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February 28, 2008

Brilliant: Bowls made of crisp bacon

not martha

Brilliant. Bacon bowls.

Drape bacon over foil-covered forms (muffin tins, bowls), bake and carefully unmold. Fill with scrambled eggs is my first thought, but not martha chose a breadless BLT.

Due to bacon shrinkage, it's bacon overload -- 6 slices of bacon for a muffin-size pile of lettuce and tomato, increased from 4, which shrunk enough to leave windows for fleeing salad -- so you might consider a wider, shallower form.

One commenter suggested turkey bacon, which doesn't shrink, but seemed concerned it might burn. (Watch it!)

Or try this tip from a commenter which, if it works, would let you use less bacon:

If you run bacon under cold water before frying, it won't shrink. I bet if you refrigerate or put the bacon cups in the freezer to get really cold before baking, it'll reduce shrinkage.

"not martha" credits Bacon Placemats at Instructables for the inspiration. This can be slipped into a normal blt sandwich, but I'm not sure I'd go for what looks like unnecessary weaving and density just to hide it in a sandwich.

And as placemats... nah. I like the containers better.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 8:48 PM | Permalink

Cats are Democrats, Dogs are Republicans

Quick smile: Cats are Democrats, Dogs are Republicans.

The panel at right is a fragment of a larger cartoon by Kirk Anderson.

Click on the image to see all the panels.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 12:03 PM | Permalink

February 27, 2008

Bookstore to expand by going nonprofit; A fridgeful of turtles; Color-blind artist

A few distractions from Serious Issues:

Shaman Drum looks to become nonprofit by Stefanie Murray of The Ann Arbor News is an interesting story about a bookstore in Ann Arbor that is on the way to becoming a nonprofit. It's not in the red, its owner wants to expand, actually:

As a nonprofit, the store would be tax-exempt and would reinvest profits into itself to fulfill its mission and serve the community. Shaman Drum could also access new sources of revenue, including grants, donations and membership fees, to help it build programming or pay employees, for example.

The change would not only impact the internal workings of Shaman Drum, but would affect customers, too.

Hart said the goal is to turn Shaman Drum into a center for literary arts. Beyond selling its trademark collection of literary, academic and scholarly books, it could increase its number of author events and add a plethora of new programming, such as writing workshops, plays, book clubs or poetry readings. Customers could also potentially pay to become a member of the nonprofit.

"We feel by going nonprofit, we can expand what we do," said Hart, 63, a former Episcopalian priest who Pohrt hired to spearhead the move to becoming a nonprofit.

"We hope to create a business model that will be useful and forward thinking."

via wood s lot

How others live: Close the door, we're trying to sleep: The woman who keeps 75 hibernating tortoises in her fridges is a serious story, not a wacky cat-lady piece.

Mrs Neely who runs the Jersey-based Tortoise Sanctuary, had to set up the fridges because of the particularly mild winter.

Her tortoises hibernate for up to three months between December and March, and need steady temperatures between 3c and 8c.

They are in danger of waking early if it heats up - and then do not have enough body weight to keep themselves warm and not enough energy to eat or drink.

But fridges, at a steady 4c to 6c, are the perfect environment.

The turtles hibernate wrapped in tea towels, which were removed for this photo.

Colour-blind artist learns to paint by hearing. Times U.K.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 12:30 AM | Permalink

February 25, 2008

Tina Fey returns to SNL" 'B*itch is the New Black'

Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update -- the original "fake news" -- came back from the writer's strike with a roar Saturday night. Former head writers Tina Fey hosted, leading with B*itch is the New Black!

Just a bit:

...back in grammar school, they could have had priests teaching you but no, they had tough old nuns who sleep on cots and can hit ya and you HATE those b*tches. But by the end of the school year you sure knew the capital of Vermont!

The title comes from a riff on Hillary. Call it equal time: The re-creation, SNL-style, of the Democratic Debate, Clinton vs. Obama features full-grown important news anchors fawning over Obama as though he were the Tom Brady who didn't lose the Super Bowl.

Topping it, special guest Mike Huckabee. Brand-new 2008 candidate Ralph Nader is slated to show up there next week.

TV worth watching: The writers are back, and they have months of words to get out there.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 4:38 AM | Permalink

February 23, 2008

Friday catblogging -- finally

Miles checks out the snow Friday afternoon.

Heavy sleet has compressed the snow to a hard four inches now in my Providence yard.

(I've been deep in code, upgrading our blogs to Movable Type 4 on a staging server. I don't think the details make for great blog posts, unless you find MT Template Tags exciting. Later...)

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 12:09 AM | Permalink

February 21, 2008

Extreme houseboats, and other, extremely beautiful ones

From WebUrbanist, WebUrbanist 17 Extreme Houseboats and Houseboat Designs: From Luxury Habitats to Humble Floating Homes

Feel like escaping? Nothing too cozy here -- mostly renderings of unlived-in high-tech houseboats, futuristic spaceships for sea or stream, and a travel trailer on a pontoon platform.

