« Transcript: Couric with the Edwardses; Harleys for mangoes; Bill Maher rant video | Main | 'Fail better' »

March 27, 2007

Hidden Picasso; Backchannel for WH emails draws House scrutiny; Life magazine folding, photo archive to go online

Scène de Rue, Pablo Picasso, 1900. This painting hides a nightclub scene beneath.

A Hidden Picasso: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art offers a do-it-yourself reenactment of the discovery of a hidden painting beneath Picasso's Street Scene, which the museum owns. Sliders let you X-ray the top painting, then add color to the black and white image seen on the scan.

(I'm as fascinated by the interactivity as by the painting -- Flash tends to force its own speed and timing on readers, so handing control over to us is refreshing.)

The people's business: I posted two entries in a row yesterday and buried the headline of gwb43.com: Parallel White House email system?, but today the story is getting a higher profile: GOP Groups Told to Keep Bush Officials' E-Mails at WaPo:

A Democratic House committee chairman yesterday told the Republican National Committee and the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign to retain copies of all e-mails sent or received by White House officials using e-mail accounts under their control, raising the political stakes in the congressional inquiry into U.S. attorneys' firings.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) said his broadly written request was based on evidence that White House officials -- particularly aides to top political adviser Karl Rove -- have used their politically related e-mail accounts to hide the conduct of official business regarding the prosecutor firings and other matters being investigated by Congress.

"The e-mails of White House officials maintained on RNC e-mail accounts may be relevant to multiple congressional investigations," Waxman wrote to the group's chairman, Mike Duncan, adding that as "governmental records" they are subject to preservation requirements and "eventual public disclosure."

...Yesterday's request was based, Waxman said, on at least three White House officials' use of Republican Party-affiliated e-mail accounts for some of their work in recent years, as well as on reports that Rove routinely uses his RNC e-mail account for business.

Waxman noted for example that J. Scott Jennings, the White House deputy director of political affairs, used a "gwb43.com" e-mail account last August to discuss the replacement of the U.S. attorney for Arkansas, Bud Cummins, according to e-mails released to Congress by the White House...

Unburied: A reader emailed that my RSS feed has been down. I edited out some text in one entry that it seemed to be choking on, and the feed came back up. Unexpected upside of this is that I turned on the feed reader in my Thunderbird email program, so blog headlines now arrive to their own folder, and look like emails.

Life ends again: Life Magazine folds, blaming newspapers, and plans to put its photo archives on the Web for free for you and me, says the Times.

Paperwork? Filling Their Sales: If organic food is so popular, why are so few farms transitioning their land? Smart and informed commenters, some of them farmers, push back a bit in several directions, some dismissing the count:

"The number of organic-practicing farms (I call them ecological farmers) in the country is probably triple the number of organically-certified farms."

At Grist Magazine, which, at the bottom of its pages, bears the slogans, "A beacon in the smog" and "Gloom and doom with a sense of humor."

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:34 AM | Permalink