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March 31, 2006

Jill Carroll: The Mujahedeen Interview video; Most-linked blogs of 2000

Jill Carroll: The Mujahedeen Interview: Video.

(Transcript by ABC News : Insurgents Justify Release of Jill Carroll in Web Tape):

ABC News has found a video on an insurgent Web site showing U.S. reporter Jill Carroll before she was released by her captors in Iraq. The circumstances surrounding the video are unclear and it is equally unclear whether Carroll was under duress during the taping.

The tape appears to have been made earlier today, before Carroll's captors released her, but the time of the taping has not yet been confirmed by ABC News.

Carroll, 28, had been held for three months by an Islamic jihadist group that refers to itself as the Revenge Brigade. The group had demanded that the United States release all Iraqi women from its prisons in exchange for Carroll's release.

In the video uncovered by ABC News, Carroll is shown being interviewed by an unknown person and refers to her imminent release.

Below is a partial translation of the video...

Excerpt:

Voice: Why didn't they (the American Army or CIA) save you?

Carroll: Well, I think the Mujahedeen are very smart and even with all the technology and all the people the American Army has here, they still are better at knowing how to live and work here and more clever, despite all the technology of the American Army, still more clever and better at being here than the American Army, still better at what they do.

It reads like she did what she had to do to get out of there alive. (What would you have done?)

News.com Australia completes the translation:

At the end of the tape, her interrogator read out a statement in Arabic.

"The mujahideen in the land of the two rivers announce the liberation of the journalist Jill Carroll ... after the US forces and the CIA failed to find her making their ineptitude obvious to the whole world," he said.
"We liberate this journalist today after the American government met some of our demands by releasing some of our women prisoners."

WaPo: 'Like Falling Off a Cliff For 3 Months.' Reporter Ellen Knickmeyer in Baghdad talked to Carroll. It begins,

Jill Carroll wondered from day to day whether she would grow old or die a hostage.

"It was like falling off a cliff for three months, waiting to hit the ground," the 28-year-old American reporter said Thursday after being released by her kidnappers.

The Post has also posted video of a Baghdad TV interview with Carroll just after her release, on this story page: Journalist Jill Carroll Freed By Her Captors in Baghdad.

Updated 11:16 a.m.

Report: Carroll Threatened Before Release. AP:

(Christian Science Monitor editor Richard Bergenheim) said Friday that Carroll's parents, who spoke to her about the video, told him it was "conducted under duress."

"What emerged was that they actually started filming this tape the night before and then there was a power outage. Jill had been told the questions, asked to translate them from Arabic into English," he told ABC's "Good Morning America."

"When you're making a video and having to recite certain things with three men with machine guns standing over you, you're probably going to say exactly what you're told to say," Bergenheim added.

Early days: The most-linked blogs of September 2000. Beebo was countring by handback then. Robot Wisdom was #1, with 44 links. Interesting:

* There are no political blogs on the list—they hadn’t been invented yet. Actually, I got the impression that many bloggers got a bit shirty when political blogs started up, and started getting popular—politics (and especially right-wing politics) wasn’t what the blog-powered future was supposed to be about. Blogs were supposed to be personal, thoughtful, witty, sincere, not brash and combative.

If you haven’t already seen it, Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker piece, “You’ve Got Blog,” captures the spirit of the blogs of the time, via the story of Kottke and Megnut’s blog-initiated relationship. (You can tell it’s old because it talks about “E-mail” and ICQ…)

Kottke was #2, Megnut #11.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 8:07 AM | Permalink

March 30, 2006

Jill Carroll updates at Monitor; Free mp3s: Dylan-Cash sessions; Obit for an eccentric pacifist, poet, garden designer

I'll be posting a new batch of garden blogs ~~later today~~ tomorrow. For now...

Free at last: Jill Carroll update page at the Christian Science Monitor, for which she was reporting when she was abducted in Baghdad Jan. 7, now has statements from her family and the Christian Science board. Expect to see more there as the story of her release develops. For now, the Washington Post seems to have good details: Journalist Jill Carroll Released in Iraq.

9:55 a.m.
Lost Album Series :: Dylan - Cash sessions. Aquarium Drunkard via Robot Wisdom.

