Projo Subterranean Homepage News

Free mp3s: Neil Young: Going Back To Canada, two CDs of a 1971 Toronto concert, is downloadable as Singapore magazine BigO's ROIO of the Week [Recordings of Indeterminate Origin]

Mr. Naturals: Pioneers of Country Music, a set of 40 collectible cards. Art by R. Crumb.

Highlights: NBCOlympics.com "will show for free, on a delayed basis, the complete runs and routines for the top finishers and for all U.S. participants in almost every event, with highlights provided for team sports like hockey," said Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics.

Don't use Google toolbar: Google Copies Your Hard Drive - Government Smiles in Anticipation. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warns about the new Google Toolbar,

Google today announced a new "feature" of its Google Desktop software that greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy. If a consumer chooses to use it, the new "Search Across Computers" feature will store copies of the user's Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents on Google's own servers, to enable searching from any one of the user's computers. EFF urges consumers not to use this feature, because it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who've obtained a user's Google password.

"Coming on the heels of serious consumer concern about government snooping into Google's search logs, it's shocking that Google expects its users to now trust it with the contents of their personal computers," said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "If you use the Search Across Computers feature and don't configure Google Desktop very carefully—and most people won't—Google will have copies of your tax returns, love letters, business records, financial and medical files, and whatever other text-based documents the Desktop software can index. The government could then demand these personal files with only a subpoena rather than the search warrant it would need to seize the same things from your home or business, and in many cases you wouldn't even be notified in time to challenge it. Other litigants—your spouse, your business partners or rivals, whoever—could also try to cut out the middleman (you) and subpoena Google for your files."

Blizzard flower: This hibiscus bloomed on a threadbare plant in a south window at our house yesterday morning as the snow fell.

Trying to drop out again: Welcome to Middle-Class Lockdown . . .Now Shut Up and Buy Something: Disillusioned Everyman Joe Bageant rants a la Prufrock ("I have measured out my life with coffee spoons"):

...There is little else to do with other human beings in America than consume. So most of our primary life activity is solitary. We drive, do housework, pay bills, watch television. When we do “get together with friends,” there is little to talk about, other than one form or another of consumption, consuming music, or movies or whatever. We cannot tell each other anything new because we all get the same news and information from the same monolithic sources. At the same time we try to fill the loneliness for a real human community that we have never experienced by calling any group of people who come together in any way a “community”. Online community. Planned community....

...Never in all history has there been such a lonely, inauthentic civilization....

Joe Bageant’s little inner voice is like everyone else’s. Whenever I shudder at the condition of the republic, whenever I feel its utter absence of community, it scolds me and tells me I am crazy: Nothing is wrong. This is merely the way things are. It has always been this way. You cannot change that. You expect too much. Look at your wife. She’s not upset. She wonders why you cannot just go ahead and be happy. What you see around you is normalcy. Take care of your own family. Relax. Buy something. And I do too. Which is why I own nine guitars, though I can only play one at a time, and even then not very well. The voice made me do it. I was bored...

Ghosts or 19th-century Photoshop? Victorian spirit photography around the Web at the Victoriana site of The Little Professor.