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Main page October 31, 2007Bellringer pipes up; Courthouse song; More sports-announcing beefsBack from Amherst -- great trip -- then we segued right into Trick-or-Treat night. I'm handing off to my commenters while I regroup and get some sleep: Three topics, all from comments that arrived during my absence:
That was me playing the Chime at Arlington Street Church. We added "Sweet Caroline" to our repertoire this year, next year I suppose we'll play "Dirty Water" as well... Here's some background on the instrument, with a photo: The Bells
Halle also points to Women's Bioethics Blog, which is more than interesting.
This one should be interesting when the Pats meet the Colts in Indianapolis Sunday: 1. Rooting for one team. It's obvious when you do. Or even more obvious when you don't like a team. Remember their fans are listening too. And there are more... Posted by Sheila Lennon October 30, 2007Kidnapped BBC journo's tale; 235 science journals simultaneously tackle poverty, human developmentI'll be on the road today. I'm looking forward to the trip to this event.
At one point, he was allowed a radio. In those calm, measured tones of the BBC, I heard reports of a claim that I had been executed. A small note: Johnston wore disposable contact lenses when he was kidnapped. After he disposed of that pair, the world went fuzzy for him.
From Nature.com: The Nature journals are pleased to contribute the content highlighted on this page, all of which is free... Taco stampede: Where... Posted by Sheila Lennon October 29, 2007Country music's Porter Wagoner dies at 80When my life is ended, my time has run out Porter Wagoner died Sunday night in a hospice in Nashville of lung cancer at 80. At the Nashville Tennessean, a loving obit -- Country Hall of Famer Porter Wagoner dies at 80 -- some tunes, and a slideshow of 56 photos from his long career.
A modest blog post at Heart on a Stick references Country Music Television's obit (Country Music Hall of Fame Member Porter Wagoner Dies) and adds, Others are going to know way more than me about his best writing and singing, about his role in spreading country music via the TV (21 years!), how he fought to give Dolly Parton a career, how he fought to keep her shackled long after her star had eclipsed his. About that amazing, awful, rhinestone jumpwear. Sing it at the pearly gates, Porter. Posted by Sheila Lennon A high-res local weather map worth bookmarkingWeather Map for Providence, RI 02902 Hi-res weather map with animation and adjustable transparency for cloud and radar layers. Replace "02902" in the url with your own zip code. Adapted by Chirag Mehta from a weather.com implementation. On a clear day, its wonders are less evident, but zooming and panning are so fluid, you might want to drag it to a place with more weather where you can play with it Posted by Sheila Lennon October 28, 2007Frivolous, spooky and odd links
* And, in a decidedly unspooky note, we have Free Rice, a vocabulary testing game that adjusts itself to your level of knowledge. That's not the good part, though; for every word you get right, 10 grains of rice will be donated to a hungry person by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). So click away, and the combined might of JIG just may do some significant good. This one is weird. The words quickly ramped up, and it wasn't much fun but I felt I had to push on to give somebody enough rice for a meal...
Gallery of fantastic creatures.
-- The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra’s “Its A Wonderful Life” More at the link.
Rafflesia arnoldii: this parasitic plant develops the world's largest bloom that can grow over three feet across. The flower is a fleshy color, with spots that make it look like a teenager's acne-ridden skin. It smells bad and has a hole in the center that holds six or seven quarts of water. The plant has no leaves, stems, or roots. There's something really creepy about a plant that's like a fungus with a canteen. Posted by Sheila Lennon October 27, 2007How should sports announcers cover games?