Concrete: Eric Lilius, my longtime "Canadian correspondent," fell silent for a while, but he's back with two new recommendations. One spins off an obit:

Ian Hamilton Finlay
October 28, 1925 - March 27, 2006
Scottish poet and artist who turned his Lanarkshire grounds into Little Sparta, a celebrated shrine to pacifism

Surprisingly for a poet, perhaps, Ian Hamilton Finlay most striking, best-known and internationally celebrated creation was a garden.

Over many years he gradually turned the grounds about his Lanarkshire home into a unique assemblage of sculptures, structures and inscribed stones called Little Sparta. The ideas given concrete form in Little Sparta range widely over philosophy and myth, but the over-arching idea was Finlay抯 uncompromising hostility to war, in all its forms from Homer onwards.

Also surprisingly for one whose life and art were devoted to the pacifist cause, usually expressed in terms of a rather chilly Neo-Classicism, Finlay was famously prone to confrontation -- with everyone from his local council in Scotland and the various British Arts Councils to the French Government itself.

His running battles with Strathclyde Regional Council over whether he should pay commercial rates on a ruined cow byre in his grounds, converted into what the council claimed was a commercial gallery while in his eyes it was a garden temple, made news in a way that hardly any art exhibition could ever hope to.

He had already had a well-publicised brush with the but-is-it-art controversy: in 1976 he was unwittingly drawn into the hullabaloo surrounding Carl Andre’s bricks, when shortly afterwards the Tate bought a wooden board by Finlay, painted with the words “Starlit Waters”, for “£500 of taxpayers’ money”.

Take a look at Little Sparta

He also designed Stockwood Park and Bell's Cherrybank Gardens

Finlay's printed works.

Also from Eric: Amazing free-form juggling video. It's good to get gifts from Eagle Lake, Ontario, again.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 10:21 AM | Permalink

March 29, 2006

Eclipse! Total, solar, rare; Turkish festival: Stage collapses?

9:27 a.m. I love this photo: Dutch tourists cheer as they view a solar eclipse in front of Apollo Temple in the Turkish Mediterranean coastal resort of Side, Turkey, AP.

6:01 a.m.

NASA image

I didn't intend to wake up for the eclipse, but I did anyway. Exploratorium is broadcasting video that's a mix of four different telescope feeds, and it will be archived.

Eclipselive.com has a webcam from Side, Turkey, and I'm getting screen captures. Totality was a black screen, not much to show. The image above was saved at 6:01 a.m. EST, just as the sun emerged from the moon's shadow. At right, one minute later. Below, the sun moves away at 6:14.

6:24: I'm viewing eclipse photos from the AP feed at the Journal over the Web. I've added NASA's image of totality from Side on top -- what the webcam didn't catch.

6:38 This is a big deal in astrology.

6:45: Backing into this, but here's the caption AP is moving with its eclipse photos (they're from the telescope feed):

... total solar eclipse captured in Turkey's Mediterranean town of Side. The last such eclipse in November 2003 was best viewed from Antarctica, said Alex Young, a NASA scientist involved in solar research. Total eclipses are rare because they require the tilted orbits of the sun, moon and earth to line up exactly so that the moon obscures the sun completely. The next total eclipse will occur in 2008.

7:12 AP photographers file from the path of the eclipse:

A man wears old Yugoslav army cap as he watches solar eclipse in Belgrade's observatory.

Accra, Ghana.

Amman, Jordan

An Iraqi man watches a solar eclipse through a tinted piece of glass, in Baghdad

Kiev, Ukraine, through a CD.

A family views the eclipse from the town of Abomey, Benin. Today's eclipse blocks the sun in highly populated areas, including West Africa, where governments have scrambled to educate people about the dangers of looking directly at the sun without proper eye protection.

8:00 Soulclipse, the festival:

The central line of totality passes close to the famous Mediterranean resort city of Antalya, known as the 'Turkish Rivera". Right over Manavgat a city in the Anatolia province. This region of Turkey has a mild climate during the winter and viewing conditions in the early spring towards the end of March should be excellent. The festival will take place in Paradise Canyon, which is set on the banks of the beautiful Koprulu Canyon river in a national park approximately 75 km north east of Antalya city.

A report by "Patricia" in the forum says the stage collapsed in the rain (earlier in the week, apparently). Regrouping (and perhaps rebuilding) seems to be under way.

