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February 28, 2006

Morning in the French Quarter; pay Providence parking tickets, taxes online; flower font

Bourbocam, from Nola.com, is at the corner of Bourbon and St. Peter Streets in the French Quarter. People were milling and dancing there at 1 a.m. It's oddly compelling this morning to watch people go to work -- mostly on foot, with the occasional car, roller blades and bicycle. (If it's not morning wheen you read this, you can rewind if you don'tt like what you see now.)

Live video | Webcam

Carnival of Lost Souls: Talking Mardi Gras with Poppy Z. Brite, a New Orleans novelist. Interviewed in the Village Voice, Brite notes, "So far, this has been a very local Carnival."

Virtual city hall: Paying parking tickets and property taxes always hurts, but for a fee you can dispose of them without standing in line at city hall or writing a check and forgetting to mail it. Providence's list of online services is impressive. In the wee hours you can pay those orange parking tickets while still small for $3 (any number for that fee). Paying taxes that way can be expensive, though. A motor vehicle tax bill might cost under $5, but I wouldn't pay real estate taxes that way -- the fee for online tax payments is 2.95 percent of the dollar amount.

Flower fonts: We think of fonts as alphabets, but some pictographic fonts are drawings delivered via keystrokes. Kapitza.com offers silhouettes of flowers assembled into a font called Blossomy. There's also a companion font of silhouetted people, often in compelling motion. They're for sale, but the odd little pictures are all displayed on one page for you to admire.

Rocket ships: 1950s Car Art.

Jeeves retired: Fired, actually. The need to personify search results, as though a human servant were fetching for you, was always an eye-roller. Anybody remember an operating system called Microsoft Bob?

Askjeeves.com now redirects simply to ask.com.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:08 AM | Permalink

February 27, 2006

Economic jihad? Ports deal: The here and... why? Jamaica selects female leader; The big heist; Geezer communes

Updated: 12:06 p.m.
Economic jihad? Maybe this is the source of the vague discomfort that the Dubai Ports World deal is not merely a business deal. By David Jonsson, at Canada Free Press (Dubai Ports — Strategic Implications), it begins,

The goal of Islamists, following in the footsteps of Muhammad is to create the Islamic kingdom of God on earth. The strategy to obtain this goal in our lifetime includes the control of the world’s energy infrastructure, the transportation systems, currency, media, elections, immigration and education....

3:26 a.m.
Ports deal: The here and... why? If you missed Saturday's Journal story, Arab bid for U.S. ports would include Davisville, Bruce Landis reports,

Although P&O operates ports elsewhere, state officials said its only role in Rhode Island is to provide stevedoring service -- that is, supplying the workers who drive the thousands of cars, primarily Volkswagens, off the ships and onto the dock.

At the end, this bit of cheerful news:

The other large commercial port operation in the state, the Port of Providence, is owned and operated by a local company, according to the man who runs it.

"It's American-owned through and through," said Ray Meader, the president of ProvPort Inc., and not just American-owned, but Rhode Island-owned, he said.

That's suddenly reassuring.

I read dozens of stories and blog posts about the Dubai Ports World deal this weekend, and wrote a few myself that I didn't push the button on. There's a lot of nonsense and misinformation floating out there, endlessly repeated. (I won't batter you with it -- headache would follow.)

But the analysis I read that largely makes sense to me is by William J. Murray in the Fredericksburg (Va.) Free Lance-Star: Port of call: Security and economic nightmare Murray is described there as "the chairman of the Washington-based Religious Freedom Coalition and a resident of Spotsylvania." Here's a big chunk:

What is really happening? First: The power struggle at the White House between Dick Cheney's economic conservatives and the George Bush social conservatives is being won by Dick Cheney.

Dick Cheney is a Richard Nixon Republican who honestly believes tax reduction and business growth are far more important than any other issues. His influence continues to grow in this regard in the second term of the administration, but has always been present....

Cheney wants business as usual with the Islamic world, despite the fact that our dollars are financing the Islamist war against us.

Secondly, the administration is desperately seeking ways to get money back into the United States that is bleeding out in a one-way direction. We give the Islamic states hundreds of billions of dollars for oil, but we have nothing to sell them to get the money back -- except equity in our businesses.

We have sold them everything from convenience stores to luxury hotel chains. Huge chunks of commercial real estate are purchased each year by Islamic interests financed by petrodollars.

Even the parent company of Fox News is slowly but surely being swallowed up by Saudi interests.

The ports deal is a way to get back a few of the bucks we have given the UAE in petrodollars. Yet there is one underlying issue no one seems to look at: When we sell them equity in corporations and business property, we get some cash back right away--but the profits from those deals then flow back to the Islamic states.

In the long run that makes the deficit flow from the U.S. even greater.

The Treasury Department continues to stand by its approval of the sale of a company to Islamist interests that will operate six American ports, for other reasons. At the Treasury Department, as with the Federal Reserve Bank, inflation is the No. 1 enemy, not terrorism.

To keep inflation down in a nation with an economic growth rate as large as that of the U.S. requires actions that are viewed by most as repugnant. This includes the outsourcing of jobs to India and other nations, which keeps down the costs of labor in the United States--as does the importation of illegal aliens from Mexico....

The fact that the middle class is being destroyed and the social fabric of the nation is being strained is not important to the Treasury or the Fed....

Who will speak for us?

Related: From the BBC, headlined, Political system faces 'meltdown'

The Power Inquiry, chaired by Baroness Helena Kennedy, says voters feel they have little influence over decisions affecting their lives.

The inquiry's Power to the People report calls for a shift in control from ministers to parliament, and from central to local government.

State funding of political parties and a voting age of 16 are also suggested....

"Politics and government are increasingly in the hands of privileged elites, as if democracy has run out of steam," Lady Kennedy said.

"Too often, citizens are being evicted from decision-making, rarely asked to get involved and rarely listened to."

This point is hitting home here at home right about now.

Jamaica's first female prime minister: Jamaica is about to have its first woman prime minister and head of government: Portia Simpson Miller - Heart, soul and guts. From the Jamaica Gleaner,

WHO WOULD have thought that when this barely budding working class woman started a political career in the early 1970s, she would eventually become Jamaica's most popular politician and the first woman in the country's history to contend for the post of Prime Minister, not once but twice?...

Miller, 60, won the People's National Party presidential election; as head of the majority party, she will replace P.J. Patterson, prime minister for the last 14 years.

The money's hot: The Tonbridge heist: They pulled off Britain's biggest raid, but the police are closing in. What will the robbers do next?

They're baaack: Growing Old Together, in New Kind of Commune: NYT. Twelve folks whose average age seems about 80 have clustered together in a co-housing arrangement they planned and designed themselves. Their commons space will have an apartment above it that they'll rent at below market rates to a nurse.

Many such housing clusters are planned for boomers who want to pick up the '60s where they left off.

Old Folks Rock'n'Roll Rest Home, save me a spot.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 3:26 AM | Permalink

February 24, 2006

Friday links: Ask a Mexican; Indie musicians turn down Hummer ads; 21 ports in Dubai deal?

Some quick hits on a busy morning:

Ask A Mexican: Irreverent OC Weekly column confronts impolite questions head on.

President’s men with chicken: That's the actual headline from the Calcutta, India, Telegram Wednesday about the arrival of the presidential party in advance of the Bushes' four-hour visit to Hyderabad March 3:

Since yesterday, 80 men and five helicopters — to ferry Bush and wife around Hyderabad — have landed in the city. So has a US air force plane with two containers of special communication and surveillance equipment.

Members of the Presidential Food Service have brought along their own frozen chicken from the US, besides vegetables, marmalade, sauces, cooking fat, cheese, salt and sugar, and are getting ready to set up shop at the Grand Kakatiya, where the Americans have booked 140 of the 185 rooms.

“They have even brought water purifiers and their own laundry machines as the security and communication teams have to spend over four days in the city,” police said.

That's too bad. Indian food is really good. (Chicken Tikka Masala!)

Bah Hummer: Indie rockers reject big money from the king of gas guzzlers. Austin 360. Hummer ads want to use their songs, but the tank's bad environmental rep has starving artists turning down wads of cash.

Serious:

UAE terminal takeover extends to 21 ports: UPI.

A United Arab Emirates government-owned company is poised to take over port terminal operations in 21 American ports, far more than the six widely reported.

The Bush administration has approved the takeover of British-owned Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co. to DP World, a deal set to go forward March 2 unless Congress intervenes.

P&O is the parent company of P&O Ports North America, which leases terminals for the import and export and loading and unloading and security of cargo in 21 ports, 11 on the East Coast, ranging from Portland, Maine to Miami, Florida, and 10 on the Gulf Coast, from Gulfport, Miss., to Corpus Christi, Texas, according to the company's Web site.

The ports list on the P&O site includes Boston and Davisville, R.I., the onetime Seabee facility at Quonset Point. (We have a reporter checking this now.)