My Joe (from MA and NH so longtime Sox fan) has been shouting at the Fox guys during the MLB games: says they don't even understand the rules of baseball or the strategies involved. And don't get us started on some of the NBA commentators....... Liz. we agree they're not thinking about what viewers want. How about we tell them? Here's mine: -- Informed play by play with relevant and interesting background on players and stats by people who love the game. Don't break out of that job description for anything less than breaking major news that people will care about. (cf. Howard Cosell when John Lennon died. Dr. Z -- Paul Zimmerman -- at Sports Illustrated is with us: What about the game? Major networks guilty of neglecting on-field action, on Oct. 19 -- before the games that drew my complaints: So which network do I go after first, Fox or ESPN? Getting many letters urging me to go forward in my crusade against network idiocy, equally divided between antagonists of both super-powers. Think I'll do the ESPN thing first because the e-mailers in that camp are more passionate; the Foxies seem to be merely annoyed. Exactly... they often seem bored by the game, treating it as a backdrop for their talk show. That last is from an email from Steve W. of Brisbane, Australia. How would you change sports announcing? Click the Comments link to answer. *Glossary
Slider: The slider is a cross between the fastball and the curve and involves the best features of both. It is thrown with the speed and the pitching motion of the fastball, but, instead of the wide sweep of the conventional curve, it has a short and mostly lateral break; in effect, it slides away from the hitter. Football positions, by describing what each player's role is when playing this position, may make clearer what players are trying to do when the ball is snapped, although this is pedantic enough to mention some obscure ones you may not see. Posted by Sheila Lennon October 26, 2007Free: All-male, bluesy Fleetwood Mac '70; Spy Valerie Plame Wilson's first chapter; Irritating sports announcers
...Fans at the Fillmore West in 1970 might have expected the band to play singles such as Black Magic Woman (which Santana turned into a signature tune) and the rock ballad Albatross. But that was not to be. Instead, it was a true-and-true blues-rock show with Rattlesnake Shake/Underway forming the backbone of the set, followed by the single Oh Well, capped by a raucous performance of Twist & Shout and Long Tall Sally. ...
This deals with her family backgroun and basic training in the CIA. There's so much missing -- represented by stars -- that it's a jerky read. A WaPo review (Valerie Plame, Telling the (Edited) Inside Story) notes, The book is, however, greatly assisted by an afterword by Laura Rozen, a reporter for the American Prospect. Rozen faithfully echoes Wilson's point of view but fills in many of the censored dates, places and other details from published sources. Readers would be smart to turn to the afterword first, before tackling Wilson's disjointed narrative.
The second game of the World Series saw the Fox announcers ignore the game so they could praise the firefighters in California at length -- right through a Curt Schilling strikeout. Then we were warned they had a sad story for us. Joe and I both yelped, "Don't tell us about it!" We're there to watch baseball. Just call the game during the game, please, without filler -- the ambient sound in a ballpark is fine. If you must praise and mourn, please save it for a downtime during pitching changes, when we might be in the bathroom. Posted by Sheila Lennon Where the Taco Bells are: Ellsbury stole you a taco
The "how to..." from Taco Bell's site says, Everyone in line at a participating Taco Bell restaurant before 5:00 p.m. local time will receive a Free Taco, even if it is provided after 5:00 p.m. Free Taco offer is subject to store availability and Taco Bell reserves the right to substitute an item of equal or greater value if due to unavailability. Whether you're looking to snag one or avoid the likely traffic jams, here are all the Taco Bells I could find in greater Rhode Island (if you're elsewhere, put your zip code into this form to find those nearest you): 11479 Mineral Spring Ave. 1076 Reservoir Ave (Rte. 2) 7 Newport Avenue 11 Commerce Way 421 Putnam Pike 877 Bald Hill Rd 784 Tiogue Ave 651 Metacom Avenue 641 W Main Rd (Rte. 114) 139 Old Tower Hill Road 18 Post Road (Rte. 1) 1500 Diamond Hill Rd 195 Marianno Bishop Blvd 514 Washington St Posted by Sheila Lennon October 25, 2007Latchmo, Dylan, Fogerty, Hold Steady, Goo, Caray, Screaming Mimes: 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game'Later: In comments at the bottom of this post, Jorn Barger of Robot Wisdom points to nine more versions he's found. The standout among them is by Pollo Del Mar and it's on their site as an mp3. You might want to dance to it.
Latchmo, on a Hammond XK3 w/ Motion Sound PRO-145.
Craig Finn of The Hold Steady lives in Brooklyn but his heart's in Minneapolis. Here's The Hold Steady's loving-the-Twins version of it, at StereoGum.
The venerable Harry Caray, Aug. 1, 1987.
John Fogerty does a leisurely version.
Screaming Mimes in Cincinnati, May 13, 2006.
Anime to the Goo Goo Dolls version. Posted by Sheila Lennon October 24, 2007'Take Me Out To The Ballgame' -- the best of YouTubeI stayed up late last night watching dozens of versions of Jack Norworth's 1908 classic, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and these made the cut. This first edition has some Red Sox versions, some neutral versions. A second edition tomorrow will have folks singing, "Root, root, root for the Cubbies," and other versions that sound strange to Red Sox fans' ears. Red Sox fans sing it Sept. 26. 2006 at Fenway.
Harpo Marx plays it on harp on I Love Lucy, 1955.
Buck O'Neill of the Negro League sings it a capella.