(I've never wanted to live in a replica of a giant portable CD player.)

Funkiest:of the bunch:

None quite compare with these rental boats in Kerala, India.

They're touted for exploring the popular "backwaters of Kerala," rather than the Arabian Sea that makes it a beach destination.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:56 PM | Permalink

February 20, 2008

Stolen Van Gogh found behind Swiss psychiatric hospital

It's not often you get to write a headline like that.

Reproduction of Blossoming Chestnut Branches painted by Vincent Van Gogh in 1890. This and Claude Monet's Poppies near Vetheuil (1879) were found abandoned Monday night in the parking lot of the University of Zurich Psychiatric Hospital. The painting is one of four stolen Feb. 10 by three masked, armed men. An attendant saw them poking out of an abandoned white Opel Omega with stolen license plates.

Is there something twisted about the thieves "returning" a Van Gogh to the parking lot of a mental hospital?

AP reports that officials refuse to address whether a ransom was paid. A Degas and a Cezanne are still missing.

BBC has good-sized images of all four stolen paintings., although they seem to have the Van Gogh title wrong. ( BBC Stolen paintings found in Zurich) calls the stolen painting Chestnut in Bloom, but the Emil Bührle collection of French Impressionists -- from which it was robbed -- displays the painting as Blossoming Chestnut Branches, Here's the collection indexed by painter.

This particular work was painted Auvers-sur-Oise in the last two months of Van Gogh's life, when he was producing a painting a day. You can see his output, indexed by year, at the Van Gogh Gallery.

The drop site is a shrine to psychiatry. Carl Jung treated patients and taught at that University hospital from 1905-1913. One of his students was Hermann Rorschach, of inkblot fame. Both earned medical degrees there.

· AP: Two of 4 paintings stolen in Zurich heist are recovered

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 2:31 AM | Permalink

February 19, 2008

Mp3s: Santana, Seattle '72 - music to work by

Santana Live in Seattle 1972

From the few recordings that survived from this tour, Santana bravely dropped Black Magic Woman, Gypsy Queen, Evil Ways and Oye Como Va from the setlist as if to say the band was bigger than the original musicians who had left.

14 tracks are up now, four encores to be added tomorrow.

I'm through track 9, and haven't heard a lyric yet. The mood is a warm summer afternoon, and it feels good in February.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 1:05 PM | Permalink

February 18, 2008

Lunar eclipse and Providence Geeks Wednesday, fighting with Movable Type tonight

Illustration at NASA by Larry Johnson of Shadow and Substance, where the animations foreshadowing Wednesday's eclipse tell the whole story.

From NASA, Total Lunar Eclipse,

On Wednesday evening, February 20th, the full Moon over the Americas will turn a delightful shade of red and possibly turquoise, too. It's a total lunar eclipse—the last one until Dec. 2010.

The Sun goes down. The Moon comes up. You go out and look at the sky. Observing the eclipse is that easy. Maximum eclipse, and maximum beauty, occurs at 10:26 pm EST...

The source of the turquoise is ozone. More at that link.

Code red: Also Wednesday night, Feb. Geek Dinner - Wed. 20th 5:30-9pm @ AS220. Providence Geeks gather and palaver once a month, and they get a light show this time.

There's also a featured presentation. Here's how co-alpha pGeek Jack Templin describes this month's:

Andrew Schiller, founder of Woonsocket-based Location Inc./NeighborhoodScout.com, a nationwide neighborhood search engine for home buyers and movers with 1.8 million unique visitors last year, will be talking about their patented search technology that answers the first question most home buyers have: “where should I focus my house hunt?”. The audience will try the algorithm by ‘building their ideal neighborhood’ on the site, and finding the local neighborhood that best matches the ideal imaginary one. A sneak peak at NeighborhoodScout v2 will reveal flash-based maps, data mining that has produced new levels of granularity for neighborhood crime, appreciation rate, and school ratings, and ‘smart search’ taken to a new level. Andrew will be joined by Andy Couture, VP of Business Development for the company.

All under a red moon.

The two are simultaneous, with totality coming last.

I used to be a poet, but now...: I've been up all night (again) coding the new Movable Type 4.1 templates -- it's the software behind these blogs, and an upgrade is coming.

I agree entirely with Ann Torrence of Pixel Remix, who wrote ((web)mastering MT4)

The documentation for the new features is appalling... For example the entire content of the docs on the new tag, is:

Now I guess users can tappity tap and consult Google-Giver-of-All until we figure out that in the MT3.3 plug-in from which this tag seems to have originated, [include_blogs="blog#"] or [exclude_blogs="blog#"] was the syntax for the attribute and give that a try, but doesn't it belong in the docs? Jeez Louise. Extra points if SixApart would output a system level table that cross-walks blog id number to blog name. Otherwise, you can hunt for it by logging into MT, navigating to that blog's tab, and then running your cursor across a url in your browser until you find "&blog_id=[some#]". How convenient.