Ted Koppel: Will Fight for Oil

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:16 AM | Permalink

February 23, 2006

The ports deal: Our belief in the terror rhetoric now threatens administration's good business deal

Why would George W. Bush toss away the organizing principle of his administration since 9/11 -- "tough on terror" -- in the ardent pursuit of a deal to give management of six American ports to Dubai Ports World -- a state-owned firm of the United Arab Emirates, a banking country that funneled money to those who hijacked the planes, including two of its own citizens; recognized the Taliban, served as Osama bin Laden's banker, before 9/11, and was the conduit for Pakistani nuclear engineer Abdul Q. Khan to move the technology for making atomic bombs to Iran, Libya and North Korea?

The administration brushes off grassroots security concerns in its ardent support of this odd deal that even waives some normal conditions of doing business with the United States.

This morning, according to ABC News, "President Bush on Thursday sought to calm an uproar over an Arab company taking over operations at six major American ports, saying 'people don't need to worry about security.' "

Yet, in today's Washington post (Republicans Split With Bush on Ports),

Joseph King, who headed the customs agency's anti-terrorism efforts under the Treasury Department and the new Department of Homeland Security, said national security fears are well grounded.

He said a company the size of Dubai Ports World would be able to get hundreds of visas to relocate managers and other employees to the United States. Using appeals to Muslim solidarity or threats of violence, al-Qaeda operatives could force low-level managers to provide some of those visas to al-Qaeda sympathizers, said King, who for years tracked similar efforts by organized crime to infiltrate ports in New York and New Jersey. Those sympathizers could obtain legitimate driver's licenses, work permits and mortgages that could then be used by terrorist operatives.

Dubai Ports World could also offer a simple conduit for wire transfers to terrorist operatives in the Middle East. Large wire transfers from individuals would quickly attract federal scrutiny, but such transfers, buried in the dozens of wire transfers a day from Dubai Ports World's operations in the United States to the Middle East would go undetected, King said.

We all get this. Why doesn't the adminisistration, which is tossing our privacy to the wind for the "greater good" of national security and heading off terrorist attacks. We're baffled that the President immediately threatened to veto any Congressional attempt to limit the deal, his first veto ever. Why does he care so much, and worry so little about these practical concerns?

I found Simon Jenkins' latest column in The London Times illuminating: Bush and Blair have brilliantly done Bin Laden's work for him Here's a bit of it:

Were I Bin Laden I could not have dreamt that the spirit of 9/11 would be so vigorous five years on. I have western leaders still parroting my motto that “9/11 alters everything” and “the rules of the game are changed”. I have the Taliban resurgent, financed by Europe’s voracious demand for oil and opium. I have the Pentagon and Scotland Yard paying me the compliment of a “long war” of indefinite duration. My potency is said to require more defence spending than was needed to contain the might of the Soviet Union....

...Indeed if ever there were a case for collective restraint it is in response to terrorism. The word refers to a technique, usually a bomb, not an ideology. A bombing is an anarchic gesture calling for police and medical services. It becomes a political weapon only if publicised and answered with hysteria. A killing is so staged as to cause over-reaction, violent response, mass arrests and a decay of civilised values. Bin Laden’s intention in 2001 was to portray the West as scared, emotionally vulnerable, over-reactive, decadent and careless of liberal values. The West has done its damnedest to prove him right....

There is now a voluminous literature on the politics of fear and its distorting appeal for democratic leaders (this month alone, David Runciman’s admirable The Politics of Good Intentions and Peter Oborne’s The Use and Abuse of Terror pdf, first chapter). The 9/11 “changes everything” mantra began as an explanation of a national trauma and a plea for sympathy. It was hijacked to validate the latent authoritarianism of democratic leaders.

The administration cannot have it both ways. Either the terrorist threat is real, in which case we need to zip up America, run our own ports and restrict investments in critical infrastructure to our longtime allies. Or bin Laden is a boogeyman, useful for achieving a level of domestic control long held in check by the protections for civil liberties and privacy inherent in the American Constitution, but definitely in the way when it comes to attracting investment from Arab countries flush with oil money.

Having scared Congress into blessing most of its foreign and domestic initiatives in the name of security, the administration is now forced to wink as it hauls out Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, who retains his position despite the disastrous handling of Katrina, to "reassure" us on Meet the Press Sunday,

“We’ve built in, and we will build in safeguards to make sure that these kinds of things don’t happen. And, you know, this is part of the balancing of security, which is our paramount concern, with the need to still maintain a real robust global trading environment.”

Do we believe him?

The Guardian (U.K.) reports (Arab Co., White House Had Secret Agreement) that,

As part of the $6.8 billion purchase, state-owned Dubai Ports World agreed to reveal records on demand about "foreign operational direction'' of its business at U.S. ports, the documents said. Those records broadly include details about the design, maintenance or operation of ports and equipment.

The administration did not require Dubai Ports to keep copies of business records on U.S. soil, where they would be subject to court orders. It also did not require the company to designate an American citizen to accommodate U.S. government requests. Outside legal experts said such obligations are routinely attached to U.S. approvals of foreign sales in other industries.

In addition,

...Under the deal, the government asked Dubai Ports to operate American seaports with existing U.S. managers "to the extent possible.'' It promised to take "all reasonable steps'' to assist the Homeland Security Department, and it pledged to continue participating in security programs to stop smuggling and detect illegal shipments of nuclear materials.

The administration required Dubai Ports to designate an executive to handle requests from the U.S. government, but it did not specify this person's citizenship.

It said Dubai Ports must retain paperwork "in the normal course of business'' but did not specify a time period or require corporate records to be housed in the United States. Outside experts familiar with such agreements said such provisions are routine in other cases.

Sounds like we badly want this deal. Why?

That former president Jimmy Carter emerged as Bush's only high-profile supporter on this deal, and the administration subsequently hired the lobbying firms of both Bob Dole and Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to spin it, only adds to the surreal environment around trying to have it both ways: The administration is arguing that we're safe with the deal because global corporations have no loyalties, no ideology. This is about making money together. Nothing to see here, move along.

Like a bucket of cold water, the Dubai Ports World deal is serving as a reality check on the difference between the administration's rhetoric and its assessment of the actual likelihood of attack.

Perhaps it's time for Congress to look with more discernment at the administration's requests in the name of terror, and to take an even longer look at what the blanket fear of terrorist attacks has wrought at home. As Jenkins notes,

The American president and the British prime minister have spent half a decade exploiting Bin Laden for political ends, in thrall to their security/industrial complex. They have relied on terrifying their electorates with new and bloodcurdling threats, with what Runciman calls “spook politics”. But they will pass. ... The vitality of British and American democracy has always been its ability to produce antibodies when truly challenged by an internal or external menace. The West will rediscover its self-belief and restore the liberalism, properly defined as freedom, that it once exemplified to the world.

If this ports deal causes Congress to suddenly remember its constitutionally ordained role as a check and balance on executive power, something useful may yet emerge from this debacle.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments 2

February 22, 2006

Technorati launches bloggers' Favorites; Free mp3s: Neil Young; On being quoted by bin Laden; student blogger in Ecuador; radio station by zip code

New Technorati Feature: Favorites. Techorati, the search engine that scours the blogs, has launched a new feature to help us sift through the 28.4 million or so blogs out there now. Here's founder David Sifry's explanation:

It's really very simple. Just tell us who your favorite bloggers are and you'll get a custom page that lets you monitor, search, and share your Favorites!

Can't wait? Go give it a try! For the curious, read on for more details. ...

David asked three bloggers to kick the feature off. One of them, Linux Journal editor and Cluetrain co-author Doc Searls, named this blog as one of his 38 favorites. Doc, whom I've never met, is a constant source of encouragement, and I'm more than grateful for his appreciation.

Doc's has long been the first blog I read every morning. Even if I don't have a dog in some of the Alpha-blogger dustups he gets sucked into, his easy voice and tales of a constantly traveling man are easy to wake up with.

Free mp3s: Neil Young :: Perfect Echo Vol. I, '67-'71 at Aquarium Drunkard.

Infamously quoted: When Osama bin Laden quoted a paragraph from William Blum's book Rogue State, the media swarmed to Blum's door. He writes about the experience in Online Journal (The Anti-Empire Report: Things you need to know before the world ends):

Much of the media wanted me to say that I was repulsed by bin Laden's "endorsement." I did not say I was repulsed because I was not. After a couple of days of interviews I got my reply together and it usually went something like this: "There are two elements involved here: On the one hand, I totally despise any kind of religious fundamentalism and the societies spawned by such, like the Taliban in Afghanistan. On the other hand, I'm a member of a movement which has the very ambitious goal of slowing down, if not stopping, the American Empire, to keep it from continuing to go round the world doing things like bombings, invasions, overthrowing governments, and torture. To have any success, we need to reach the American people with our message. And to reach the American people we need to have access to the mass media. What has just happened has given me the opportunity to reach millions of people I would otherwise never reach. Why should I not be glad about that? How could I let such an opportunity go to waste?"

Celebrity -- modern civilization's highest cultural achievement -- is a peculiar phenomenon. It really isn't worth anything unless you do something with it.