The main stage has completely collapsed. Its totally destroyed. Useless.
The entire stage, sound system, everything! Gone. Probably about 200,000Euros, worth of equipment.
It rained extremely hard, (It has been for the last 2 weeks but the organizers said they were afraid to tell anyone, cause maybe no one would come) We also heard the weather report predicts clouds for the eclipse : (
Okay, back to the stage: Apparently, they didnt have the correct support frames to hold up the stage, and after the heavy rain, it all just collapsed. It was really scary. 2 people are now in the hospital, one in critical condition.

Send your prayers that they both recover!
Its very chaotic here. A rumour has t that the locals are also very unhappy with the way the Israeli organizers have been treating them.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments 3

March 28, 2006

Lemon Festival sculpture; 'Elegant Universe' online; World's best skylines; Rove helping prosecutor Fitzgerald? Gingrich's advice to Dems

Lemon Festival: Menton, France -- near Monaco -- held its annual Lemon Festival last month. The most obvious part of it is a sculpture festival. (They don't sculpt the lemons, they assemble them on metal frames.)

They've more than covered the lemon beat: Photos, a slideshow, ecards and a stamp, recipes, cocktails; in English, The Lemon, symbol of Menton’s identity; The Fête du Citron: A Long Story; The Back of the Stage of the Festival and A Small Lemon Spelling-Book.

If you're really into this, there are plenty of photos of earlier festivals on the left.

Can changing your tune change your life? Nova's The Elegant Universe -- elegantly explains "string theory," edgy physics that predicts "eleven dimensions, parallel universes and a world made of strings." The three-hour series is online in QuickTime and RealVideo formats, in four- to sten-minute chunks. For a crib sheet, check out the teachers' guide.

Articles, interviews and slideshows accompany it.

We watched it live on TV at our house, and it's mesmerizing. The freaks were right -- the universe is all about vibes. Think vibrating strings, music.

Silhouettes: The Top 15 Skylines in the World v3.0. Interesting eye candy, except that the captions are above the photos, making for a bit of confusion.

Dubai, UAE, above, rises out of the desert. Author Luigi Di Serio, an urban planner, writes of Shenzhen, China, below, "Shenzen is a marvel of lights after sunset. You can’t help but ask yourself if you are in a video game or in a real city."

Karl Rove cooperating with Plame leak Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald? The Washington Note, Beneath the Surface on Plame Investigation: Rove and Libby in Deadly Dog Fight:

According to several Pentagon sources close to Rove and others familiar with the inquiry, Bush's senior adviser tipped off Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to information that led to the recent "discovery" of 250 pages of missing email from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney....

Campaign advice from the architect of off-year regime change:

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who masterminded the 1994 elections that brought Republicans to power on promises of revolutionizing the way Washington is run, told TIME that his party has so bungled the job of governing that the best campaign slogan for Democrats today could be boiled down to just two words: "Had enough?"

-- Republicans on the Run, Time Magazine, Mar. 26, 2006

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 11:07 AM | Permalink

March 27, 2006

Iraqi blogger 'Salam Pax' (Dear Raed) speaks in Calif.; 'Raed' in New Orleans; New Hapland game

Spartan Daily, San Jose, Calif.
'Salam Pax,' left, the Iraqi blogger, and Mitch Berman, Director of the Center for Literary Arts at San Jose State University.

Baghdad blogger in U.S.: Remember Iraqi blogger "Salam Pax" and his Dear Raed blog from the first months after the invasion?

"Salam Pax" -- his pseudonym means peace in two languages, and persists to this day for security reasons -- spoke Thursday night in San Jose, Calif. The student newspaper, the Spartan Daily, offers this report by Ryan Sholin (Iraqi blogger opens window on wartime Baghdad) and the first photo I've seen of "Salam."

The Iraqi blogger known as Salam Pax stepped onto a stage at an American university for the first time Thursday at San Jose State University's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Joint Library.
Around 200 students, faculty, staff and community members filled a second floor lecture hall as Pax spoke about the experience of posting his thoughts online as coalition troops advanced on Baghdad.

"I thought that the moment the bombs would drop, that would be the last time I was blogging," Pax said....

MetroActive's Vrinda Normand interviewed 'Pax' from London before the appearance.