An elderly man identified only as George plays it on organ, just like at the ball parks. Budweiser lizards and ferret do it. When the Red Sox won the pennant in 2005, the night before the parade through Boston the bells of the Arlington Street Church at Boylston and Arlington Sts., where the carillon is still played by hand, played Take Me Out to the Ball Game. There is no separation between church and sport. Posted by Sheila Lennon Daily photos of the political campaigns in Iowa
Citizen photojournalism: At The Stumping Grounds, six freelance photographers cover the presidential campaigns in Iowa with a daily photo. They're good -- sometimes a candidate, sometimes a crowd, sometimes a fragment -- and the photos load quickly. You could start when they did, June 1, and just whip through them by clicking "Next." The only negative: No captions, which leads to "Guess whose finger" and "Who's in those shoes?," but only a few are obscure. via MediaStorm Posted by Sheila Lennon October 23, 2007Wi-fi in shelters keeps Calif. fire evacuees connected
Here's the link -- 'Fire blogging' tech expert on how fellow evacuees and networks are holding up -- and his report on the tech capacities: The shelter set up a dedicated computer room with an 802.11 a,b, and g network which worked like a charm. Lots of people brought notebooks when they left their home, so there was a whole lot of IM traffic in and out of the shelter. The local cell networks were subsumed by traffic early in the day so people were texting friends and loved ones a lot. On his own site, ForbesOnTech, Jim Forbes is also fire-blogging. He's praising the shelter -- "hey put on nice spaghetti feed and provided games and television for kids and adults. And no pet at the evacuation center went without water and at least a knish and a reaffirming stroke between their ears." -- and slamming AM radio: With the one exception of the San Diego AM radio fox affiliate, the new has been incredibly superficial. There have been almost no details on what routes are open or how to get to the Fallbrook Gate of Camp Pendleton to drive across the base and get on I-5, which is open to Los Angeles. But there has been a lot of sniveling from one specific radio talk show host, Roger Hedgecock on the lack of air tanker support for the San Diego firestorm. Never mind that the winds make it unsafe for tankers to fly, or that the voters of San Diego turned down a bond measure that would have provided organic air tanker support in 2003. The bond was turned down because it would have increased taxes. Well D’oh! Last night, he ended up moving: The big out call came from the police department around 1 p.m. so I loaded up my useless cats and my road dog and off I went to an evacuation center at the north end of Escondido. I stayed there until about 6 tonight and decided to haul ass for Azusa, where I know my dog and useless cats will be safe for the night... There's been nothing from him today. Let's hope he's conserving his battery on the mountaintop. Wednesday update: Today, he's back posting. Related: SignOn San Diego is all over this, including a firemap Doc Searls, newly a fellow at Harvard, tracks what's happening "back home," with lots of good links, not all of which are available at all times: Fire news, cont’d Also: San Diego Fire Resources (Witch Fire & others, Oct 2007) at Jim 2.0's blog. One of them is a live Webcam, with large views from four directions: Lyons Peak Cameras Posted by Sheila Lennon Guardian America: British paper's Washington-based site launches
Guardian America, the American version of the liberal British news site, has launched. Quick impressions: Slowly, quietly, Rooney is starting to fulfil his potential It's about an English soccer star. No World Series news. The Guardian today launched its US website with an exclusive interview with presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. And a style note (Do we realise what we're doing?): Guardian America, the US edition of the British newspaper, won't use American spellings and punctuation. What will make it a Guardian publication will be its adherence to the Guardian stylebook, a volume that since the 1920s has gone through several editions and revisions and which is available in bookshops and here on the Guardian's website. There's always room for more good journalism. I hope this isn't just an advertising vehicle. Posted by Sheila Lennon Out of Iraq: Refugee Riverbend in DamascusRiverbend, the Iraqi girl blogger of Baghdad Burning, last posted Sept. 6 as her family prepared to leave Iraq for Syria. Now she has posted from Damascus. ...A refugee is someone who isn’t really welcome in any country -- including their own... especially their own. Posted by Sheila Lennon Joni Mitchell '75 demos: 'The Seeding Of Summer Lawns'
In 1975, Joni Mitchell signalled a switch in direction when she released The Hissing Of Summer Lawns. It was a rich album with textures unseen on a folk album. It wasn't rock for sure. Hissing was the singer-songwriter exploring new sounds outside the folk idiom. Nine demo tracks at BigO, Singapore. The blog there is Talkin’ About My Revolutions. Posted by Sheila Lennon Students' energy-efficient house designs compete in Solar Decathlon, Germans winGermany wins the 2007 Solar Decathlon!. The blog Inhabitat has been covering the event:
It has just been announced that the German University, Technische Universität Darmstadt is the winner of this years Solar Decathlon competition! In order to win this prestigious design competition, the German team had to beat out a whole slew of American universities on U.S. turf (the National Mall in Washington DC). Frankly, however, we’re not surprised to see a winning design emerge from the land of high-quality engineering. And the Darmstadt Solar Decathlon house was a worthy winner of the coveted prize. The stunning solar house was simple, elegant, and extremely innovative in its use of solar shutters and fold-up interior space. There's a gallery of the exterior of all the entries at the official site. The first visual impression of the bunch is boxes, and shoeboxes, slants and angles. Only one, below, has a visible curve. but Inhabitat has better photos of some, with interiors.