Blum notes he's neither a Republican nor a Democrat. "...an entire alternative world exists above and beyond the Republicans and Democrats.," he writes.

Whether you agree with him or not, it's an interesting read, departing from the usual pat, polarized positions.

Another country heard from: Over at the new R.I. Students Abroad group blog, Jenna McCrory of North Kingstown got her first post out from Cuenca, Ecuador, and it's a good one. Here's a bit of it:

I chose Ecuador hoping to find a place where I felt completely culture-shocked, and out-of-whack. I wanted adventure, I wanted poverty, I wanted mountains, I wanted rainforest, I wanted indigenous people, I wanted to learn Spanish!

We're expecting yet another new blogger there later in the week, a Brown student in Rome. Stay tuned.

I coded the Movable Type software for this blog so that each blogger is a "category," with a photo appearing atop individual pages of entries as well as each entry, their photos and links to the individual pages showing in the main blog. I'm an English and American History major, not a programmer, but, to my amazement, my code worked.

Radio stations you should be able to hear: Enter your zip code and AM FM Zip Code Based Signal Strengths spits out a list of stations whose strength and location put them on the airwaves in your area.

I've never looked for WFAN sports radio 66 AM in New York, but it says here I should receive it.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:42 AM | Permalink

February 21, 2006

High Court okays religious use of psychedelic; Curt Gowdy: 'Have a 'Gansett,' Jimmy Fund clips; Strange buildings; After Carlos Castaneda; Introverts... Unite!

This just in: Religious use of ayahuasca ruled lawful in U.S. This MeFi post is first with the links. (The first one goes to the Church, which calls its sacramental substance "hoasca.") The comments below it are likely to be most interesting.

More: Ayahuasca.com "is a library and community collectively researching the botany, ethnography, mythology, arts, music, therapeutic mechanisms, and phenomenology of the Amazonian Spirit Vine."

The active ingredient in ayahuasca, DMT, consumed late ethnobiologist Terence McKenna:

McKenna was particularly fascinated by a certain consistency of experience among hallucinogen users at "heroic" dosages. It seemed as if they were all going to the same place, a realm inhabited by entities he referred to as "self-transforming machine elves."

McKenna died of brain cancer in 2000. Much more on his Wikipedia page.

Before air conditioning: Have a 'Gansett (mp3). Relive those memories of hot summer afternoons, Curt Gowdy following the beer jingle with a plug for the Red Sox. Undated, but it has that '50s feel. Source: blohards.com (the Benevolent and Loyal Order of the Honorable Ancient Redsox Diehard Sufferers of New York)

From Edward Cossette of the abandoned Bambino's Curse, nearly three years ago:

I had forgotten how much I love Curt Gowdy. He IS the omniscient voice of baseball in my head, the voice God himself would use to call a game. Listening to Gowdy last night on ESPN 2, I am ten years old again on a summer Saturday afternoon, my dad is stretched on the couch, fans whirr in the background, and on our new and first color tube is Fenway Park, so green I want to reach out and taste it, and filling in the spaces between is the voice of Curt Gowdy.

And here's a young Gowdy doing a black and white TV promo (real video) for the Jimmy Fund, before zip codes -- you send your contribution to "Boston 16, Mass." Zip codes started in 1963.

(Other clips on that page show promos by James Cagney, Joan Crawford, Bing Crosby, Ed Sullivan, Spencer Tracy,)

Links wrap:

Dancing House, in Prague

Most Unusual Buildings On Earth. Some of them, anyway.

One billion mazes: High-quality pdfs to print and solve.

Even weirder after death: Follow-up on Carlos Casteneda's followers after the novelist's death in 1998. Here's the Metafilter item, with links that go way past the fiction.

Remains of guru's disciple identified Shortly after the 1998 death of "A Separate Reality" guru Carlos Castaneda, whose peyote-fueled sorceric journeys into the Mexican desert captured the imagination of a generation in the 1970s, five of his closest disciples made out their wills, disconnected their telephones, and disappeared into thin air. via

Introverts get their energy from being alone; other people wear us out. The most popular essay ever on The Atlantic's Website was Jonathan Rauch's Caring for Your Introvert in March 2003.

Atlantic editor Sage Stossel revisits the topic in an interview this month with Rauch: Introverts of the World, Unite!

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments 3

February 20, 2006

Behind the 'Cheney's Got a Gun' 'toon parody; R.I. blogs eye poetry, saving Cranston's Horton school; principled dumpster-diving

12:14 p.m.
"When the Vice President shoots a man, it's news." -- Helen Thomas

Dick Cheney's in cultural trouble. 'Cheney's Got a Gun' is a really good song. The 'toon is funny-scary. (The quail keeps it safe for work.) T-shirts and mugs are for sale at two online stores.

Here are links to stream the video or audio (mp3) and to download the files in a variety of sizes and formats.

This buffoonery is what the Vice President may be remembered for, at least by those with lighter tastes.

The source is The Bob Rivers Show at classic rock station KZOK in Seattle, which leads the morning-drive slot; the singer, Rivers' sidekick Spike O'Neill, at right, actually fronts a band, Spike and the Impalers, which does cover tunes. The song is a parody of Aerosmith's Janie's Got A Gun (realaudio clip) .

As it turns out, Aerosmith played Tacoma Wednesday night. The Seattle P-I had freelancer Shawn Telford cover it, and he reports,

Between songs, (Steven) Tyler asked "Does anyone read the papers?" He then snatched a sign from the audience and held it up for all to see. It read: "Cheney got a gun." Tyler then dedicated "Janie's Got a Gun" to the vice president.

The song is so well-known that there's a CD called Janie's Got a Gun: A Tribute to Aerosmith, full of bands that cover the song.

The Flash cartoon comes from Seattle's Tooned In animators. (They're hiring, but I can't link directly to that section.)

CBS has a story and the song's lyrics.

Fringe link: Editor & Publisher finds Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding involved in this spiraling event that's overtaken the less musically adept JibJab parodies.

The cosmic joke: The last Veep to be a laughingstock was... Dan Quayle.

9:55 a.m.
New R.I. blogs: Poetry, save a school. I'm going to be updating the Greater R.I. Blogs list, and here are some bloggers who've written to ask to be added to it:

Curt Stump of Smithfield writes,

I moved to RI because of the chance to write and work in the arts. I’m now living out that dream at the Stone and Plank in Smithfield.

Writers and part-time artists Stump and Caroline Brown live in the 1813 house -- pictured in summer at right -- and host a gallery, poetry center there, a gallery, and now the site includes a poetry blog.

As lofts go, this one looks very special.

Later, in response to a question, Curt adds,

I moved here from California, where I enjoyed living very much but couldn’t afford to buy a house (San Francisco Bay Area) without working a high-tech job for the rest of my life. Moving to Rhode Island afforded me the chance to buy a house (The Stone and Plank) and devote more free time to writing and the arts. The choice to move here was not that hard because there are actually so few places in the United States that are affordable, liberal, and creative at the same time. We moved here at the end of 2002. My wife and I found Providence to not only be “arts friendly” but a town that really loves the arts and wants to foster that. That was a huge part of our decision to move here. We ended up in Smithfield simply because of the artistic appeal of the stone house. After we bought the place, it wasn’t long until I had the idea to turn it into a part-time gallery and poetry center. My wife agreed and we were on our way. So far, we’ve had some great artists and poets show their work here and we hope to continue that.

'Save our school': Save Horton is an ad hoc, one-issue Cranston blog:

We the parents and students of Horton Elementary School need your help today!

The Cranston School Department has proposed
closing our award-winning school.

They believe that by closing our school,
they can save money.

They think that it might save less than 1% of the
budget - but we can't be sure because a detailed
cost analysis has not been made available to the
public.

We parents know that our students' continued
academic success is worth millions more, and
Horton has proven itself to be a High
Performing school worthy of saving.

Help us fight to keep Horton open!

Contact Meg Lucas of the Horton PTO
(275-0686) for more information. Thank you!

Its links list leads with A Horton Closure "Fact Sheet" (pdf) and ends with links to two other Cranston blogs -- kmareka.com and Cranston, RI Politics -- and, for good measure, two high-profile Rhode Island political blogs, R.I.'s Future from the left and Anchor Rising on the right.

kmareka explains it name: "Sounds like America but less repressive — a place where social workers and citizens speak out."

Principled dumpster-diving: Freegans: The bin scavengers finds an Independent (U.K.) reporter meeting up with Freegans -- the moniker a combination of "free" and "vegans" -- and trying out the scavenging lifestyle.

Dining on food from a dustbin may have once been the preserve of tramps, but for many it is now becoming a lifestyle choice. Freeganism - a combination of the words "free" and "vegan"- is a movement whose devotees take responsibility for the impact of their consumer choices and find alternative ways of meeting their everyday needs. This includes housing, clothing and, most surprisingly, food. Around 17 million tons of food are buried in British landfill sites every year, four million of which are edible. Sometimes, disposal is the cheapest option available to the food industry....

