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February 27, 2007

Links: 10 Iraq-war protest songs; Gerald McBoingBoing, Mr. Magoo videos; Top political donors; Powerball payback odds; Great abandoned houses...

Ten Protest Songs released since the Iraq war began in 2003. From Pearl Jam to Neil Young to Green Day to Bright Eyes, little YouTube videos. At ThrowAwayYourTV.com.

Gerald McBoing-Boing, the 1951 cartoon, on YouTube.

Gerald McBoingBoing won the Academy Award for Best Animation in 1951 for United Productions of America, the artists who also turned out Mr. Magoo.

The style was groundbreaking -- few backgrounds, fewer lines, colors to suggest mood, more suggestive than "real."

Background from Wikipedia:

UPA was founded in the wake of the Disney animators' strike of 1941, which resulted in a number of long-time employees of Walt Disney leaving the venerable studio for greener pastures. One of the animators taking part in the Disney exodus was John Hubley, an artist who disagreed with the ultra-realistic style of animation that Disney had developed and championed. Along with a number of other animators, Hubley promoted the idea that animation did not have to be a painstakingly realistic imitation of real life; he felt that the medium of animation had been forced down a narrow path by simply trying to imitate reality.

Nice stills and history in UPA’s Gerald McBoing Boing at Lost in Negative Space.

Melting pot boils over: From the S.F. Chronicle, Asian paper's 'I Hate Blacks' column assailed:

A San Francisco weekly newspaper that bills itself as "The Voice of Asian America" is facing harsh criticism from that very community for publishing a column Friday titled "Why I Hate Blacks."

In the column, AsianWeek regular contributor Kenneth Eng listed "reasons" to discriminate against African Americans. The piece has been pulled from the newspaper's Web site, but the print edition of the free paper, owned by the politically influential Fang family, was still available in news racks Monday.

But nothing put on the Web ever completely goes away. The Coalition of Asian Pacific Americans invites you to sign a petition stating,

We join Asian American leaders in criticizing AsianWeek for printing Kenneth Eng's column "Why I Hate Blacks" in its February 23rd edition. We condemn the piece as irresponsible journalism, blatantly racist, replete with stereotypes, and deeply hurtful to African Americans.

We call on AsianWeek to take immediate action and issue an unequivocal apology, terminate their relationship with Kenneth Eng, print an editorial debunking the column and setting the record straight, review their editorial policy and process, and hold those responsible accountable.

They also offer a pdf of Eng's piece so you'll know what you're objecting to.

Deep pockets:
Top Political Donors, 1989-2006 at opensecrets.org.

Relatively healthy:
Are Doctors Just Playing Hunches? -- Time.com

It's not enough to prove that a particular blood test or CT scan really spots cancer, for example. You also need to know whether early detection of that cancer would make a difference in your ability to respond to treatment or it merely means that you would die at the same point but learn about your illness earlier than you would have without the test.

Would you rather know you're dying for years, or learn about it at the last minute? (The late Molly Ivins, who died of inflammatory breast cancer, a particularly aggressive form, wrote of her treatment, "First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you.")

Guys: The biological bell tolls on thee, too

"It's too late to have a kid when you cannot guarantee that you're going to be in the game as a father when that kid is 18 years old." -- Ron Geraci, 36, author of "The Bachelor Chronicles."

There's a guarantee?

Eat, Drink and Be Merry,Or why we should learn to stop worrying and love food at Scientific American:

"Swedish and Thai women were fed a Thai dish that the Swedes found overly spicy. The Thai women, who liked the dish, absorbed more iron from the meal. When the researchers reversed the experiment and served hamburger, potatoes, and beans, the Swedes, who like this food, absorbed more iron. Most telling was a third variation of the experiment, in which both the Swedes and the Thais were given food that was high in nutrients but consisted of a sticky, savorless paste. In this case, neither group absorbed much iron."

Corollary: Disputed Study Concludes That Identical Exercise Produces Greater Benefits For Those Who Believe It Will

Group says U.S. restaurants promote "extreme eating"

...Ruby Tuesday's offers an entree called Fresh Chicken & Broccoli Pasta so loaded with cheese and other stuff that it tipped the scales at 2,060 calories and 128 grams of fat...

But it sounds so healthy.

In that spirit, here's The Really Big Guide To Secret Menu Items. We're talking fast food here, at Consumerist.

Peopleless homes: Abandoned Beauty: Amazing photos of abandoned houses around the world, at Archibase.net. I'll take this one:

Powerball payback odds: You have "one chance in 36.61" of winning something" when you buy a Powerball ticket. Durango Bill's Applied Mathematics shows how the odds are calculated.

Long overdue: I finally figured out how to let you page backwards through this blog one week at a time. There's a little overlap right now -- I see some entries on the main page repeated as part of "last week," but until I can fix that I'd rather repeat some than lose some. Links at the top of these weekly pages take you back and forth through time.

The code places the link at the bottom of the last entry on this page, so I can't give it to you here without freezing it for future readers at this last week in February. Scroll down to the end of whatever post anchors this blog's homepage to enter that wayback machine.

There's also a list of headline links to every entry, sorted by month, since I switched to this software in July 2005. Earlier than that, there are only weekly links back to March 2002.

Finally... if you don't want the Anna Nicole circus and various missing blonde stories to suck up all the news broadcasts, don't watch the "special reports" on them. These are driven by ratings. If you don't watch, ratings will shrink. But you'll also have to watch serious news to push up its ratings.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:22 AM | Permalink

Comments

Posted by: Keith Kamisugi on February 27, 2007 5:34 PM

Posted by: treveon on February 26, 2008 3:23 PM