Related: Raed Jarrar -- Salam's friend in Jordan named in the title of his blog -- was in New Orleans recently, volunteering in the Katrina cleanup and covering his first Mardi Gras with lots of photos.

Hapland 3 is out, the latest in this inventive series of games from 19-year-old Robin Allen (story).

Unless you have to days to spend, you may need to peek at a walkthrough.

If the word "Hapland" doesn't ring a bell, try Hapland 1 and Hapland 2 first.

Allen's also the game maker behind Escape from Rhetundo Island.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 11:00 AM | Permalink

March 26, 2006

Catching up on links: Noteworthy blogs; Texas's war on tipsy; San Francisco mayor wants wi-fi for all

A few links from the notebook while I take a break this weekend to catch up on sleep and novels. We played family Scrabble last night -- the 8-year-old played alone for the first time, which was frustrating for him. He knows more words than he knows how to spell (netin?). Turning "razors" into "crazors" cracked us all up.

Notable blogs: After the Levees: A New Orleans group blog at lefty site Talking Points Memo. "We have a cultural anthropologist, poverty lawyer, geographer, sociologist, and noted literary figure to help in this process."

Everest Bloggers: Mt. Everest climbers pause to write.

Moses Brown School - Service Trip to the Dominican Republic 2006. A photo blog with the students writing in the comments.

Nice blog design: Elaine Nelson's epersonae

Timeshifting: CBS' '60 Minutes' clocks in at Yahoo: News.com,

CBS said Thursday that it will showcase segments from its popular "60 Minutes" television news magazine on Yahoo as it seeks a wider audience for its news programs.
The tie-up will begin at the start of the 2006/2007 broadcast season in the third quarter, when "60 Minutes" will open its 39th season on the air.

Each week, following the Sunday night broadcast of "60 Minutes," viewers can turn to a dedicated Yahoo site that will expand on segments seen during the program, with unaired footage as well as archival material and blogs.

Who's out of control? Stephen Gordon's Texas blog Hammer for Truth and his readers are all over what happens when the state gives the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission too much money -- they hired 100 agents to arrest people in bars for being intoxicated, including out-of-towners in hotel bars. (Neoprohibitionist Update: Preemptive War Continues in Texas).

"I can understand if we had somebody laying in a booth and they were basically passed out and drunk, I could understand for them to go in with the flashlights and take them out of the booth and arrest them, but these people were standing and doing fine," he said. -- Texas bar owner.

But my favorite reponse comes from Startle Grams: Taking all the fun out of drinking,

All that's left is being drunk at home, and where's the fun in that?
Most of us have already been drunk with everybody at home.

Sometimes you just need to be drunk with different people.

If Texans want Texas effectively dry, they should vote on it. Some of those arrested were drinking in the bar of the hotel at which they were guests. The alleged drunk argued lucidly that she was not endangering herself or anyone else, she was going up to her room to go to sleep. The robotic response was that by being intoxicated she was endangering herself and others.

And if Texas's motivation is actually its DWI rate, why is it aggressively arresting drinkers who aren't driving? It's a legal substance, and they aren't vagrants staggering on the streets.

Have they taken their act to country clubs as well?

An arbitrary and punitive change in the interpretation by police of any law, not just public intoxication, is not a good demo for the democracy we're trying to peddle around the world.

Texas, this doesn't make us want to visit you.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome: J.D. Lasica hears him say,

San Francisco wants to become the first city with free wireless access. "It is a disgrace that we're talking about it when it should have been done all across the nation five years ago." He equated free wi-fi with the public library system, adding, "We need to get serious about eliminating the digital divide."

...He hauled out his biggest guns to blast the telecoms, which are lobbying Congress to prevent cities like San Franciso from providing free wi-fi. "They've got lobbylists. They've got lawyers. Type in my name and wifi and you'll get 18 million blog entries [a bit of an exaggeration, but point taken]. They're scared to death."

Dick Cheney: "If they (Democrats) are competent to fight this war, then I ought to be singing on American Idol."

Mr Cheney's fellow executives have yet to prove themselves competent to fight this war, and most Americans wouldn't have started it, don't want to fight it, and want to end it.

We'd love to hear Mr. Cheney sing.