...Eventually, we find the Co-op rubbish and... bingo! There's a plastic bag full of vegetables, but it's right at the bottom. So, while Dave holds the lid open, I climb up, balance on the side and reach in. A couple of passers-by throw us pitying looks. I feel mortified. But the sealed bag is full of leeks, potatoes, apples and carrots, and there is nothing wrong with them. As we triumphantly bag our free-food booty, we discuss potential menus and decide on soup. Now, we just need to find some bread....

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments 1

February 19, 2006

Cheney wrap; 'Cheney's Got A Gun" 'toon parody; Jon Stewart preps for Oscars; In Rome, soccer trumps Torino Olympics

Paul Iverson/AP
Austin Attorney Harry Whittington speaks with reporters, Friday, Feb. 17, 2006, after being discharged from the hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas. Whittington was shot in the face, neck and chest with birdshot by Vice President Dick Cheney Saturday during a hunting accident at a South Texas ranch. (video options)

Newsweek leads with Evan Thomas piecing together the backstage of the Cheney shooting; also revealing, White House emails during Katrina. (Time also has a Cheney story. )

Aerosmith lives: "Here's the audio parody of Aerosmith's "Janie’s Got a Gun," on The Bob Rivers Show." Via JudiPhilly, who notes elsewhere, "I'm all for finding out what really happened, so long as it can still be a joking matter too."

Here's the 'toon version.

A 'toon interview with the quail.

Just jokes: Jon Stewart Joining Elite Group As Oscars Host. AP checks in with the Daily Show host as part of the runup to the March 5 movie awards.

Rome is hot: Kelsea Brennan-Wessels, our guest blogger in Rome, notes that the home team, Il Roma, is going for its tenth consecutive win in the soccer championships today:

So while the Olympics continue up north, you can bet that most of the Romans will be crowded around their TV like every Sunday: Watching the Roma game and cheering on their hero.

The hero is team captain Francesco Totti, a civic-minded hunk. Photo at the link.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 12:52 PM | Permalink

February 17, 2006

Amazon Plans Music Service To Rival iTunes; Free mp3s: Mozart, Jackson Browne; Celebrating last-place Olympic finishes

Amazon Plans Music Service To Rival iTunes: WSJ (free today) reports,

Amazon, the world's No. 1 online retailer, is in advanced talks with the four global music companies about a digital-music service with a range of features designed to set it apart. Among them: Amazon-branded portable music players, designed and built for the retailer, and a subscription service that would deeply discount and preload those devices with songs, not unlike mobile phones that are included with subscription plans as part of the deal.

The service could be launched as soon as this summer, according to people familiar with the matter. Amazon declined to discuss the service, and hasn't finalized deals to license content from major music companies: Vivendi Universal SA's Universal Music Group; Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG; Warner Music Group Corp.; and EMI Group PLC.

Free mp3s: Mozart. From digg, "Danish national radio released 9 mp3s (at very high quality: 256kbps) with 9 Mozart symphonies in honour of the musician's 250th birth anniversary. Download for free."

The site is in Danish, of course. The downloads are under the "TIDSKEMA FOR DOWNLOAD" label. This is when the Firefox extension Flashgot does it all automatically.

Free mp3s: Jackson Browne.
At BigO, the Singapore rock magazine, the ROIO of the Week [Recordings of Indeterminate Origin] is Jackson Browne's 1971 The Early Days Of Jackson Browne, Live at Jabberwocky Club, Syracuse University:

This is the complete version often referred to as "Jackson Browne’s first known recorded performance". This show appears one year before Browne recorded and released his self-titled debut album that is popularly known as Saturate Before Using. Prior to that, Browne wrote songs for Nico of the Velvet Underground, Tom Rush, the Byrds, Bonnie Raitt and most famous of all, The Eagles. Take It Easy, Desperado and Doolin’ Dalton were all co-written with The Eagles.

Here's to the losers: DFL is "Celebrating last-place finishes at the Olympics. Because they're there, and you're not."

Eliminate the middleman? Why not let corporations run for office? asks Merrill Markoe at HuffPost.

Unless I am missing something, it seems like it makes no sense not to acknowledge that the "people" holding our nation's highest political offices are actually just figure heads for consortiums of international corporations. It's easy for us to get confused and think of them as "people" (as in individuals, human beings) because they do peopley kinds of things like get haircuts, go on vacations, shoot other people etc....

When one of them gives an impassioned speech about the first amendment, are they really just a mouthpiece for ClearChannel? When they support the invasion of a struggling impoverished country in the name of freedom everywhere is it because they are seeking real estate to build a Home Depot? Understanding this stuff is like watching a foreign movie without subtitles....

I know It sounds kind of harsh at first, but it might not be any worse than our present method for selecting presidential candidates which is essentially to cast a Presidential sit com with a lovable reformed rake character as the romantic lead and a whimsical- curmudgeon- next-door-neighbor-and-best-friend as his side kick . This old system has worked very well telegenically for decades , but as with all sit-com actors, you never can be sure who these guys are in real life.

The future is almost here: OMNI Poll: What will 2007 be like? (From 1987)

Gloves? Bacteria hone in on shopping carts - survey. In Korea, anyway. (Your mileage may vary.) The Reuters story nails elevator buttons, as well.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:01 AM | Permalink

February 15, 2006

Checking in with new and old Rhode Island bloggers

Call me blogmama: Our newest guest blog here is a group blog called R.I. Students Abroad. At Christmastime we put a notice in the paper and on projo.com asking for volunteers for a guest blog. About a dozen responded, and the first of their posts went live this week.

Some of my favorite parts include the moments when they realize how different other cultures can be. John Riley, in Madrid, is amazed that the clubs are still going till 6 a.m.

Vickie Goff of North Kingstown, a URI student in Salzburg, Austria, leads this anecdote with a great line:

I have never seen a baby cry or a dog bark yet in Salzburg. Many Austrians bring their dogs into restaurants, shops and food markets. Bus transportation operates on an honors system. The driver doesn’t check to make sure that everyone has a ticket. ...

Lauren Whaley, on the island of Rhodes, Greece, says, "the locals here get a kick out of me coming from a state that has the same name as their island."

Brian Hodge of Seekonk, Mass. -- a town just over the East Providence line -- describes Dublin as "an older, friendlier, sky-scraper-less Boston."

URI student Katie Owens grew up in Alaska, so she loves snowy Hønefoss, Norway.

Our youngest blogger, Moses Brown student Jesse Mills, is outnumbered 3 to 1 by girls in his present school in the Moorish-influenced "art-dominated" city of Zaragoza, Spain.

Lucky Karlene Aiken of Cumberland is in beautiful St. Andrews, Scotland, and sends photos that make me want to join her.

Give them some comments so they'll get that shock of recognition: "Somebody's reading it!"

Wired Rhody: The new Providence Geeks blog points to what looks like a most useful new discussion:

The popular urban-issue-discussion-site UrbanPlanet.org hosts boards for hundreds of cities throughout the world. One of the most active boards -- by far -- is Providence & Rhode Island’s. And now that board has a new thread dedicated to discussing the city and state’s info-tech infrastructure and services.

Elegant bohemia: Over at The TumTum Tree, Danielle discovers the beautiful Riversleigh Manor blog, which describes itself as "a salon style environment where ideas are conceived, gestated, and hatched."

I want to live there.

Alt-Valentine's Day: Photoblogger Woneffe has posted a first set of photos of yesterday's Marriage Equality Rally, including a larger version of the photo above of the festooned State House.

Carved in stone: The State Council on the Arts blog has a historic job opportunity to pass along:

The Old Man of the Mountain Legacy Fund, in cooperation with the State of New Hampshire, invites professional artists to submit outdoor sculpture proposals for a memorial commission (or multiple commissions) to be sited on the north shore of Profile Lake in Franconia Notch State Park....

I didn't get to the political bloggers on this list, last updated in September, but some of the links I clicked have frozen in time. Like my dusty blogroll, it needs freshening. It's on the list.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 7:07 PM | Permalink | Comments 1

Cheney shooting: Shotgun spray pattern at 30 yards; what victim's friends are saying

Updated 7:04 p.m.: Transcript of Vice President Cheney's interview by Fox News

--Corpus Christi Caller-Times

Shoot, this is serious: Corpus Christi, Texas, Caller-Times (reg.req.) photographer and avid shooter George Gongora simulates Vice President Dick Cheney's shooting of a hunting partner Saturday with a 28-gauge shotgun at 30 yards. (video) The pellets are 5mm in diameter -- about 3/16 of an inch, and Gongora emphasizes that this tight pattern is what you want when shooting quail.

Nobody's laughing now that Mr. Whittington's "peppering" turns out to mean he's been shot, like a quail, and is now riddled with foreign objects which may cause infection.

Dr. David Blanchard, the emergency room chief, estimated that Mr. Whittington had more than 5 but "probably less than 150 to 200" pellets lodged in his body. -- Fellow Hunter Shot by Cheney Suffers Setback, NYT

According to Paul Burka at Slate, who visited Harry Whittington's law office in Austin yesterday (Full of Holes: The gossip about Cheney's bad shot), "two pellets lodged against his larynx, another was in his liver, and another migrated into the heart muscle, causing the heart attack. The pattern of wounds was between the lower chest and the forehead, a pretty tight zone for shot of 30 yards."