I've since found a little more on the syntax of that Multiblog tag -- and used it tonight -- but I've been doing a whole lot of tappity tap myself. If I hadn't taught myself MT template tags on these earlier MT blogs, I'd be sunk. As it is, what were once giant but unified templates have had their parts squirreled away in style sheets, modules and widgets, so the hard part is finding the pieces and putting the puzzle back together in ways that are standard for editors but not for Web designers.

I was an English and History major, so I don't think in code. I treat it all as a foreign language and eventually I stop ordering three potato courses, as I did the first day I arrived in Spain.

I know how to say "I'm sorry" in lots of languages -- (Mandinka? No problem. It's "Hekatu") -- but I think these pages should be saying it to me.

Eventually, it will enable good new functions such as podcast feeds, but right now I'm adding RSS feed icons back in, rassling with nested Chinese boxes and eyestrain, losing sleep and getting punchy, with the occasional "Eureka!" thrown in when another piece of it works.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 6:24 AM | Permalink | Comments 2

February 17, 2008

Half a resurrection? Hamilton and Bates of the Blue Flames at Chan's Friday

Back when they were kids, sax and harp player Scott Hamilton and guitarist Fred Bates started a blues band called Hamilton-Bates Blue Flames, with Preston Hubbard on bass and Chuck Riggs on drums.

Scott went on to become a world-famous tenor sax player, living in London and touring in Europe, where jazz thrives. Friday night he'll be at Chan's in Woonsocket, reuniting with his high-school friend Fred (and backed by Marshall Wood, Jim Gwinn and Paul Schmeling) for two shows: 8 p.m. $20, 10 p.m. $15, both $24.

You can see some photos of the Blue Flames in this autobiographical section at Preston Hubbard's site. (They've all played with Duke Robillard -- Preston went from Roomful of Blues to The Fabulous Thunderbirds.)

YouTube has a 1977 TV clip of Scott at 22 fronting a Toronto band, and you might want to watch it before you check out what's below, shot nearly 30 years later.

The Scott Hamilton Quintet perform Fats Waller's The Jitterbug Waltz.
filmed by Paul Hubbard at The Hi-Hat, Providence (undated, but recent)
featuring Paul Schmeling on piano; Marshall Wood on bass; Jon Wheatley on guitar; and Blue Flames original Chuck Riggs, heard on many Hamilton albums, as well as alongside Harry Allen in Manhattan.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 5:21 AM | Permalink

February 15, 2008

Deer in the yard, and their fan mail

My daughter wants to live here. It looks to be in Western Massachusetts. The page is Deer in the Yard at Pelorian Digital.

Our house was built in the deer's natural habitat in a remote rural area. Well worn deer trails cut through the property's abundant pine and sage. The oldest deer we've met (we call her Mama Rose) walked right up to us when we first arrived, sniffing and looking us over. Rose smelled some almonds in my pocket so I gave her a few. We gave some almonds to her family a few other times but stopped the practice when advised that feeding deer is illegal. Even so, that didn't stop them from regular visits. Rose and her kin obviously think the yard belongs to them as much as anyone else, and they are just taking advantage of the wealth of natural foods growing everywhere. They especially like clover flowers, but it's amazing to see the variety of tasty flowers, leaves, twigs, nuts and berries they'll eat. They stay away from herbs and herbal flowers, but on occasion we've seen young deer eating the sweet medicinal berries of the Juniper tree. Food is of course a major concern, but we also think they visit because they like our company...

Lots of photos.
More Deer in the Yard: Emails (their fan mail) and more details.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 4:25 AM | Permalink

February 13, 2008

Slideshow: Valentine roses from Kenya come with a whiff of danger

AP
Roses for export in Naivasha, Kenya last Thursday.

From Kenya, Flowers in Kenya is a narrated slideshow of stunning contrasts by AP.

The story:Kenya violence threatens flower exports

Tech note: At the bottom of the slideshow are links to Play, Pause and Captions (to the left of the progress bar below the photos). I mention it because the type is so dark on my screen that I missed the captions the first time through.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 3:29 PM | Permalink | Comments 1

February 12, 2008

Better printable Valentines Day cards -- and an R&B e-card

'50s Valentines - A Flickr set of 58 (historical?) images by valart2008 that beg to be passed out in class.

This link goes to a page of thumbnails. Click on one to see it, click "All sizes" above get a version big enough to print. (You might print a sample to get an idea how large each size would print.)

Concept counts: Idea: Scientist Valentines at Ironic Sans.

Click to enlarge, then print, fold or... wrap around chocolate.

Less mush, more bite:
Hearts Atwirl Vintage Valentines is one woman's private collection. Definitely worth digging into.