Related: Good versus evil isn't a strategy "Bush's worldview fails to see that in the Middle East, power politics is the key." By former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 3:49 PM | Permalink

March 24, 2006

When 'pro-lifers' turn to abortion; Free mp3s: Pink Floyd '72, Led Zep; RSS backlash

"The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion": When the Anti-Choice Choose. From a Canadian pro-choice site,

Abortion is a highly personal decision that many women are sure they'll never have to think about until they're suddenly faced with an unexpected pregnancy. But this can happen to anyone, including women who are strongly anti-choice. So what does an anti-choice woman do when she experiences an unwanted pregnancy herself? Often, she will grin and bear it, so to speak, but frequently, she opts for the solution she would deny to other women -- abortion.

In the spring of 2000, I collected the following anecdotes directly from abortion doctors and other clinic staff in North America, Australia, and Europe. The stories are presented in the providers' own words, with minor editing for grammar, clarity, and brevity. Names have been omitted to protect privacy. ...

Go read 'em. Footnotes have links to some sources. Psychology is tricky stuff.

Entirely understandable: Some women who have been actively leading anti-choice activities and picketing of clinics find themselves needing an "exception," and the next day resume their picketing of the clinic whose services they have chosen. It's their secret.

Not so understandable: Some women who oppose abortion rationalize that they have had "an accident" but "refuse to sit in the waiting room with women they call 'sluts' and 'trash' " -- other women who have also had "accidents."

Before you assume you know my position on this, here it is: With advanced birth control methods, abortion could become rare. If you oppose birth control, you're asking for a world of hurt.
.
Free mp3s:Pink Floyd, Best Of Tour '72: RESTORED VERSION, at Singapore's BigO, of course; it's ROIO of the Week [Recordings of Indeterminate Origin] :

It was recorded during a four-night stand at the Rainbow Theatre in London from Feb 17 to 20. Roger Waters had finally decided that the next album would not be called Eclipse: A Piece For Assorted Lunatics. Instead the programme for the Rainbow Concerts was printed as Dark Side Of The Moon. These concerts were the first public performances of the legendary album. And the quality was said to be fantastic.

Also still open for downloads:

-- Led Zeppelin, For The Benefit Of Anyone Who Was Making A Bootleg

-- Mahavishnu John McLaughlin & Devadip Carlos Santana,
A Live Supreme

and more. Check the right side of that Pink Floyd download page, the most current entry; if the links say "Open" in red, it's still available.

An RSS reader showing feeds from defenselink.mil

RSS backlash: Maybe RSS feeds --- your favorite blogs/news-site links delivered to your PC like email -- are new to you, but some longtime bloggers miss your visits to their pages:

Jeneane Sessum (Allied), LAZY AGGREGATOR PEOPLE GO HOME,

You know what happens to blogs when all you do is feed off their feeds, but you never click through and you never link and you never comment? THOSE BLOGS FALL DOWN GO BOOM. And the people you are forgetting to talk to are some of the hardest working bloggers in blog business. Working their asses off so you can save yourself the trouble of clicking a damn mouse. You'd rather read them in an ugly scrolling window. That's like coming over for dinner and eating in the front yard.

What's the matter with us? We have to get out and WALK the blog neighborhood. Everyone reading this post, please make sure that you have a blogroll. Sure, I can't tell you what to do, but Blogrolls are the antidote to RSS and aggregators. Bring back our conversation nodes, our watering holes, our double wides. Bring back our summer-time Christmas lights and nativity scenes.

Please. I am not writing posts for you to read; I AM TALKING TO YOU.

A response from Euan Semple (The Obvious), Technology giveth and technology taketh away,

...But I have stayed uneasy. It felt like I wasn't really visiting people any more. I had turned relationships into content. I was also increasingly frustrated that I didn't really know who was reading my own blog as it is hard to get a sense of how many people access your content through RSS and because of the lack of referalls you can't get to know them.

Ralph Brandi: (There is No Cat), RSS levels community,

Feed aggregators reduce every site to a dull grey lowest common denominator. Allied is Burningbird is Emergency Weblog is the New York Times; they all look the same in a feed reader. Most feeds don't include the associated comments from a post; if they did, the same item would come up as new over and over and over as comments were added, which would break the model on which feed readers are built.