In another Times story, Account of Doctors Raises Questions on Heart Injury),

Dr. O. Wayne Isom, the chairman of heart and chest surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College, said it was unlikely that a pellet would migrate to the heart through the bloodstream, as some have assumed from the account of the Texas doctors.

The reason, Dr. Isom said, is that the pellet would have to enter a vein, travel to and through the lung vessels that go to the heart, and then lodge in heart tissue, not in one of its chambers. ...

A more likely explanation, Dr. Isom said, is that the pellet lodged in or touched the heart when Mr. Whittington was shot.

Burka, of Slate, finds Whittington's friends wondering how he got that injured.

The official story is that the blast from the vice president's shotgun hit Whittington at a distance of 30 yards. Hunters at the Vaughn Building are skeptical. The hunt took place on a cold, windy afternoon. Whittington and his fellow hunters were probably wearing warm clothing—say, a jacket and a flannel shirt. Cheney was using a 28-gauge shotgun, a smaller-diameter firearm with pellets smaller than BBs. Whittington's friends question whether the pellets could have penetrated his layers of clothing and skin at that range.

While Gongora's demonstration indicates a pattern on paper, he doesn't address whether the low-velocity pellets that puncture paper at that distance could also penetrate clothing, skin and muscle all the way into the heart.

Routine first-responder information that accompanies most shooting stories is missing in this case because there was no 911 call. From the Washington Post timeline of events:

7:20 p.m.: An ambulance standing nearby for the vice president takes Whittington...

A long line of famous people -- from St. Jerome and Thomas Aquinas to Shakespeare and Shelley -- are said to have a kept a skull on their desks as a reminder of their mortality.

Dick Cheney is trailed everywhere by an ambulance, waiting for him, his own personal vulture always in sight.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 8:54 AM | Permalink | Comments 2

February 14, 2006

Cheney hunting jokes, developing story; promoter Bill Graham's archives streaming online; 'Free Geek'; 'Buy nothing' year

Cheney Accident Triggers Jokes on Late-Night TV: Here's one of them (Video at Crooks and Liars -- Video-WMP Video-QT: :

Rob Corddry: "Look, the mere fact that we're even talking about how the vice president drives up with his rich friends in cars to shoot farm-raised wingless quail-tards is letting the quail know 'how' we're hunting them. I'm sure right now those birds are laughing at us in that little 'covey' of theirs.

Related:

Jokes about Cheney's hunt never misfire, comics find. Scripps.

Cheney's Friendly Fire: At Rolling Stone,

In the first documented vice presidential shooting since Aaron Burr dropped Alexander Hamilton in an 1804 duel, Dick Cheney put a shotgun blast full of No. 8 birdshot into the face of a hunting companion on Saturday.

Cheney faces citation for lack of game stamp: NYT via IHT.

Slow Leak: How Cheney Stalled News Reports of Hunting Accident. Time.

Cheney ignored safe hunting procedures: Bird hunters should use dogs and fewer guns -- and leave car behind. Charlotte Observer.

Official report: At The Smoking Gun, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Hunting Accident and Incident Report Form

Old rock never fades away:
Vault Radio is streaming late Fillmore owner Bill Graham's concert archives. CNet story .

Trickle-down PCs: Free Geek: “Helping the needy get nerdy since the beginning of the third millennium.” At DesignTechnica,

The concept is simple, really. Hire a handful of staff members, pay them the same hourly figure from the top down, train volunteers to run the business and work solely with donated electronic items to make them reusable or recyclable. In the process, teach volunteers how the business works and how to rebuild computers, allowing them to adopt a computer after 24 hours of volunteer service, giving them on-the-job training, as well as a social outlet. The result of the effort keeps harmful products out of landfills and enables schools and groups who desperately need computers to receive them at no cost. Last, but not least, make it all a democracy so volunteers and employees can participate in the direction of the collective.

Such is the way of Free Geek, a nonprofit technology recycling center in Portland, Oregon, leading the revolution in technology waste management. People donate their unwanted gizmos, ranging from computers to VCRs (excluding TVs and very few other items), then Free Geek volunteers rebuild the items to reuse, or safely deconstruct them to be recycled. Since its inception, Free Geek has refurbished approximately 6,000 computers using 5,000 volunteers and has recycled 1,000 tons of material, keeping it out of landfills. Just this month, they celebrated taking in their 300,000th donated gizmo...

Group plans to buy only essentials for a year: Out of the retail rat race:

While many people will spend countless hours this year lining up at Wal-Mart and maxing out their credit cards at Nordstrom, a small Bay Area group has declared it will do just the opposite.

About 50 teachers, engineers, executives and other professionals in the Bay Area have made a vow to not buy anything new in 2006 -- except food, health and safety items and underwear.

"We're people for whom recycling is no longer enough," said one of the members of the fledgling movement, John Perry, who works in marketing at a high-tech company. "We're trying to get off the first-market consumerism grid, because consumer culture is destroying the world."

They call themselves the Compact. They have a blog, a Yahoo group and monthly meetings to reaffirm their commitment to the rule, which is to never buy anything new....

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments 3

February 13, 2006

Free 1971 Neil Young concert mp3s; R. Crumb country music cards; Olympics videos; Don't use Google toolbar...

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.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:39 AM | Permalink

February 12, 2006

How's your blizzard going?

10:58 a.m.
It's not deep -- 4 or 5 inches of fake Christmas snow with drifts. It's quiet, fine powder falling like delicate rain. Snow fog falling. And falling...

7:37 p.m.
"1 to 2 feet": The forecasters' discussion published at the National Weather Service in Taunton, Mass., is blunt:

Believe higher snow fall totals will occur along and SE of a bos-Pvd line, with a 1 to 2 feet snow total from bos-Pvd line SE to upper Cape. North And west of this line lesser amounts of 8 to 14 inches. then there is the ack dilemma...

Yeah, he really said "the ack dilemma"... full moon, too.

Their official forecast for Providence (at 7:15) is 12 to 16 inches.

The grocery stores were busy today, lots of party stuff in the carts -- dips and sushi and cheese and chips.

The 8-year-old is getting out The Snowman Kit he got for Christmas.

We're well-stocked, and this old house has a gas-fired boiler and thermostat that needs no electricity.

FEMA jokes.

Valentine's weekend, we're getting snowed in here, starting 'round midnight.

Feel free to blog about the storm where you are in the comments --- the link is below.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments 7

February 9, 2006

8 new garden blogs

It was January, and maybe my gardening brain was hibernating. Whatever, I'm sheepish about having neglected the news of garden blogs that arrived despite the short days and drab yards.

My apologies to these patient garden bloggers, who have each finally been added to the long-running Garden Blogs list.

Backyard Gardening is an informative Michigan garden blog, with photos, experiences and advice on favorite plants. Right now, Chris Beasley is propagating iceplants:

Iceplant is by far my favorite ground cover. It is hardy, quick growing, has attractive foliage, is drought tolerant, and pest and disease free. It also looks like a carpet of blossoms for most of the summer.

Chris writes, " I plan to cover mostly gardening, but some landscape design. My passions are flowers and perennials, particularly daylilies."

Sign of the Shovel: Michele writes,

I have two gardens--a town garden in Saratoga Springs, NY and a country garden in Salem, NY--which puts me firmly in the category of insane gardener.
I've been gardening long enough that advice bores me. What I want to read is a good garden story, the history of a particular place meeting a particular personality, with the occasional nod to the larger realms of sex, politics, and religion. So that is what I've decided to write in my blog.

Michele's blog posts are wonderful essays in a smart, funny voice.

JohnAndrewsThoughts is the name of a Knoxville, Tenn. garden blog. I'm jealous -- in January he was putting in strawberry plants. John writes,

This 1/2 acre property is about 20 years old and had little landscaping in the huge back yard. This blog is about the work I am doing to plant and fix up this garden.

The side yard provides parking for our RV, one of the main reasons for buying the house. The other reason was because there was no pool and no stairs.

Oh, well, that is where we begin. Now there is a 5 year plan under way to improve the garden, or better, build it from scratch.

Comments are absent to date, but welcome. My kids say do more pictures.

Real Food & Scandalous Gardening Secrets is Harvest McCampbell's garden and humor blog from Hoopa, Calif. (No, not Hoopla.) Hit the archives link on the bottom right for earlier posts.

Bifurcated Carrots: Heirloom gardening and the lives of Pat ‘n’ Steph is in Amsterdam. Not a tulip in sight there, though.That's a bifurcated parsnip at right.

Idaho Gardener "is meant to be a clearinghouse for informational on all things gardening in the intermountain west: people, plants, events," writes Mary Ann from the Treasure Valley.

The Joy of Gardening in Southern Ontario: David the Plant-o-Holic has a brand new blog. He's got a greenhouse growing up there -- a functional plastic-tent rectangle, by the looks of it, and is defying -13-degree nights.

