgrade from $89 to $59 — a whopping 33 percent savings
— made headlines this week. But the public should beware
of geeks bearing gifts. Windows Me has some significant
improvements, but for most users those improvements do
not justify the pain and potential dangers they will face with
this upgrade. Microsoft can lower the price of Windows Me
and give it a few great features, but it can’t fundamentally
make Me a better operating system than Windows 95,
because of underlying technical flaws with the whole
Windows operating environment.” Salon
Philadelphia police spokespeeople call the allegations a mixture of exaggerations, half-truths and flat-out lies, but protesters’ reports of police brutality seem widespread and consistent. Salon The Philadelphia Independent Media Center (IMC)is a collective of journalists and independent media organizations continuing to cover the condition of the jailed protesters. The LA IMC is up and running with pre-convention coverage of ‘D2K.’ And the Boston IMC notes that organizing for a response to the first major Presidential debate, scheduled for Bsoton on October 3, is proceeding. And a disorganized group of hackers helped reporters cover police activity around the convention. Wired
Man says cell phone makers caused his brain tumor
Dr. Christopher Newman, a Maryland neurologist, has filed an $800 million lawsuit
against a number of cell phone makers claiming that the mobile phones that they
made caused a malignant tumor in his brain.
Massachusetts man charged with stealing human corneas. He says he thought the foam package was filled with lobsters.
Anarchism, the Creed That Won’t Stay Dead. ‘The protests have often been condemned in the mainstream
news media as imbecilic and chaotic, all action and no
theory. But that is also an anarchist trait. Its adherents have
long been dismissed as uneducated and unwashed.
Anarchism’s most memorable slogan, coined by Enrico
Malatesta of Italy, is “propaganda by deed.”
“With the decline of socialism, you have seen anarchism go
through a revival as an easy way to oppose global
capitalism,” said Paul Avrich, a leading historian of anarchism
who teaches at Queens College in New York.’ New York Times
NASA satellites monitor western wildfires from space
As soot-covered firefighters face the billowing roar and crackle of the convulsing
flames on Earth, NASA’s Earth Probe satellite hangs in the silence of space
monitoring the plumes of smoke 740 km below.
Every few hours, a global map of smoke and other aerosols detected by Earth
Probe are updated at the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) web site.
Better Living Standards, Childhood Leukemia Linked
“Leukemia cases among young British children
are increasing and doctors suspect improved living standards
could be the cause.
Youngsters are exposed to fewer common infections than they used to be so their immune
systems are weaker and not as good at combating illnesses, British researchers said Friday.”
Humphrey Bogart And Marilyn Monroe, Sort Of
“A futuristic mafia drama set on a spaceship
and starring celluloid greats Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe
would be the greatest movie ever, according to a survey by
online retailer Amazon.co.uk.”
POPULATION: 1 Old Rancher and The Manson Family
“Thirty years ago, a census taker had a brush with weirdness on the Spahn Ranch.”
Eight blacklisted Hollywood writers finally get screen credits for their work.
Parental Discretion: “A simple question no one seems to want to ask: If Dick
Cheney loves and is proud of his openly lesbian
daughter, why is he supporting a man who wants her to
live under the threat of criminal sanction? It’s no secret
that Governor George W. Bush has publicly supported
Texas’s still-extant gays-only sodomy law, which makes
private, consensual sex between gay adults a crime.
Does Cheney agree with his running mate’s position?” The New Republic
I couldn’t believe how pitiful it was. Bo Derek honored to be reading scripted comments at the Republican convention, and tongue tripping over some token Spanish. And, no less pitiful, this National Review columnist complaining that the celebrity decks are stacked so far to the left that poor old Bo just won’t be enough to sway the tide:
Sadly, this isn’t going to be enough, and even more sadly, this matters. In
our tranquil, ill-educated times, showbiz sets not only the cultural, but the
political agenda. The drip, drip, drip of a predominantly liberal message
in the movies, TV, and the other entertainment media is bound to wear
through to the ballot box. We saw this in Britain, where a hostile cultural
scene proved to be the harbinger of the crushing Conservative defeat in
the 1997 election. Writing in the London Sunday Times the following
year, the newspaper’s then-resident leftist, the writer Robert Harris, noted
— with, probably, some satisfaction — that he couldn’t think of one
single “important” British writer or, for that matter, a film director, theater
director, composer (“apart from Lord Lloyd Webber”), actor, or painter
who was a Conservative.As Mr. Harris went on to point out, “the entertainment and fashion
industries are now two of the biggest economic sectors in the world.
Never have we lived in a time more conscious of style, and never in
democratic history has it been less stylish to be on the right.”Now, he was writing in a British context, but, like it or not, it’s not too
difficult to see the same process gathering pace over here. It’s not going
to be easy to reverse. On this battlefield, the Right are simply too few.