Inhabitat is a stylish and interesting blog, worth bookmarking. Cutlery that's 70 percent potatoes? That's here.... Related: A Right Livelihood Award to Grameen Shakti which has installed more than 110,000 solar home systems in rural Bangladesh.
via Jeff Hess's Have Coffee Will Write. Posted by Sheila Lennon October 22, 2007Journalists, librarians and the public good, with a break for amazing cakesThink, wring hands, repeat: Doc Searls blogs today (Stop and listen) about Hal Crowther's eminently readable The future of the newspaper — without the paper. Crowther references former L.A. Times editor John Carroll's April 2006 speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, What Will Become of Newspapers? Every journalist believes that he or she works, ultimately, for the reader—not for the editor, or for the publisher, or for the corporation, or for those opaque financial institutions that hold the stock. Working for the shareholder means getting you to click on as many pages a possible so we can show you their ads. You had a big appetite this weekend for stories about the Red Sox and Halloween. See where this is going? Doc: Well, crap was king in most newsrooms long before Don Henley wrote and sang Dirty Laundry. Really, is Rupert Murdoch any better or worse than William Randolph Hearst? But Hal’s right about every business model he trashes here. Including the one thanks to which countless bloggers have become no less obsessed with eyeballs than any other “journal” — traditional or otherwise — that lives mostly to serve ego and advertising. More importantly, he’s right that we haven’t found the business model that makes a living, and not just a cause, for full-time truth-hunters. The first -- and at this time, only -- comment on Doc's thoughtful piece tosses a bucketful of cold water. The punch line: I’ll take the openly partisan model of the 19th century over the sanctimonious “eat your spinach” model represented by Crowther. The sooner he and his kind pass from the scene, the better. Unh-uh. Sorry. Those are no longer your choices. The Red Sox or Halloween. No substitutions. My own, view-from-the-trenches opinion is that newspapers should not be public companies, forced by Wall Street to deliver annual growth rates incompatible with the nature of their products. (How much annual growth in your clicking and reading time do you expect?) Privately held companies can sustain healthy, stable annual profits and invest in innovation. If they're willing to go through some lean years in order to retool and get it right, they can. Kudos to those who are buying back their stock and taking the hit in the interest of the longterm survival of their journalism.
Mike's Amazing Cakes is a Redmond, Wash., sculpture studio for cake. These are amazing. via Rebecca Blood.
The Internet Archive, whose main claim to fame is the Wayback Machine, designed to archive the internet's web history, has created a new project: the Open Content Alliance. It's purpose is to open the nation's library collections to universal web search. The Times has the details (Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web ): But the resistance from some libraries, like the Boston Public Library and the Smithsonian Institution, suggests that many in the academic and nonprofit world are intent on pursuing a vision of the Web as a global repository of knowledge that is free of business interests or restrictions. Posted by Sheila Lennon October 21, 2007Panties for Peace uses superstition against Burma's junta; Flickr to add editing tools; Farm bill makes us fat
· Post Your Panties for Peace! Global action Beginning 16th October The Burma military regime is not only brutal but very superstitious. They believe that contact with a woman’s panties or sarong can rob them of their power Here's a list of contact addresses -- street, phone, fax and email -- for Burmese embassies around the world, including Washington, D.C. and the U.N. Mission in New York. The Irrawaddy News Magazine is all over Burma Crisis 2007, with video links on its homepage. It reports “Panties for Peace” Campaign Wins Wide Support, Liz Hilton, a supporter of the Lanna Action for Burma and a member of the Empower foundation, said that by sending underwear to the men of Burma’s overseas embassies women would be delivering a strong message to the regime.