A Midwestern Tropical Garden: Dave must like challenges -- he's growing tropical plants from seed in Iowa.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 6:33 PM | Permalink

Zillow 'zestimates' house values; Songbird: open source Web music player; fun rabbit game; geeks meet, eat

Public records mashup: How much is your house worth? Zillow knows, reads the headline at CNet about Expedia founder Richard Barton's Seattle startup, Zillow. Zillow uses public data to come up with "Zestimates," although at the moment it seems to be largely for entertainment purposes.

Putting my address into its maps mashup yielded a "No home data for Providence yet" message. There does seem to be some for Newport, though -- the dozen or so prices I clicked on were all the tax assessor's valuations.

Business Week's Peter Coy had a different experience.

A couple of weeks ago, when Barton and his team came by BusinessWeek's New York HQ for a secret demo, I plugged in my house in New Jersey and was horrified to see it listed for about 40% less than I think it's worth. The explanation: Inadequate data. I'm picturing thousands or millions of people across the country clicking on Zillow and getting that same stab of fear: "This can't be right!"

It took a few tries to get in: The Seattle PI noted, Zillow swamped, crashes: Home-valuation Web site attracts millions of visitors.

Newborn of Winamp and Firefox: Songbird "is a Web (music) player built from Firefox's browser engine. Songbird is open source, will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and supports user contributed, cross-platform extensions."

Oh, and by the way, Songbird Debut Strains Servers at Songbirdnest. Here's the download mirror (although the main link seems to be automatically redirecting now). Among the features: Play anything, two included themes, build custom mixes, plays MP3s without leaving the page, play web pages as playlists, integrated Web search, and, soon, CD import and burn. This preview is Windows only, but Mac and Linux versions are coming.

Here's BoingBoing's interview with founder Rob Lord, once an early Winamp employee.
Reviews, etc.:
Songbird is out, and quite cool: Firefox + music + Winamp brains = Good Inquirer, UK.
Songbird: Open-Source iTunes Killer? PC World.
Songbird "User Preview" First Look at eHomeUpgrade.
Songbird, a nifty new Web browser and media player -- and iTunes killer? at SilconBeat

Related: Free & Open Source includes a short list of sites where you can buy full mp3s not crippled by DRM (digital rights management).

Wabbits!: Dodge That Anvil is a terrific, addicting online (Shockwave) game with carrots, rabbits, dynamite, flippers, umbrellas and deadly dropping anvils. Do the tutorial, it's helpful and fun. Read all about it at Jay Is Games.

Good start: I dropped by the first Providence Geek Dinner last night, and got to put faces on some familiar names in R.I. blogging -- O'Reilly author Brian Jepson and Tom Hoffman -- and met some new ones, such as Andrew Gilmartin of South Kingstown, who wrote the first Gopher client for the Mac, and new Rhode Islander (from New York) Jack Templin.

Some came to eat -- a food spill caused a quick lifting of laptops -- and others to clump in small standing groups. In one clump, Jim Willis, IT director for the Secretary of State's office, beamed about how they're making government data available by RSS feed.

Low-key and casual, the meet worked. I hope there'll be many more.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 9:44 AM | Permalink

February 8, 2006

Valentine Doll Dress-up; low-fat diet doesn't cut health risk; 'lost world' photos; NASA's political pressure man fired over resume; Craigslist sued; Design a tartan

Cute fun: Valentine Doll Dress-up offers lots of pink, red and purple outfits to drag, mix and match. Or, you could dress up a penguin.

Just in time for Valentine's chocolate: Low-Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Study Finds: NYT.

The largest study ever to ask whether a low-fat diet reduces the risk of getting cancer or heart disease has found that the diet has no effect.

The $415 million federal study involved nearly 49,000 women ages 50 to 79 who were followed for eight years. In the end, those assigned to a low-fat diet had the same rates of breast cancer, colon cancer, heart attacks and strokes as those who ate whatever they pleased, researchers are reporting today.

"These studies are revolutionary," said Dr. Jules Hirsch, physician in chief emeritus at Rockefeller University in New York City, who has spent a lifetime studying the effects of diets on weight and health. "They should put a stop to this era of thinking that we have all the information we need to change the whole national diet and make everybody healthy."...

The study made no distinction between butter and olive oil, and most women weren't able to get as little fat as the study recommended, and newer thinking, such as carbs and insulin reponse, wasn't represented. It means disease happens anyway and everybody dies of something. Okay.

Smoky honeyeater.

Photo Gallery: Five photos go with "Lost World" of New Species Found in Indonesia at National Geographic.

Busted by a blog: A Young Bush Appointee Resigns His Post at NASA: NYT.

George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.

Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted....

Mr. Deutsch, 24, was offered a job as a writer and editor in NASA's public affairs office in Washington last year after working on President Bush's re-election campaign and inaugural committee, according to his résumé....

Mr. Deutsch's educational record was first challenged on Monday by Nick Anthis, who graduated from Texas A&M last year with a biochemistry degree and has been writing a Web log on science policy, scientificactivist.blogspot.com.

After Mr. Anthis read about the problems at NASA, he said in an interview: "It seemed like political figures had really overstepped the line. I was just going to write some commentary on this when somebody tipped me off that George Deutsch might not have graduated."

A guy who lied about his own education wants scientists to lie about the dangers of global warming. Figures -- he got far by 24, after all.

Anthis, the blogger, to his credit points to the last graf of the Times story, a quote from Dr. James Hansen, the climate scientist Deutsch tried to muzzle (pictured at right), as the point of it all:

"On climate, the public has been misinformed and not informed," he said. "The foundation of a democracy is an informed public, which obviously means an honestly informed public. That's the big issue here."

Related: Here's a WaPo profile of Hansen from last year. And, from Sunday's Boston Globe, Too hot to handle: Recent efforts to censor Jim Hansen, NASA's top climate scientist, are only the latest. As his message grows more urgent, we ignore him at our peril.

More hubris? Europe's Biotech-Seed Rules Ruled Illegal by WTO, U.S. Says. Bloomberg.

...European governments such as Germany and France, as well as activists such as Greenpeace International, have sought to curb the use of seeds genetically altered to resist pests, disease and drought, claiming that the modified crops threaten human health and the environment. The U.S. insists that biotech seeds are safe and shouldn't be distinguished from conventional seeds.

The WTO ruling sets a precedent for other nations ranging from India to Japan to Russia that have regulations stipulating the labeling and tracing of goods containing biotech ingredients.

'One of the main reasons to bring the case was to prevent the loss of other important markets'' for U.S. agriculture exports, said Michelle Gorman, director of regulatory relations at the American Farm Bureau Federation in Washington. ...

Upsetting the balance of nature pales next to the needs of "markets."

Mass resignation: NY Press kills cartoons; staff walks out, reports the N.Y. Observer.

The editorial staff of the alternative weekly New York Press walked out today, en masse, after the paper's publishers backed down from printing the Danish cartoons that have become the center of a global free-speech fight.

Editor-in-Chief Harry Siegel emails, on behalf of the editorial staff:

New York Press, like so many other publications, has suborned its own professed principles. For all the talk of freedom of speech, only the New York Sun locally and two other papers nationally have mustered the
minimal courage needed to print simple and not especially offensive editorial cartoons that have been used as a pretext for great and greatly menacing violence directed against journalists, cartoonists, humanitarian aid workers, diplomats and others who represent the basic values and obligations of Western civilization. Having been ordered at the 11th hour to pull the now-infamous Danish cartoons from an issue dedicated to them, the editorial group—consisting of myself, managing editor Tim Marchman, arts editorJonathan Leaf and one-man city hall bureau Azi Paybarah, chose instead to resign our positions...

DIY discrimination: Craigslist sued over housing ad bias: Medill News Service.

Massive online bulletin board Craigslist.org has been accused in a federal lawsuit of publishing discriminatory housing advertisements.

The Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law Inc. filed suit in Chicago on Monday saying Craigslist published more than 200 housing advertisements on its Chicago Web site since last July that excluded prospective buyers and tenants on the basis of race, gender, family status, marital status, national origin and religion.

According to the suit, one rental ad stated, "African-Americans and Arabians tend to clash with me so that won't work out." Another read "no minorities" in all capital letters, the suit said.

I've wondered about that -- I've seen jobs ads there specifying gender, for instance, for no obvious reason.

Design your own plaid: Interactive Tartan Weaver You may just wish to play and produce your own Tartan images. Perhaps for inclusion on your own web site.

Delicious spook debunked: Alas, you can't boil an egg with two cell phones. Fun while it lasted.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments 1

February 7, 2006

Giant rabbit; retired CIA agent's world view; Buddha photo project; GMail chat

Herman the giant rabbit. BBC.

Spook blames you and me: Seeing Only Evil: An Interview with Retired CIA Agent Robert Baer: At Chronogram. Baer is the author of See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War Against Terrorism.