While that first set takes me back to third grade, Elizabeth Rosenberry's Valentines are stranger, and more interesting. If you're on the outs with your sweetie, here's one for you. There's tougher love, too.

Like ornate? Vintage Valentine Postcard Gallery from Pamela Wiggins, Antiques Guide for About.com.

Virtual V's: a good surprise. I wasn't expecting a guitar-playing cartoon rose and a toe-tapping heart belting an upbeat R&B tune at an earnest site:

"For every eCard sent, Care2 makes a donation to an environmental nonprofit to save a square foot of rainforest."

The rest of their Valentines. There's a "love" section, too.

Bonus thought: Abe Lincoln turns 200 today.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 3:38 AM | Permalink | Comments 1

February 11, 2008

Grammy winners list -- and Woody Guthrie's on it; 'Natural' Pepsi launches in U.K.; Useful Firefox extensions; Google, Yahoo & Microsoft

Here's AP's List of Grammy winners

Woody Guthrie's rediscovered and reclaimed 1949 wire recording, which I blogged Saturday in depth, with audio links (Woody Guthrie live -- in 1949 -- is up for a Grammy), won Best Historical Album. Woody died in 1967.

Realer thing: This Is London reports, Pepsi launches 'healthy' option made from all natural ingredients... but only in the U.K.

Pepsi Raw is said to be made from natural ingredients and contains no artificial preservatives, colours, flavourings or sweeteners.

Traditional Pepsi contains fructose corn syrup, sugar, artificial colourings, phosphoric acid, caffeine, citric acid and natural flavours.

In comparison, Pepsi Raw has only natural ingredients including apple extract, plain caramel colouring, coffee leaf, tantaric acid from grapes, gum arabic from acacia trees, cane sugar and sparkling water. It is paler in colour and less fizzy than other cola brands.

By replacing corn syrup with cane sugar, Pepsi claims it has managed to reduce the calorie content of a 300ml bottle by 20 per cent, from around 120 calories per serving to around 90 calories....

If it takes off there, maybe we'll see it here. Soda did seem to taste better with real sugar in it.

Your way: 25 Firefox Extensions to Make You More Productive at LifeDev. The Firefox browser lets you customize it with add-ons that you find useful. I post these from time to time because everybody uses the Web in a different way.

I find these two essential -- they aren't on LifeDev's list:

Restart Firefox. If you work with 50-plus open tabs as I often do, things can slow down. Pull down File-> Restart Firefox and the browser closes and reopens, asking in conjunction with Session Manager if I want to restore all 50 tabs. I usually do, but now the zip is back in my browser.

Image Zoom: (link fixed) Enlarge any photo right there in the page with a quick right click-left click.

Defying Goliath: Saturday, Yahoo announced that the board decided Friday to reject Microsoft's $44.6 billion offer. From Kara Swisher's Wall Street Journal blog, If Yahoo Only Had the Nerve -- But Will It Be a Happy Ending?:

...there is a very scary downside to this plucky show of courage.

That’s because Microsoft–well known for its pathological aggression–has already shown in its initial hostile move last week that it is more than willing to play hardball. In fact, very, very, very hard.

And this slap, most especially because Microsoft thinks that Google is standing right behind Yahoo in the fight, will surely send Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer into a corporate rage, if not a real one.

It is made worse because Microsoft’s paranoia is quite legitimate. Google’s top brass has actually been meeting with Yahoo execs this past week to help formulate a plan to help Yahoo and, of course, itself, by figuring out a lucrative outsourcing deal that will not attract too much ire of regulators due to Google’s dominance of the search market.

But Yahoo is going to need a lot more than Google if it really wants to stay independent, as I believe it actually does.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 4:24 AM | Permalink | Comments 1

February 10, 2008

Sunday links

Tiny beings: Marine Miniatures National Geographic Magazine publishes photos shot through a microscope:

A dipperful of seawater reveals an amazing hodgepodge of microfauna, from gelatinous shape-shifters to a baby octopus.

This photo, by David Liittschwager, is of a larval flounder.

Auto feedback: Rocking: Guitar Rising for Real Guitar Heroes. This game involves hooking a hard-body guitar up to it and playing it for real. (This escaped to the RSS feed when I accidentally saved it as "published." So if you think you've seen this before -- and even attributed and published it as Jorn Barger did-- you have.

Reality check:

I am a Muslim [pic]
No, I am a Muslim [pic]

How we’ve come to believe that overeating causes obesity

For the always on: Sorry, First Adopters--Better iPhone Is On The Way. Forbes previews the upgrade.

Before the fall: Was It Only a Game? - Dick Cavett reminisces about Bobby Fischer -- they got along, back on his old show -- in his New York Times blog. (If you didn't know about it, It began behind their columnists' pay wall and didn't get much of a launch.)