... thousands of monks were taken away on trucks to where??? The military have continued raiding homes and arresting anyone believed involved in the demonstrations. Monks and others arrested are telling the stories of torture and brutality. People are dying in custody…their bodies quickly cremated. State Peace and Development Council s the official name of the military regime of Burma (also known as Myanmar). It seized power by force instead of taking part in the election of 1990 which resulted in overwhelming support for the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD). The Washington Post reported Saturday Bush Sets New Sanctions Against Burmese Military Junta, President Bush yesterday ratcheted up pressure on the military junta in Burma in response to its violent crackdown on democracy protests, imposing a new round of sanctions and calling on China, India and other regional powers to help force the ruling generals to "stop their vicious persecution." Everybody's trying to hit them where it hurts.
TechCrunch reports, Currently, you can rotate photos on Flickr, but the editing stops there. When the new tools launch, users will be able to edit photos more extensively using the http://www.crunchbase.com/company/picnik">Picnik Flash based tools (see our review here).
... the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy. Life makes you tough: The wussification of American children. SFGate. The experiences we had that today's kids won't, in the name of fear. Posted by Sheila Lennon Old-pictures blog becomes bookIf you're not up for a sports day -- the Patriots at Miami at 1 on CBS or the do-or-die Red Sox finale against Cleveland tonight at 8 on Fox -- and the 70- degree weather of the new Southern New England autumns, here's a bookworm's alternative.
Blog to book or, BibliOdyssey becomes biblio: Before photography, illustrators painstakingly reproduced the natural world; lofty concepts were systemized and drawns; manuscripts were illuminated. A blog that has published many such images from limited-edition books has taken a sampling of it to print: BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet From the blurb, ...Across the world, libraries and institutions are only recently starting to make their collections available online, and the bulk of this amazing material goes unnoted by the casual surfer. BibliOdyssey's mission over the past two years has been to diligently trawl the dustier corners of the Internet and retrieve these materials for our attention. Thanks to the daily efforts of this singular blog, a myriad of long-forgotten imagery has now re-surfaced, from eighteenth-century anatomical and architectural drawing to occult and alchemical engravings and proto-Surrealist depictions of the horrors of industrialization (for example, the half-plant, half-people illustrations of J.J. Grandville). Each of the images is accompanied by commentary from "PK," author and curator of the BibliOdyssey blog. The book also provides details for each image and links to the source website. With a foreword by artist Dinos Chapman, BibliOdyssey is a true cabinet of curiosities and a journey in discovery and delight. Or you could browse the BibliOdyssey blog. The thumbnail images stripped along its right side will take you to interesting spots. (I've spent hours clicking images on this delightful breadcrumb trail.) There's a dropdown labeled Archives that will take you back through earlier pages. A third navigation option is a tagcloud at the bottom of the page, which leads to annotated archives -- tag index at del.icio.us (one of the best uses of the social bookmarking tool I've seen.) There's a blogroll of links to Resource Sites, as well, where more of this "visual anthropology" can be found.
Jules Rupalley, The Miners - Group of miners around well-like shaft in rocky setting [Quirot & Company (active ca. 1851-ca. 1853), lithographer and publisher] It's not all antique. Below is an album cover from a post devoted to the work of modern graphic designer Erik Nitsche.
Posted by Sheila Lennon October 20, 2007Facebook parody makes the GOP candidates your 'friends'The Right-Wing Facebook is a parody that looks like a Facebook page, full of updates on your "friends," the GOP presidential candidates. The disclaimer: Right-Wing Facebook is a satirical take on right-wing presidential candidates and is a project of People For the American Way. This site is a parody of Facebook but is not associated or affiliated with Facebook in any way. It's not inside the real Facebook's walled city, so anyone can see it. It's just another page on the open Web. No, I'm not going to spoil it. Go take a look for yourself. Frequent updates would be an authentic touch. Posted by Sheila Lennon Saturday cowboy: The busted stripper is the Utah police chief's wife
It reads like a dusty end-of-the-road novel. In less than a week, Tripp was driven from the post he'd held most of his adult life -- "on grounds of embarrassment," said the mayor. In the same stories that reported his resignation, Tripp was accused by two of his own officers of a certain indifference to narcotics investigations. He hotly denied this last allegation -- and, upon further examination, it seems to have stemmed mainly from a clash of wills and a difference of opinion about how to police a small, isolated town. Still, the damage was done. There is no photo of Vaughn Tripp -- perhaps he wants no more celebrity -- but he's probably on the wall behind his parents in the photo below. His mother Gertrude, 78, is quoted as saying, "My son has a problem picking wives."