From Shelley Powers (Burningbird), A Pale Moon’s Shadow,

I’m also thinking of putting a line at the bottom of each post in the Atom feed, saying:

“Created especially for my friends. Does this mean you’re my friend? Good. I need a place to sleep, then. I’m no bother. Really. Well, aside from the insomnia. Oh, and I have 8 cats. Well, my boyfriend’s kind of scary, but the meds seem to help.”

Communities, friendships, a sense of companionship and sharing can’t be made or broken through the use of tools. If anything, when we become friends through our online associations, we have done something extraordinary–we have reached beyond the limits of technology and created something human, and real.

But it’s a fragile reality–like the shadow of a pale moon.

As I tried to say in comments at Jeneane's -- they went down and she ended up blogging it instead -- I fired up an early RSS reader years ago, but kept forgetting about it. I like to see the sites, see them change. (Of course, I don't generally read opinion-only blogs that are just text after text after...)

I have no idea how many of you read this weblog. In addition to feeds, many read it on other Belo news sites --23 of them, last I looked. I've gotten emails from people I've mentioned saying, "Thanks for the mention in the Dallas Morning News." and I find Google links from sites to a blog post citing me as,

SHEILA Lennon: The Front-Runner's Fall Press-Enterprise (subscription) - Riverside,CA,USA

-- Firefox News: Sheila Lennon: 'The 46 best free PC utilities'; Unitarian Jihad ... KVUE (subscription) - Austin,TX,USA

or even,

-- " 09-23 Sheila Lennon: Hacking the Presidential Election(The Press-Enterprise, RI)"

I sneezed a sneeze into the air, it fell to earth I know not where...

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 9:53 AM | Permalink

March 23, 2006

Heavily loaded photos; Bird flu may flop; The '60s: Rehearsal for what?; Recover scratched CDs?

Overloaded is a series of photos at Ezpresso.com about what happens in some parts of the world when the load far exceeds the apparent capacity of the vehicle available to transport it.

Sometimes it works /\, sometimes it doesn't \/.

It's just one theme in the site's Crazypics collection.

'Jeopardy' screening online next week

Coming soon, Geek Jeopardy!: What are 'Jeopardy!' tests online? News.com:

What is the online contestant test, Alex? The answer is: the innovative method "Jeopardy!" has devised for potential participants to take the first step toward appearing on the long-running game show.
Fans will be able to take the 50-question preliminary general knowledge exam online from March 28 to 30. Each day is designated for a specific time zone and will get different questions from the other two.

...Fans must preregister and supply basic information, after which they receive a specific time during which they must log in and answer the questions.

Even if you're not a "fan," you can try out, if you use (at least) I.E. 5.0, Flash 7 and disable pop-up blockers. (Macs are OK, no mention of Firefox.) If you're on the East Coast, test time is Tuesday, March 28th at 8:00 p.m.; Wednesday for Central dwellers, Thursday for the West.

FAQ, rules, pre-registration.

Think the servers will hold up?

My colleague Alan Rosenberg was on Jeopardy! many years ago. He was foiled by the buzzer not responding as he expected -- that's the part you can't cram for. Knowing the answer and pushing a buzzer that doesn't register has to be excruciating on national TV.

via Robot Wisdom

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments 1

March 22, 2006

The fall of Adam Vinatieri; 'Content-producing consumers'; Gmail invites here; Quick game

Selling weapons to the enemy: Adam Vinatieri a Colt, romping the Astroturf of the RCA Dome with Peyton Manning? Could Adam have found a crueler way to stick his thumb in our eye?

It's already a wince to see pictures of the Adam in Patriots blue. Today I'd rather think of him with a gun, shooting pheasant in corn fields -- he's a bigtime hunter, says Field & Stream.

Not that I'm not grateful for the snow game and many, many more clutch kicks. But, as Journal sportswriter Tom Curran reported earlier this month,

"If he's smart, he will (stay in New England)," Dallas Cowboys coach Bill Parcells said when asked if the Cowboys would have interest in Vinatieri. "He could be Bobby Orr and Carl Yastrzemski and John Havlicek. That guy's done a lot."

Vinatieri faces an interesting dilemma. He may get more money up front somewhere else as a free agent, but how much money in endorsements and appearances will he be giving up if he leaves New England? And it's not just while he's still kicking. Simply being Adam Vinatieri professionally for the rest of his days could be a pretty lucrative business.