...we're dumping billions and billions of dollars every time we go to the gas pump into a jihad against us in Iraq that's killing American soldiers. I've read, "One kid is dying in Iraq so the father of the kid next door can drive his Hummer." And what's more, the money's coming from Japan and China, and in a certain sense from the Middle East, and then it's filtering back. Blackwater, SAIC, Custer Battle—all these companies just basically got the 20 billion dollars that was supposed to go into construction. Construction was never going to happen.

LT: Why?

RB: You can't dump 20 million dollars in a country in the Middle East and have even a tiny fraction going into real projects. That's not the way the place works. So when Congress voted for that money, it was out of stupidity. It was either going to go into the hands of the American contractors or into the hands of Iraqi crooks. Iraq is a corrupt system. The only way you can really get around this is simply line the contractors up and shoot them if they stole the money, which of course is not acceptable to Americans. It goes back to Ottoman corruption, corruption under Saddam, where his family was stealing vast amounts of money, taking the oil profits. For us to go in and turn this around overnight was insanity, to think we could do it—nationbuilding....

Collect 'em all: The Buddha Project at Lens Culture:

The Buddha Project encourages people worldwide to participate by submitting photos of found Buddha, sacred Buddha, ancient Buddha, kitschy Buddha, handmade Buddha.

An archive of hundreds of Buddha images may well generate good karma for everyone involved, viewers and contributors, alike....

Please participate by contributing your images of Buddha. Notice Buddha in your surroundings and share your discoveries with others. It will make you feel good. Guaranteed.

This Buddha was photographed in a shop window.

No Buddhists are rioting because of this collection.

Live mail: Google merges Gmail with chat: CNet.

Google on Monday was set to launch Gmail Chat, which will let users send instant messages with one click from their e-mail account, see when contacts are online and save the chat history like an e-mail message....

Gmail Chat is available on Internet Explorer 6.0 and higher and Firefox 1.0 and higher and in the U.S. English interface only.

While the chat functions of Google Talk are integrated into Gmail, users must download the Google Talk client application to make voice calls.

Here's the screenshot.

Food in unexpected places: The latest Photoshop contest at Worth 100. Yum, chocolate keyboard.

First Providence Geek Dinner set for Wednesday: Providence Geeks -- "Digital Innovators in the City-State -- is a new blog and a good idea.

The first of what its founders, Brian Jepson, Tom Hoffman and Jack Templin, hope will be many Providence Geek Dinners is set for AS220, 115 Empire St., Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. More details and a place to RSVP in the comments at this link.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 9:50 AM | Permalink | Comments 2

February 6, 2006

Super Bore XL; Make your own free ring tones; Mary Magdelene and Muhammed, reinterpreted

Super Bore XL: The wrong teams played, and the officiating was terrrible -- again. Seattle made enough of its own mistakes, but a questionable Roethlisberger touchdown call and a late offensive-pass-interference call on Seahawk Darrell Jackson in the end zone would have reversed the outcome.

I didn't have a dog in this fight, but it didn't seem like a fair one. And if I were out to throw a game, it wouldn't take much thinking to know that part-time officials with ordinary day jobs might be the hungriest guys on the field. Don't make me go there. Professionalize the entire process.

Throw a flag on the officials: Kansas City Star.

...We are too technologically advanced, and the NFL is overrun with too much money to put up with the kind of officiating errors that are ruining the pro game. The league needs younger, full-time referees on the field and a three-man officiating team sitting in the press box supervising what is called on the field. All calls — including ones like the offensive pass-interference call that killed Seattle — should be subject to quick review and overturning.

You don’t need an official on the field to stick his head underneath a blanket draped over a camera to review calls. Those decisions can be made in a press-box suite. Instead of stopping the game for commercial timeouts on nearly every change of possession or when a coach just wants to stop the clock, the game should go to a commercial timeout whenever a critical penalty needs to be reviewed in the booth.

Also, the officiating crew should be forced to address the media and defend their decisions. It’s ridiculous that the media are allowed to confront players, coaches, executives and owners, but the guys who can easily change the course of a game with one questionable decision are pretty much off limits.

Bill Leavy and his crew ruined Super Bowl XL. Am I the only one who would like to hear them defend their incompetence?

More on this at the CBS Sportsline blog.

Commercials: You can see them all large at Google video. We didn't skip through them, but largely wished we had. The best -- to us: The young Clydesdale was sweet, the pregnant monster funny, the little girls who think they're ugly poignant, the secret fridge was just goofy enough. Otherwise, the crop seemed meager. Well, okay, the pterodactyl was stupid-funny.

When did Mick Jagger turn into Richard Simmons? His halftime lap prancing looked more like vigorous exercise than rock'n'roll. The twice-bleeped Rolling Stones are some never-was-high geezer's too-long-deferred marketing dream.

Super Bowl XL should have climaxed the 2005 season with the Pats and the Colts, and Mike Shinoda doing Remember the Name. I'd pay to see that movie, if some mogul would make it.

Distinguish yourself: Stop Paying for Ring Tones: How to use a clip from a song you already have. Since we all have to listen to your phone ring, why not spend the 20 minutes and make it interesting? At Wired.

Religious interpretation in dangerous times. Whose truth, when?

THE SAINTLY SINNER: The two-thousand-year obsession with Mary Magdalene. The DaVinci Code movie opens in May, but the controversy has a long history. In the New Yorker.

Mohammed Image Archive: Depictions of Mohammed Throughout History

Democracy in a Cartoon By Ibn Warraq

Best-selling author and Muslim dissident Ibn Warraq argues that freedom of expression is our western heritage and we must defend it against attacks from totalitarian societies. If the west does not stand in solidarity with the Danish, he argues, then the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest.

The Brussels Journal blog continues to track the controversy.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:04 AM | Permalink

February 5, 2006

100 percent reason to 'Remember the Name'; Betty Friedan; links dump

This is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill
Fifteen percent concentrated power of will
Five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain
And a hundred percent reason to remember the name!

The jingle goes so well with football that it leads into the action between commercials. But you may not know that Linkin Park / Fort Minor's Mike Shinoda wrote "Remember the Name" about making music with his friends. (Explicit lyrics) You can see the video and download a free mp3 of the song at the Fort Minor link. By the way, they played Lupo's last night.

These lines have become the tagline of lots of personal entries in lots of forums, applied to a wide range of personal passions.

It's one of those memes that may not be accurate -- want to quibble about percentages? -- but it sure is catchy.

Cartoonist Steve Harrison -- Fabricari is his site -- leads his Comixpedia bio with those lines.

(Cyberpunk typically deals with alienated loners in a dystopia. Postcyberpunk tends to deal with characters who are more involved with society, and act to defend an existing social order or create a better society.-- Fabricari is Postcyberpunk)

Thank you: Betty Friedan died yesterday on her 85th birthday. When I was 16, promising Mr. Tambourine Man I'd go wandering, The Feminine Mystique was the voice of the Mother who said, "We couldn't, you can, go, run!"

"A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, 'who am I, and what do I want out of life?' "

If you think that's self-evident and obvious, you can largely thank this "seminal" work of Betty Friedan for making it so. Her New York Times obit recounts her trail.

Links dump:

Rumours mount over Google's internet plan

Danish cartoonists fear for their lives

Is this a real Warhol?

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 12:42 PM | Permalink

Farewell, Fernando Sant'Anna

Fernando Sant'Anna died suddenly, unexpectedly Monday at home as a result of a stroke. He was 42, played bass and leaves two children and an awful lot of friends. He was a happy man. His combined wake and funeral yesterday was awkward and hard and very sad. The open casket held somebody that didn't look much like him. (This scowling obit photo doesn't, either.)

At the very end, at the cemetery, it got real. Fernando's best friend Jim said he hoped Fernando was in a better place where Harleys aren't always breaking down. We laughed.

Fernando's girlfriend Erin gripped a paper and spoke elequently of the man she knew and how much he loved his children and cared for his friends. With guts and passion, she made it all the way through to an excruciatingly soft and sad, "Goodbye, my love" that broke everybody's heart. A profound silence broke into a group sob.

Fernando once sought me out to tell me he read this blog, that "it's all good stuff." Today he's become part of it, archived forever in the annals of the Web.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:46 AM | Permalink

February 3, 2006

Cops v. cops; IE 7 preview; Indie bands cover 'Highway 61'; Muslim cartoons; smell of moondust; 2 cellphones boil egg

Cops vs. cops: Surveillance Prompts a Suit: Police v. Police. NYT,

The demonstrators arrived angry, departed furious. The police had herded them into pens. Stopped them from handing out fliers. Threatened them with arrest for standing on public sidewalks. Made notes on which politicians they cheered and which ones they razzed.

Meanwhile, officers from a special unit videotaped their faces, evoking for one demonstrator the unblinking eye of George Orwell's "1984."

"That's Big Brother watching you," the demonstrator, Walter Liddy, said in a deposition.

Mr. Liddy's complaint about police tactics, while hardly novel from a big-city protester, stands out because of his job: He is a New York City police officer. The rallies he attended were organized in the summer of 2004 by his union, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, to protest the pace of contract talks with the city.