The Times caption: Gertrude and Mark Tripp are the parents of ousted Wendover Chief of Police Vaughn Tripp who was fired after his stripper wife was busted selling drugs to an undercover agent. A wall of photographs of the family adorns their living room. The police chief vacancy is advertised at hotjobs: Police Chief: City of Wendover Utah. In the course of pulling threads together, I found the bio of Tripp's counterpart across the border, the West Wendover, Nev., police chief, Ronald Supp. It ends, perfectly, with Ron says, "As a result of that last assignment, it appears that I became one of the many who have either been stranded here or came on a temporary basis and decided to stay."
Last month, SL Weekly, the alternative weekly out of Salt Lake City, 120 miles away, profiled some others stranded or landed here, but on the Utah side: Feature: Crap Shoot Mexican immigrants bet on a better life in Wendover. But is there a better payout for the kids? Wendover can be a tough place. Deepak Sharma found the border town so hard that the 36-year-old set himself on fire one April morning in an apartment on Wendover’s Utah side. The immigrant from India worked as a dealer at the Peppermill Hotel Casino in West Wendover, Nev. Like many immigrants to Wendover, he slept in an apartment on the barren Utah side, then drove the five minutes to his casino job on the more plush Nevada side of the border. Three comments on this story add a great deal to the whole package. Posted by Sheila Lennon October 19, 2007'Clinton, Schumer lose Woodstock museum'; 1.2 million download Radiohead $? album; TV news: Substance works, tooClinton, Schumer lose Woodstock museum may show up as a Jay Leno headline chuckle. Award goes to Bran Tumulty's posting on the Politics on the Hudson blog at the The Journal News/LoHud.com, out of White Plains, N.Y. It's just an earmark. All is not lost. Efforts by Sens. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chuck Schumer to earmark $1 million in federal money for a museum commemorating the 1969 Woodstock music festival were defeated Thursday.
In a functional society, there's support for all the arts and sciences, infants and boomers, hobbies and enjoyment, learning and easy travel and as many bronze monuments as you need. What you value is not inherently more important than what others care about. Vaguely related: Women Lit the Fire That Burned Draft Cards at Women's E-News. Another story from 1969:
As night fell in the capital city on Moratorium Day, 15,000 people carried candles around the Washington monument, led by Coretta Scott King, identified by the press, in the custom of the times, as "Mrs. Martin Luther King."
Last week, Radiohead released their latest album, In Rainbows, for free, asking fans to pay whatever they liked for the full length downloadable work. More: Radiohead's direct-marketing experiment looking successful
Viewers, the study found, are perfectly willing to watch stories on education policy or tax debates - in many cases they'll tune in to those stories but flip away from a segment on a celebrity divorce or a deadly highway pileup. And they'll consistently reward in-depth reporting with higher ratings than more cursory stories, no matter what the topic. Movie of the absurd: Reverend Billy Wants You To Stop Shopping. RU Sirius interviews the star of What Would Jesus Buy?, a new film directed by Rob VanAlkemade and produced by Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock. The film follows Billy and his "Church of Stop Shopping choir" on a trek across America, between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 2005, as our protagonists try to inject a little bit of genuine holiday spirit into the frenzy of the Xmas shopping season. (You know — love thy neighbors, help the needy, give peace a chance...) Posted by Sheila Lennon October 18, 2007Viacom puts 8 years of 'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart' onlineViacom to offer all clips of 'Daily Show' online "...every minute of the show since its 1999 inception." "The site (www.thedailyshow.com) is meant to pull in advertising money from Day One, but it also will be something of a test lab for Viacom and perhaps for rivals looking over its shoulder. Knock yourself out... Stewart has signed a two-year contract extension that keeps him in the anchor chair of his Comedy Central ''faux news'' show through 2010, the network announced Thursday. His contract had been set to expire at the end of 2008. Posted by Sheila Lennon Site helps you stop paper catalogs that follow an online purchaseYou've probably done this, too. Buy something at an online site, and find its paper catalog in your mailbox every couple of months thereafter. Now there's a way to opt out -- a "Do Not Mail" list, essentially. "Catalog Choice is a free service that allows you to decide what gets in your mailbox. Use it to reduce your mailbox clutter, while helping save natural resources." The Times (Deforest your mailbox): The site was developed by three nonprofit environmental groups - the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Ecology Center - to relay requests en masse to specific retailers. Since it was introduced last Wednesday, more than 20,000 people have registered. ...There have been some surprises: The most requests have come from people who wish to stop receiving the catalogs of L. L. Bean, a company built on an image of embracing the great outdoors. I'm surprised more sites don't let you opt out online, when you're making a purchase. Maybe they think you'll forget about them unless they nudge you with visual evidence. My first impulse was to take my growing pile of catalogs and unsubscribe every one of them, but I really do prefer to browse paper seed and plant catalogs. The choices are so numerous, and few sites let you display more than 10 items per page; the result is, quickly, click fatigue. Later: Reader Jim Rizzo emails to suggest, "Check out greendimes.com. It does something similar by stopping direct marketing 'junk' mail." This will cost $15, though. Catalog Choice is free, but more limited: GreenDimes reduces the credit card offers, insurance offers, sweepstakes offers, coupon mailers, charitable solicitations and retail catalogs that your household receives. We can’t reduce magazine subscriptions, bank statements, brokerage statements, school alumni or other similar mailings since these mailings are the result of a personal relationship you have with the company or organization. Jim adds, "Yes, it's not free, but the money goes to a good cause (and I think the kit includes some stuff to make your daily life a little greener)." Check it out if you're being thorough. Its FAQ is here. GreenDimes is a business, and has a blog. Posted by Sheila Lennon Surrealism, Halloween and a... barking spider?