Eugene Kennedy’s long investigative report Mike Barnicle and American Twilight
on the Boston Globe‘s poorly justified firing of the outspoken commentator two years ago. Barnicle was by many accounts the most popular Globe columnist, offending many by tweaking their political correctness left and right. Kennedy feels it was one particular Globe editor’s self-serving hypocrisy that brought Barnicle down over a non-issue without an adequate opportunity to defend himself. It deserves looking at again since the Globe just did something seemingly similar to Jeff Jacoby, their only columnist with conservative credentials.
“That’s American twilight: Being found half guilty in the half light that’s too dim to
illuminate the whole truth, the truth that is complex while accusations are simple and
live forever on the Internet. Dusk is a great equalizer, right and wrong, honor and
dishonor, they look the same after sundown.” Jim Romenesko’s Media News
Tensions Cool in Philadelphia Streets. No ‘days of rage’ for Philadelphia 2000, says the mainstream press (it would be interesting to hear the perspective of the demonstrators). The police commissioner said: “They were folks who came here hell-bent on causing disruption. The Philadelphia Police Department is in control of the situation. Make no mistake about that.” The nascent new movement — energetic and focused, spontaneous and decentralized — touted in the aftermath of the WTO and IMF showings does not appear much in evidence. In fact, some protesters were quoted explaining that the protests had petered out because “their leaders” had been jailed early on. Strategists of the movement have offered that they will be targeting the Democratic convention in more force, because the Democrats are more prone to listen and be influenced by their agenda. Meanwhile, the one moment of any controversy on the convention floor almost seemed more than what fizzled on outside.
Judge Sets FBI Email Scanning Disclosure. The judge has granted the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s request for expedited processing of its Freedom of Information Act inquiry into the inner workings of ‘Carnivore’, after Janet Reno had decreed that the details would only be revealed to a “group of experts.” EPIC and ACLU say the tremendous potential for violation of constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure mitigates for full and open disclosure of how Carnivore works. Once installed at an ISP site by court order, it “sniffs” or scans all traffic through the site, although the FBI assures us that only data related to criminal activity is filtered in and reviewed. How good are the FBI’s programmers at writing ‘perfect’ search filters? how invested?
Giant Trap Set for Monster in Lake. Scientists hope to net Nessie’s Norwegian cousin Selma.
Web Site Asks for Donated DNA Samples, appeals to donors’ altruism to help it build a DNA database it hopes will allow correlation between medical conditions and genetic loci. ‘The privately held company will use the data to “offer several products and services” to
other firms and research facilities, another section of the Web site explains. Among other
revenue-generating projects, the firm intends to “provide aggregate health and genetic
information to outside research facilities,” and to “sell and/or lease clinically useful genetic
associations to public and private research and product development institutions.” ‘
What to Do About All the Uncompassionate Conservatives? “Reject immediately this absurd notion that the
Republican convention lacks drama. For starters, there’s the extremely
dramatic ideological cosmetology. The Republicans want to show they
are compassionate conservatives, but that means they have to do
something with all the folks who are … you know … uncompassionate
conservatives.” Washington Post
Acme Klein Bottle:
“These are the finest closed,
non-orientable, boundary-free
manifolds sold anywhere in our three
spatial dimensions.”
CNET.com page of downloads of Napster alternatives
J.S. Bach, Man of the Ear: On the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, an attempt to grapple with how challenging it is to listen to his work.
Woven of independent and self-sufficient
musical lines that interact with split-second imitations and
sinuous counterpoint, his multiple-voiced works unsettle the mind
because, even at their simplest, there seems to be more
happening than can be comprehended through mere listening. His
fugues make us want to reach for the remote and stop time, so as
to untangle and hold up for scrutiny the passing show of musical
logic.What happens to Bach’s music between the notes on the page
and what we hear remains enigmatic. There have been periodic
attempts to define the larger, sociological resonance of his
music, attempts to answer the question, “How do we as a society
hear Bach?”…All of this lies to the side of the most troubling and most
rewarding aspect of Bach’s music: that its complexity still
terrifies us like no other body of composition. Bach remains the
intimidating composer par excellence. His contrapuntal
complexity has become synonymous with the very definition of
profundity in music. Composers seeking to demonstrate depth in
their work–from Beethoven to Liszt to Shostakovich–turn to the
fugue, a highly ordered work of multiple interacting lines of
counterpoint, as if it were the only form adequate to express the
most serious imagination.
Washington Post
Australia’s monetary policy body plagued by gnomes blocking front steps of building where it meets monthly.
It’s going to be a little harder to be a big man on the stock exchange floor.