The holodeck in baby steps: Holographic displays step closer. BBC.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 1:10 AM | Permalink

February 9, 2008

WSJ: Yahoo Board to Reject Microsoft Bid

Yahoo Board to Reject Microsoft Bid, posted at the Wall Street Journal site today.

Yahoo Inc.'s board plans to reject Microsoft Corp.'s unsolicited $44.6 billion offer to acquire the Web giant, a person familiar with the situation says.

After a series of meetings over the past week, Yahoo's board determined that the $31 per share offer "massively undervalues" Yahoo, the person said. It also doesn't account for the risks Yahoo would be taking by entering into an agreement ...

Related: NYT: Facing Free Software, Microsoft Looks to Yahoo. Oops.

SAN FRANCISCO — Nearly a quarter-century ago, the mantra “information wants to be free” heralded an era in which news, entertainment and personal communications would flow at no charge over the Internet.

Now comes a new rallying cry: software wants to be free. Or, as the tech insiders say, it wants to be “zero dollar.”

A growing number of consumers are paying just that — nothing. This is the Internet’s latest phase: people using freely distributed applications, from e-mail and word processing programs to spreadsheets, games and financial management tools. They run on distant, massive and shared data centers, and users of the services pay with their attention to ads, not cash.

While such services have been emerging for years, their rapid adoption has been an important but largely overlooked driver of the $44.6 billion hostile bid that Microsoft made to take over Yahoo this week....

Relevant: The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy — and Their Open Source Alternatives

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 12:51 PM | Permalink

Woody Guthrie live -- in 1949 -- is up for a Grammy

Woody Guthrie in a 1944 publicity photo.

A newly discovered and restored live 1949 wire recording of Woody Guthrie has been nominated for a Grammy award for Best Historical Album.

For the first time hear Woody Guthrie perform live!

In 2001, The Woody Guthrie Archives received 2 spools of wire recordings from a live Woody Guthrie performance held in Newark, New Jersey in 1949. With the help of many talented recording engineers, the Woody Guthrie Foundation transferred this rare live performance from a delicate wire recording to digital audio, and, with state-of-the-art technology, restored it to near-perfection. This is one of the most significant recent finds in folk music history.

Hear clips here from The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949.

Background: The Grammy in Mathematics: Mathematician nominated for award for restoring the only known recording of a live Woody Guthrie performance at Science News' MathTrek blog..

There are samples of the recording before and after processing, at this link.

Guthrie's daughter Nora eventually figured out that the suspicious package wasn't a bomb, but rather a recording of her father on a device that predated magnetic tape. After a year of searching, she managed to track down someone with the equipment to play it.

What she finally heard was a bootleg recording of her father singing a live performance in 1949. It was the first time she had ever heard him perform in front of a live audience. He had developed Huntington's chorea and stopped performing when she was a child, and she thought he had never been recorded live.

The technolology:

-- The Wire Recorder at The Sound Recording Technology History Site.

-- Wire recording at Wikipedia.

Woody's competition in that category includes People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs 1913-1938 and Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings From The 1890s.

The Grammy Awards air Sunday night at 8 on CBS.

Thanks to MeFi for the first clue.

Footnote: Where the recordings came from

In 2001, Paul Braverman sent a small package containing 2 spools of wire recordings to the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York City. He had discovered them while cleaning out his closet. He had made the recordings himself while a student at Rutgers University, using a small wire recorder which was briefly used in the late 1940's. He was a recording hobbyist and often recorded events and programs held by the Y in the late 40's and early 50's.

Braverman, a retired pharmacist who died in 2003, made the recording at a free concert that drew about 25 people to the Newark, N.J. YW-YMHA, where Woody's second wife, Marjorie, taught dance. He told the Newark Star-Ledger in 2001 that he kept the metal wires wrapped around spools because "I knew that somehow or other, they would be of value in the folk music field."

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:29 AM | Permalink

February 7, 2008

Mp3s: Emmylou Harris, outtakes from 'Wrecking Ball,' 1995

Tunes for yet another gray day. Wrecking Ball Demos & Outtakes

Outtakes from the 1995 album Wrecking Ball recorded at Woodland Studio, East Nashville, January 1995.

... Supposedly from a source close to producer Daniel Lanois.

The album that both reinvented Emmylou, and invented the alt.country genre, Wrecking Ball occupies as unique a position in the modern rock canon as any album that the '90s threw up....

Few of the performances are actually demos; rather, they constitute rough mixes of songs recorded during sessions at Nashville Woodland studios, before the production moved onto Kingsway Studios. Three songs not found on the original album emerge.

Note: These soundboard tracks are excellent.