Surreal and prolific: Fascinating Worlds of Jacek Yerka at Dark Roasted Blend. More at Yerka's site.
Here are some spooky things to browse on the Web that aren't on everybody's route:
 The Museum of Supernatural History is divided into a number of departments, each of which focuses on a magical, malefic or fantastical area of study. Each haunted antique (hauntique) is a gateway between two worlds. Individuals known as 'sensitives' are the key that can open these gateways. Of course, activating certain artefacts in the collection entails a risk of triggering a catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions. The Haunted Museum: Ghosts of the Prairie's Chronicle of Ghost Research, from the Heyday of Spiritualism to the Modern Era. How the Irish invented Hallowe'en
Posted by Sheila Lennon October 17, 2007'Sheri Martinelli: A Modernist Muse'; Dustin Hoffman at 70; Electronic paper: Not here yetSome days it seems there's nothing new on the Web but operating-system chatter, young men's fantasies and life hacking ("How to wash your hands"), and political outrage. It's wearying, and the tilt toward geek dudes' concerns betrays the promise of the universal Web. The competitive nature of social bookmarking seems not to appeal to people with more substantial interests, and their finds are often not recorded and shared. Worth a look:
No notice was taken by the press of artist-writer Sheri Martinelli’s death in November 1996, unfairly ignoring the significant role she played in the cultural history of our time. A brief overview of her career indicates her range of roles: she was a protégée of Anaïs Nin and is described at length in her infamous Diary; she was the basis for a major character in William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions and then became the muse and (some say) mistress of Ezra Pound (she appears in various guises in the later Cantos); Charlie Parker and the members of the Modern Jazz Quartet hung out at her Greenwich Village apartment; Marlon Brando was an admirer and Rod Steiger collected her art, as did E. E. Cummings; she knew and was admired by all the Beats, Ginsberg was an especially close friend and mentions her in one of his poems, and was herself known in San Francisco in the late 1950s as the Queen of the Beats; H. D. identified with her and wrote about her in End to Torment; Pound wrote the introduction to a book of her paintings, and her art is now in collections throughout the world. She wrote unusual prose and poetry, much of it published in her own ‘zine.... More: I met Sheri Martinelli and the guy she was living with, a Chinese named Gilbert Lee, in Washington, D.C. in 1956 or 1957 when I was 17 years old. Sheri was a red-headed woman of Irish descent (as she never let you forget), maybe about 40 years old, though she claimed to be more like 32....Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli 1960-1967
Dustin Hoffman is 70? Shoot, we're rolling off the edge. Midnight Cowboy was done on a low budget. You gotta have money to pay for a scene that includes a bunch of people on the street in midtown Manhattan. So Jon Voight and I were walking in regular traffic and being filmed by a camera hidden in a van across the street. That's a stolen shot. That was a cab that almost hit us. In my brain, I wanted to say, "We're making a movie here, asshole!" But your brain knows that would ruin the take. So I'm walking here! really means We're shooting a film here! Via Robot Wisdom.
I've been reading for decades about the thin sheet of something -- portable, unobtrusive, flexible and indestructible -- that will let us read the paper wherever. Soon come, for decades. Q: How do you see the future of e-paper? How easy is it to lose? I was afraid so... Posted by Sheila Lennon October 16, 2007Providence Geeks tomorrow, 7 p.m.; Streetpainted river; Gawker's nasty NYC; Pope JP2 'appears' in bonfire?Geeks need women: Providence Geeks' monthly meet is set for 7 p.m. Wednesday. At AS220 as always, but starting later than usual. Details at that Geeks link.