Instead, somebody (probably a serpentine sort) poked his pride and convinced him he was getting no "respect" from the Pats' front office, And he threw it all away for a onetime chunk of a signing bonus. Think of Babe Ruth leaving the Sox.

ESPN: "...league sources told ESPN.com that the multiyear deal includes a signing bonus of $3.5 million and that it averages $2.5 million over the first three years of the contract. " That's what Adam made last year -- minus the bonus. Security was already his, on the field or off.

The story broke late, and The Indy Star isn't whooping like you'd think they would be. Reaction at the Star's newly created Adam Vinatieri message board is mixed -- some are pleased, others wonder if kicking is where the Colts should have spent big bucks.

Better hope Bill Belichick and Scott Pioli have a dozen rabbits in their hats to redeem the 2006 no-name Patriots. Gone now are Willie McGinest, Ty Law, Lawyer Milloy, Christian Fauria, Kevin Mawae, Ted Johnson, Tim Dwight, Damien Woody. Troy Brown, Stephen Neal and Tom Ashworth are shopping around, too.

The Pats are going to need a lot more touchdowns, since without Adam the squeakers are no longer in the bag. Veteran wide receivers Eric Moulds (Bills) and Keyshawn Johnson (Giants) are available.

But when it's fourth and crunch, who we gonna call? Doug Flutie?

Using users: Longtime Web-sters roll eyes -- and get a tad hostile, sometimes -- when landlocked marketers bring an "I'm here for mine" attitude online.

From Doc Searls (Were there eyeball hors d'oeuvres?):

Mary Hodder got a little more than a day in at SXSW before she headed west to PC Forum. There she wrote,
There was a guy on stage yesterday that Esther Dyson kept trying to get to say that the users could create on his site, and he finally blurted out, ".. we just let them think they are creating...". (You know there was a publicist in the back of the room saying "Take him out. I repeat. Take him out" to a sharpshooter on an ear radio somewhere. In fact there are tons of publicists and PR folks here.. many more than last year.)

It's too bad because "Users in Charge" is a great topic and Esther and company have put in a lot of work to frame these issues thoughtfully. But most of the attendees can't help themselves... they can only think of consumers buying things, being fed something packaged and consumable and neatly branded from these companies and making boatloads of money, with seemingly little care for the users, the experience or anything else.

Brian Dear added,

The most absurd was during the Me Media roundtable session where someone was talking about "content-producing consumers"... I had to walk out about then.

Do they also consume what they produce? The absurdity of this rests in the buyer as object, "the mark," to be deceived and hustled.

The golden rule applies online, even if your job is to sell a product. Make it a good product, make using it a good experience, and don't hustle us.

And please don't call us consumers unless we eat your product. We're users, readers, writers, people.

As Mary writes, "people who participate are not consumers."

Want Gmail? Hack Attack: Become a Gmail master. I haven't delved into Gmail this deeply -- I'm just a bit wary of letting Google see and store my private communications -- but If you want an invitation-only Google Mail account, just send me an email with Gmail in the subject line, and I'll invite you. (No spam will result, I won't use your email address for anything else.)

Go play: PandAventure is a quick Flash game where you're a panda who follows your friend to get more tender bamboo shoots. You can probably solve this one without help, but that doesn't mean it's obvious. There just aren't that many parts to it.

More about it at Jay is Games, which will get you started.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 9:24 AM | Permalink

March 21, 2006

Watch air traffic on your computer; Google Finance; links of the day

Ants on parade: I've been mesmerized by Airport Monitor:

This is Logan International in Boston. Arrivals are in blue, departures in green; the black ones are "in transit." This is jerky realtime -- everything moves every few seconds. Click on a plane and it turns red; you'll be shown its type and altitude.

Logan's runways, close up. Zoom levels range from 4 to 90 miles.

This is JFK International in New York.

If your first thought was about terrorists seeing this, they do already know there are planes in the air.

Airports offer this Passur product free on their sites to people wondering if weather has grounded their planes, or those they are to meet, and to the surrounding neighborhoods. From the "Top 10 Reasons Why Airports Choose Airport Monitor" page:

Lowering call volume, workload at the noise and operations offices
* Over time, AirportMonitor results in fewer calls for information, explanation or clarification about noise issue, as people become used to looking up the information for themselves

Massport offers a link on the Logan page right under Arrivals and Departures.