The real hook here, for me:

Harris's vocals are as raw as you've ever heard them, and all the more beautiful for it, aching with a vulnerability that is rarely given such free rein on her regular albums. Equally, stripping away the multiple layers that Lanois brought to the final album brings a whole new emotional element to the songs, a naked beauty that Harris herself had not really exercised since the underproduced days of Elite Hotel/Pieces Of The Sky. Compare the two versions of Wrecking Ball itself, and you decide which will haunt you longest. - Dave Thompson

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 9:07 AM | Permalink

February 6, 2008

Unusual punditry: Mad Mag's Pulitzer cartoonists on Bush and global warming; U.K. view of Super Tuesday

Madly relevant: Mad Magazine's Presidential Lampoons. The New York Times publishes this slideshow of six drawings from a rare venture into reality for Mad Magazine:

For a two-page "exposé" in its upcoming issue, Mad magazine enlisted the talents of 10 Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists to illustrate "Why George W. Bush Is in Favor of Global Warming."

None, unfortunately, feature Alfred E. Neuman, but seven posters and covers from Mad's slender political history follow the guest contributors.

The story: Mad magazine enlists Pulitzer winners to take on Bush.

Super Tuesday from the Guardian (U.K.) political columnists -- not the typical TV talking heads.

Gary Younge, a black British journalist living in Brooklyn (Polls and pundits):

Last night Obama performed well. Were it not for the fact that a raft of commentators had once again been believing their own hype, the night would even have been regarded as a victory for him.

For the last few months he has been trailing across the country. For the last few days he has been catching up. Much like New Hampshire, the fact that he was even competitive was diminished by the fact that he didn't win. When all the votes are counted he will have held his own in the northeastern states and fared excellently in the Midwest. At the time of writing California is still too close to call. In all likelihood he will lose. The fact in itself would have been remarkable this time last week.

For the last month now we have seen poll-happy pundits mistake their own fantasy for fact. So excited by the possibility of an Obama victory that they lose all sense of themselves and their credibility. Not for the first time, Obama is doing far better than anyone expected. And not for the first time, the pundits are faring worse.

Guardian America editor Michael Tomasky, born in West Virginia, lives in Maryland: (The view at midnight EST):

Democratic voters are choosing sides. But they're not choosing ideological sides. They're choosing psychic sides.

And since this is clearly going to continue into Louisiana, Maryland, Virginia, Wisconsin, Texas and Ohio, the challenge for each candidate is to elbow her or his way into the other's psychic space, find a way to peel off a chunk of the other's voters.

They'll both declare victory tonight, and both with some justification. Even so, it's slightly more Clinton's night, pending the final delegate count, because she stopped what seemed to be big Obama momentum. But going forward, each has to figure out how to appeal to the other's base.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 2:35 AM | Permalink

February 5, 2008

Photos: Edgy Carnival in Brazil, from watermelon helmets to an Inquisition float

Reuters photo

Sure, Carnival in Brazil is scantily clad Samba dancers, but it's also kids, men wearing watermelon helmets, mud dancers, fabulous floats and some like this one, which depicts The Inquisition.

It's one of dozens of interesting shots in this slideshow by Reuters.

Yes, today is Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras, and Lent begins tomorrow. (Although it felt like it began Sunday night.)

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 2:09 AM | Permalink | Comments 1

February 3, 2008

Cyber-savvy town gets rich on eBay frauds

Cyber-savvy town gets rich on eBay frauds - Times Online

HUNDREDS of people in the poor Romanian town of Dragasani have grown rich by conning eBay online auction customers with deals that seem too good to be true - and often are...

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:31 PM | Permalink

Got a new HDTV for the Super Bowl? A few things the manual won't tell you

Photo by Sheila Lennon

Change your ways: You've just bought a big new HDTV to watch the Super Bowl, had high-definition service installed, and now you're staring at an unfamiliar remote control. Sunday night, you tune to FOX at channel 64, or channel 11 on cable, as you used to, and wonder what the fuss over HD is about. Don't do this.

The Super Bowl is broadcast on 11 and 64 in the old 4:3 screen format, but it's broadcast for you in wide-screen (the 16:9 ratio) high definition on completely different channels.

Here's the hi-def channel lineup for Rhode Island:

Cox: Ch. 704
Full Channel: 911
FIOS: 801

Fox Super Bowl pregame show schedule. NFL Network, if you have it, is HD Ch. 726 on Cox. The game coverage begins at 6 p.m. only on FOX;.

Waste not: Maybe you bought a high-rez high-def TV, the one that offers 1080 lines of resolution, going for the best picture possible. And then you read a story like Behind Fox's Super Bowl Game Plan at Broadcasting & Cable.

Buried deep in this tech story, which details the exact equipment Fox is bringing to its Super Bowl coverage, is this sentence:

Wireless links are just one of the many pieces of HD production technology that have become commonplace as Fox wraps up its fourth season of producing the NFL in 720-line progressive high-definition.

720? Is that all?

Wikipedia: In the USA, 720p is used by ABC, Fox Broadcasting Company and ESPN because the smoother image is desirable for fast-action sports telecasts, whereas 1080i is used by CBS, NBC, HBO, Showtime and Discovery HD due to the crisper picture particularly in non-moving shots.