No other form has lent itself so perfectly to capturing the current ethos of young New York, which is overwhelmingly tipped toward anger, envy, and resentment at those who control the culture and apartments. “New York is a city for the rich by the rich, and all of us work at the mercy of rich people and their projects,” says Choire Sicha, Gawker’s top editor (he currently employs a staff of five full-time writers). “If you work at any publication in this town, you work for a millionaire or billionaire. In some ways, that’s functional, and it works as a feudal society. But what’s happened now, related to that, is that culture has dried up and blown away: What's left seems snarky and trashy. Be glad you're elsewhere.
Row, row, row... Hannu's Boatyard Free detailed plans for "One-sheet" (of plywood) and "one and a half sheet" boats. Small boats, of course. I'd rather be in this than in Gawker's NYC.
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Lost in translation: Is this fiery image Pope John Paul II? This is from "Australia's largest-selling daily, the Herald Sun." ...The fiery figure being hailed as Pope John Paul II making an appearance beyond the grave was spotted during a ceremony in Poland to mark the second anniversary of his death. Fire seems an inappropriate medium for this apparition, considering... There's much more here -- in Italian, but reproducing several news clippings, a photo of the photographer, Gregorz Lukasik, the site of the festival, a map....
Posted by Sheila Lennon October 15, 2007Winemaker Bledsoe picked Brady yesterday; CEOs overpaid, they say; 'Airplane mode' (Say wha'?)
"Tom has established himself as one of the premier guys in the league and has done it for a long time," Bledsoe said. "Tony is, what, just about to go into his 16th game as a starter? The tale was of a Patriots team that came through again, despite a glaring failure to sack (by Rodney Harrison), and just one interception (by a surprised Junior Seau) in a whale of a game that was more of a nail-biter than it looks on paper (48-27 Pats). John Clayton, ESPN: The scary part of the Patriots' 6-0 start is that they really aren't playing their best football. Tackling was a little bit sloppy Sunday. Brady did miss 15 passes. In the third quarter, Patrick Crayton caught an 8-yard touchdown pass from Tony Romo to put the Cowboys ahead 24-21. Bledsoe, by the way, calls his budding winery the "Flying B." We can't wait till next year to see whether the label on his bottles resembles the Flying Elvis on his old helmet.
We are overpaid, say US executives. Financial Times, London. Most US corporate leaders believe chief executives are overpaid and do not provide value for money for their companies, according to a study that will embolden critics of excessive compensation. Reaganomics Finally Trickles Down To Area Man. The Onion, of course.
Weird Al Yankovich's Bob, a palindromic parody.
Posted by Sheila Lennon October 14, 2007Updated: Sad day on the Cowboys blog; Flamingos' flamingo formation; Muslim scholars call for peaceLater: The Dallas News Cowboys blog. After the 48-27 Patriots win. The comments tell all. Choreography? Flamingos form a flamingo, in an aerial photo in this month's National Geographic. How did they get them to do that?
LONDON, Oct 11 (Reuters) - More than 130 Muslim scholars from around the globe called on Thursday for peace and understanding between Islam and Christianity, saying "the very survival of the world itself is perhaps at stake".
There's probably something there that matches your energy level. You might want to peek at the Dallas News Cowboys Blog to see what they're saying about "us." I'll take Brady over Romo. Found: Seven out of eight Dallas News sportswriters pick the Pats. Posted by Sheila Lennon October 12, 2007BIF-3, Day 2: Denise Nemchev, Joseph CoughlinI missed the morning's storytellers on the second day of the Business Innovation Factory’s BIF-3 Collaborative Innovation Summit at Trinity Rep yesterday. You can read about them at the excellent conference blog. Here's the Day 1 post: Bloggers swarm the Business Innovation Factory's Collaborative Innovation Summit And the Mark Cuban - Walter Mossberg interview: BIF-3: Mark Cuban wants to buy Cubs -- and Verizon, to which I just added a bit of video.
Rachel Clarke: Transcripts from First Session Day 2 Brian Jepson: |
Red Sox outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury stole second base in the bottom of the fourth inning, of last night's second Sox World Series game at Fenway, so you get a free "crunchy seasoned beef taco" Tuesday between 2 and 5 p.m.. (And the Sox won, 2-1 , to boot.) 
The stripper -- Sylvia, at right -- is the police chief's wife. 