Now the officers, through their union, are suing the city, charging that the police procedures at their demonstrations — many of them routinely used at war protests, antipoverty marches and mass bike rides — were so heavy-handed and intimidating that their First Amendment rights were violated. ...

IE 7 Beta reviews: Internet Explorer 7 for XP SP2 Beta 2. At ZDNet. A lot of catching up to Firefox and Opera, and plugging security holes, in this developer preview. Users rate it 5.2 out of 10.
Parable: A Story of Cane and Able and the Browser that rode Chariots. Shelley Powers.
Here's the beta (XP only; even the final version won't support Windows 2000). No, I'm not interested, thank you. Firefox is too much fun, and IE will never have the useful-to-me array of extensions written by Firefox's many programmer-users.

Free downloads: Indie bands cover Dylan's Highway 61 songs: The mp3s.

Art attack: Danish Imams Propose to End Cartoon Dispute: From Brussels Journal -- which is all over this story -- on Jan. 22,

The Danish imams, who protested the publication of 12 Muhammad cartoons [see them all below] in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten last September, have announced that they want to end the dispute.

But now...

BBC: Muslims in new cartoon protests is the latest story in section devoted to the clash. Check out the links on the right.

Ties: J.D. Lasica -- Blogger, author, reporter and cofounder of Our Media -- blogs our Sunday story on Martha and Waitstill Sharp (video) (html), the couple who will be honored as Righteous Among the Nations in June at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem for saving hundreds from the Nazis, adding,

In the 1980s, the travel editor of the Sacramento Union told me that she'd seen my famliy's name on the wall of Yad Vashem -- I still have relatives all over eastern Europe. I wrote to Yad Vashem and still have the letter tucked away somewhere. One of the Righteous is named Laszyca or a similar spelling. (A distant relative? Who knows?) Some day I hope to visit.

Your relatives, too, may be among the roughly 21,000 Europeans so honored.

Cook anywhere! How to use two mobile phones to cook an egg.

...a pair of mobiles each with 2 Watts of transmitter output will take three minutes to boil a large free range egg. Check your user manual and remember that cooking time will be proportional to the inverse square of the output power for a given distance from egg to phone.

Super ads: Banned Super Bowl ads.
GoDaddy.com had 13 rejected by ABC before the fourteenth was approved. They're all here as either videos or storyboards.
Last year's ads.

Previews of Sunday's upcoming ads. No videos.

Not blue cheese: The smell of moondust: It's gunpowder, say astronauts.

Spook-y: I Spy: Amateur satellite spotters can track everything government spymasters blast into orbit. Except the stealth bird codenamed Misty. At Wired.

These are the good old days: The End of the Internet? (linked now) In The Nation,

The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.

Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets--corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers--would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.

Under the plans they are considering, all of us--from content providers to individual users--would pay more to surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received....

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 9:08 AM | Permalink

February 2, 2006

Cindy Sheehan: 'Getting Busted at the State of the Union'; police apologize; Graham Nash, photographer; Astrologer predicts Steelers win; Super Blogs

Rep. Bill Young (R-FL) on the House floor, saying his wife Beverly was called "a demonstrator and a protester" and removed from the gallery by Capital hill police for wearing this shirt to the State of the Union address.

Getting Busted at the State of the Union By Cindy Sheehan.

Reuters: Capitol police apologize to activist Sheehan:

The U.S. Capitol Police dropped charges against activist Cindy Sheehan on Wednesday and apologized for arresting her in the House of Representatives chamber shortly before President Bush's State of the Union address.

Sheehan, who became a central figure in the U.S. anti-war movement after her son Casey was killed in the Iraq war, was taken from the Capitol in handcuffs and charged with unlawful conduct after refusing to cover an anti-war slogan on her T-shirt.

The Capitol Police said in a statement that it had reviewed the incident and determined the arrest was unwarranted.

"While officers acted in a manner consistent with the rules of decorum enforced by the department in the House Gallery for years, neither Mrs. Sheehan's manner of dress or initial conduct warranted law enforcement intervention," the statement said.

Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer also apologized to the wife of a House Republican who was told to leave the chamber during Bush's speech for wearing a shirt bearing words of support for U.S. troops.

Rep. Bill Young of Florida had condemned the treatment of his wife, Beverly. Young, who chairs the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, said on the House floor his wife was called "a demonstrator and a protester" for doing what Bush had asked of Americans: supporting U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq.

The Capitol Police statement said neither guest should have been confronted about her expressive T-shirt....

Sheehan and Young's T-shirts read, "2245 Dead. How many more?" and "Support the Troops," respectively.

In the WaPo version, Gainer "said he will clarify rules about disruption to remind officers that 'simply having a T-shirt on' does not constitute lawbreaking."

Tim Kaine won by an eyebrow? Jeneane Sessum asks, "WHY EXACTLY didn't they let Barack Obama give the Dem response?"

Sounded good: Administration backs off Bush's vow to reduce Mideast oil imports. KRT,

WASHINGTON - One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.

...Asked why the president used the words "the Middle East" when he didn't really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that "every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands." The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him in trouble.

War on Terror: The board game. Next up, war on paranoia. For how many years can you live in fear before you realize we're all going to die anyway?

The government can't make you safe. They can increase your fear, your surveillance, search you up and down and inside out, but you're still gonna die someday.

Is your greatest need, really, to feel safer? Stay in bed.

When you're on your deathbed, you'll be kicking yourself that, instead of living freely and well, you spent your life fearing that it would be over.

A way in: "Debbie's idea was to fill a simple need: to help a reader decide which book to read first of an unfamiliar author." She hasn't read the canon, of course, so she needs help. Some authors listed await your suggestions.

Printable paper rulers could come in handy sometimes. The A How Big Are Things? Cube is interesting, too.

Graham Nash, the photographer: His music as images: 'Eye to Eye' is Graham Nash's first major museum photo exhibit.

L.A. Times profiles the San Diego museum exhibit of CSNY's "N." The show of 80 images -- all black and white -- runs through April 30.

Unfit Artist Search: The Entries. Earlier this month, on the Dilbert blog:

The syndicated comic strip Unfit is looking for someone to take over the artwork. If you’ve seen the strip, you know it’s a great concept with lots of potential, but the artwork is holding it back. See for yourself at:

http://dilbert.com/comics/unfit/

If you’re interested in applying for the position, just redraw any of the recent Unfit comics already on the web, using your own poses and perspective, and send it along with your resume...

Super Sunday: We expect an oddly relaxing Super Bowl party here this year. No heart-in-mouth moments, since we aren't attached to the outcome, just to a good game. Maybe we needed a break from willing the Patriots over the line.

Steelers have edge in the stars: Favorable astrological signs point to Cowher getting best of Holmgren. Sports astrologer Andrea Mallis, at MSNBC,

Super Bowl XL incarnates on an ethereal Feb. 5 in Detroit, with a yearly Sun/ Neptune aspect in unconventional Aquarius. It probably won’t be the usual Super Bowl blowout when the underdog Seattle Seahawks take on the favored Pittsburgh Steelers....

Predictably, there are lots of Super Blogs.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 7:42 AM | Permalink

February 1, 2006

Most beautiful Firefox extension; SOTU straw men; Man Who Said No to Wal-Mart; reporter fired for MySpace sleaze

The most beautiful Firefox extension ever: Colorful Tabs helps you distinguish among the many tabs you have open. The color goes with the tab's position, though, so if you use Tab Mix Plus, which lets you drag tabs around, you can't arrange them by color.

State of the Union: Tom Shales, the WaPo TV critic, reviews last night's prime-time offering and notes,

"We love our freedom and we will fight to keep it," he said earlier, adding, "We will never surrender to evil," though there don't seem to be any major political figures who are proposing we do that. Bush also kept lashing out against "isolationism," as if any opposition to the war in Iraq represented that philosophy.

Straw men.

Saying no to junk:
The Man Who Said No to Wal-MartEvery year, thousands of executives venture to Bentonville, Arkansas, hoping to get their products onto the shelves of the world's biggest retailer. But Jim Wier wanted Wal-Mart to stop selling his Snapper lawn mowers.

"...he looked into a future of supplying lawn mowers and snow blowers to Wal-Mart and saw a whirlpool of lower prices, collapsing profitability, offshore manufacturing, and the gradual but irresistible corrosion of the very qualities for which Snapper was known. Jim Wier looked into the future and saw a death spiral."

My 20-year-old clothes dryer started making loud noises last week. When I went looking at new ones -- not at Wal-Mart, but this effect ripples -- they're mostly plastic, and wouldn't last 20 years. The dryer is still banging.

Dude, you're busted: Romenesko at Poynter points to a Wilmington (Del.) News Journal story about Matt Donegan, 24, a reporter/copy editor for the weekly Dover Post fired for his blog -- actually a personal MySpace site -- after WGMD talk-radio host Dan Gaffney told Donegan's editor about it.

Neither Romenesko nor the News Journal post a link to the offending site, though. It's here. Some posts seem to have been removed already, but hold your nose anyway.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:46 AM | Permalink