Is your 1080p "wasted" for this game? Will your picture be less lifelike/crisp/dazzling than it will be next year, when the game is on NBC, a 1080 source?

Knowledgeable source: I asked this question of CNET HDTV senior editor and reviewer David Katzmaier. Here's his reply,

In short, your new TV won’t be “wasted.”

Too much is made of the difference between 720p and 1080i broadcasts. In reality, most people can’t tell the difference, regardless of the native resolution of their HDTVs – whether they’re 720p or 1080p or something in between (typically 1366x768 or 1024x768). Unless you sit extremely close (about 5 feet for a 46-incher) and stare extremely hard at the finest details on the screen, there’s no way to tell the difference between the very best 1080i/p and 720p sources.

The source quality is key in any broadcast regardless of resolution. I don’t know for sure, but I imagine that satellite, cable and Fios are all pumping the Super Bowl at maximum bandwidth since it’s well-known that it will be the HDTV event of the year, as always. Local conditions vary widely however, so I can’t really say whether OTA (over the air TV) will look better or worse than a pay TV service for the game. I can say that if there are differences, they’ll be difficult to spot.

In my experience Fox’s HD football broadcasts are superb, better and more consistently good overall than CBS and on a par with NBC (which generally only had to worry about one game per week this year).

One additional point: I’d recommend that, in general, viewers with HDTVs set their boxes to output 720p resolution, or engage a “native” mode which outputs the resolution of the channel without conversion. Some boxes can do a poorer job of converting the resolution of the channel (720p in Fox’s case) to 1080i for disply on an HDTV. As a rule of thumb, you’ll want the TV doing that conversion, not the box. Then again, the difference will be nearly invisible once again.

More info:
--HDTV resolution explained

--720p vs. 1080p HDTV: The final word

Hope this helps,

David

Memorize that channel number, and enjoy the game. Go Pats.

Later: My brother sent me this. It's wonderful. Clearing Up Some of the Confusion Over HDTV. The Times' David Pogue interviews a Best Buy HDTV salesman.

People come in here absolutely clueless. Or furious, because they bought an HDTV set, got it home, and discovered that the picture doesn’t look anything like it did here in the store. Because they don’t realize they need a high-def *signal* to feed that set. For example, they need to replace their cable boxes with digital ones, or put a high-def antenna on the roof.

[D.P. adds: According to a study by the Leichtman Research Group, 50 percent of HDTV owners aren’t actually watching any high-def shows on them… but 25 percent of them *think* they are.]

Still later: Moved up from the comments, where readers are extending this post: HDTV 101: A beginner's guide at CNet.

Tech note: Comments have been failing for bogus reasons. If that happens to you, use your back button and click the preview button. Type the letters you see in the new image, post, and it will probably work. Sorry for the inconvenience. An upgrade is coming that fixes that.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 2:23 PM | Permalink | Comments 12

February 1, 2008

The future tech I want is not what they'll try to sell me

Thinking About Tomorrow. "We look ahead 10 years, and imagine a whole different world." The free section of WSJ surveys experts about what's in the tech pipeline and heading at us.

Problem is, there is absolutely nothing appealing to me in the oddly disconnected world described in the lead essay by reporter Mylene Mangalindan:

Shoppers will still be greeted at Wal-Mart, but a computer may be the one saying hello -- and reminding them of what they bought on their last visit.

Why would I want to know what I bought last time, anywhere? I already have it. I'm thinking about what I came for this time, and where it is. Amazon is still treating me as the composite of everyone I bought Christmas gifts for, and recommending nothing I would want for myself. (SpongeBob Scare Your Pants Boxer Shorts for men!)

Friends will still send each other birth and wedding announcements, but the process will be virtually automated, thanks to alerts on social-networking sites.

Automated greetings turn being thoughtful into soulless spam -- "Send this card to everyone in my address book on their birthdays." And the message is "I'm too busy to actually celebrate your birthday, whenever it is."

A lot of this future seems like more inbox clutter -- you'll hear from your appliances and printers hungry for ink.

But this one takes the cake:

As you drive around, for instance, you might get reviews of nearby restaurants automatically delivered to a screen in your car -- maybe even projected onto the windshield.

Just before you hit the pedestrian you can't see. Right.

I think the problem is that engineers figure out how to extend a technology and then look for a marketable use for it, rather than find elegant solutions to real inconveniences.

The prediction that "a cellphone, BlackBerry or digital-music player... might allow you to make purchases with the touch of a button instead of pulling out your wallet" seems a metaphor for all of it -- it makes extracting money from you effortless.

We sheepie take what they come up with and learn to like it. But what would you really like technology to do for you 10 years from now?

Here are some modest advances I'd like to see.

-- My car would know I'm going to work and would warn me when Route 95 is a parking lot before I get on the entrance ramp. And -- the elegant twist -- the device should be an inexpensive little accessory you can stick on the dashboard of any old clunker.

-- An appliance that looks like a microwave would function as a small refrigerator until it heats to 350 degrees as I leave work and cooks the casserole I left there in the morning. It would also cool or freeze hot things as quickly as a microwave thaws and cooks them.

-- A truly universal TV (etc.) remote control that would automatically integrate all my components, ask me some questions about what I want to control manually -- and it would ask me what text should display on its LCD "buttons" so I know what they all do.

-- If I'm looking for a product, I could search local stores' inventories and instantly learn who carries it (in my size, if applicable) and at what price. Similarly, a search agent that alerts me when lobster and ribeyes and fresh cherries go on sale, and where. My searches would represent a customer willing to buy; savvy businesses eager to sell should take note.

-- Let me scan my feet at any shoestore periodically, and email the data to me. I store that profile on the Web and match it to the shape of shoes I buy online. Pressure points should be obvious. If the shoes fits the scanned shapes well, they should have a leg up on comfort over blind purchases.

- When I make these purchases online from stores that would be an inconvenient drive, give me the free option of picking up my orders a few hours later at a central delivery center in my neighborhood. (This eliminates the considerable extra expense of delivery to a million different doors.)

- Let me watch any prerecorded TV show when I want to, everything on demand, without having to schedule a recording when it's broadcast. Similarly, the giant jukebox -- any song anytime, anywhere, for anybody. All music "niche channels" are somebody else's taste.

-- Much better interfaces between humans and computers. I'm tired of navigating directories. Tell your computer in natural language what you want, and it's smart enough to do it.

- Universal free Internet access so we're all able to participate in the wired future. The Rhode Island Wireless Innovation Networks (RI-WINs) aims to blanket the state with seamless mobile Internet access via WiMax. (Think of it as WiFi on steroids -- its range is 31 miles.) The first pilot users were largely government agencies, emergency and social services, businesses and educational institutions.

Let everybody use it, teach everybody how. (Those smart interfaces will come in handy -- they'll sharply flatten the learning curve.) Anybody with a TV could use the buttons on that smart remote to operate Web TVs with interfaces that aren't LAME. (The first emails from customers of the badly crippled early Web TV were in all caps.)

Wouldn't you think retailers would support a technology that creates a statewide market everybody shops at, and that brings customers to their virtual doors, to boot?

These are the first things that came to my mind tonight.

You'll have better ideas -- please add them in comments.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 5:02 AM | Permalink | Comments 1

Super Bowl recipes from newspaper food sections (New England chili?)

The funniest recipe in the run-up to the Super Bowl is New England Chili at New York Daily News, adapted from the "Anheuser-Busch Cookbook: Great Food Great Beer" (Sunset Books. $24.95 paperback.)

The last two ingredients:

1 pound cooked pheasant, cut into ½-inch dice
1 pound cooked quail, cut into ½-inch dice

They set up a confrontation between this and New York Vegetarian Chili. You think there's bias there?

Well, it beats clam chili.

The Louisville Courier Journal does meaty chilis -- one with ground beef and ground pork, and a chunky Texas truck stop/diner chili made with big cubes of brisket, pictured at right -- and yet another called Smoking chipotle pork stew. Carnivores will be pleased.

Spinach dip in a bread bowl from "The Sour Dough Bread Bowl Cookbook," by John Vrattos and Lisa Messinger appears at the San Jose Mercury News. Spinach and portobello mix with dairy in a large round loaf of sourdough.

I like Susan Barnes' attitude -- she's food editor of the Ann Arbor (Mich.) News: It is, after all, football. The recipes she offers, all on one page, include her own Chicken or Vegetarian Minestrone, and a
crockpot Beef Stifado with red wine, cinnamon sticks and allspice, meant to be served over rice.

Turkey-Black Bean Chili is a crockpot recipe from Detroit News that uses ground turkey and chicken broth. Make it with black soybeans -- canned, indistinguishable from the other black beans, available for sure from Whole Foods -- and they're low-carb.

Caramelized Opossum Onaplank -- where else would you expect to find gourmet roadkill but ESPN's Fans' Super Bowl party recipes

At the Rocky Mountain News, Chicken Enchiladas With Yogurt Sauce looks easy and tasty. By the time the stuffed tortillas bake together, topped with salsa and cheese, you probably have a casserole.

On that same page, an uncooked, layered Southwestern Taco Dip made with yogurt.

Cheddar Beer Dip with Smoked Sausage -- from from Diane Phillips' "You've Got it Made" via AP -- may satisfy wannabe linebackers without the ick factor of the opossum.

Honolulu TV station KHON2 had a contest, and the winner is Superbowl Recipe Winner: Healthy Hoagies made with crispy chicken apple sausage, garlic, onion and bell pepper.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 3:00 AM | Permalink