Links of the day:

Google Finance: I see financial stories as a list of raw headline links, but Google Blogoscoped's Philipp Lenssen sees more.

Opposite? Tip for finding music on Google.

BBC: Pentagon plans cyber-insect army. Truly weird.

The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll: "A new generation of conspiracy theorists is at work on a secret history of New York’s most terrible day." New York Metro.

World's Most Expensive Cars, 2006: Wired, from Forbes.

That's a Swedish Koenigsegg CCR, $540,000.

SXSW to MPAA: STFU. Derek Powazek:

One of the most interesting panels at SXSW Interactive 2006 was The Future of Darknets, moderated by JD Lasica. And while the concept of Darknets - communities using private subnetworks to communicate and collaborate out of view of the larger internet - is indeed fascinating, the panel was not interesting because of the intended topic. In fact, we never actually got to hear much about DarkNets, much to my disappointment, because the panel was hijacked the moment one panelist said, "Hello, my name is Kori Bernards, and I'm from the Motion Picture Association of America."

What followed was an hour-long firing squad as one audience member after another directed angry questions her way. The feeling of pent-up frustrations with the movie biz was palpable, especially as her claims of flexibility and excitement within the MPAA to find "creative new solutions" to the problems raised by the audience rang more and more hollow, the more times she repeated them....

...No one in that angry audience in Austin wants to dupe a movie to sell it on the street. That's piracy. We just want to put movies on our hard drives and iPods, share our mix CDs with each other (just like we used to do with tapes), and mash that funny video with that cool song to produce something new, something we'll give away for free....

Gawker Owner Nick Denton Opens Storefront Headquarters on Crosby Street. -- New York Magazine

Watch bloggers type!

The 'Hotbed of Tech' Times? Dan Gillmor, former tech columnist at the San Jose Mercury News in Silicon Valley, suggests that Yahoo buy the local paper, orphaned in the Knight Ridder sale.

Back to the good ole days: The Raleigh (N.C.) Times closed in 1989, but The News & Observer reports (A downtown spot to toast the bygone times) that the building lives on:

... The Times building from the '20s is being turned into a watering hole (The Raleigh Times) and a next-door coffee shop (The Morning Times) on Hargett Street.

On Friday night, dozens of Times alumni, including Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, gathered to hoist a few beers and talk about the days when all newspapers thrived on competition -- none so much as The Raleigh Times....

via Romenesko, who's chock full today of post-Knight-Ridder sale news and journalistic soul-searching in its wake.

Trapped in between life and death. Seattle Times:

"When a young Fort Lewis soldier returned from Iraq paralyzed from the upper chest down, it was his teenage brother who assumed the role of roommate and primary caretaker."

Amazing story.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 10:18 AM | Permalink

March 20, 2006

Blogiversary: This blog turns 4 today

Here's how it started: Subterranean Homepage News, March 20, 2002.

Day One: It's a cliche among musicians that you get your whole life to make your first album and three months to make your second. This "weblog" may never have such a long daily entry again. My latest Journal job (features & interactive producer of projo.com; I've been an editor here since 1985) and a dozen years of my life online have led me way beyond the categories of the traditional news website. Here, I hope to look at hard news sideways, go deep into parts of the culture that don't make it to the newspaper, delve into freeware and the future of this medium, and share the spotlight with you.

In those days I made it by hand in Dreamweaver, and could only blog from the newsroom, since it lived on our servers here.

Now, with Movable Type's Web interface available 24/7, the blog owns me.

Links to all the early years' posts are here.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 5:18 PM | Permalink | Comments 4

March 19, 2006

Update: New report, new videos from French labor protest

Video, with sound, by Danielle Ameden in Paris:

"Aujourd'hui, dans la rue" --> "Today, on the street"

3 secs mpg | Real Media | Windows Media

The soundtrack is dance music.
18 secs mpg | Real Media | Windows Media

A strong voice: Roughly, "Everybody stop working, Let's have a general strike."
14 secs mpg | Real Media | Windows Media

Danielle also has a new post up about yesterday's demonstration (Paris Manifestations: Marching with a Mission):

Against the advice of the U.S. Embassy and my program director, I was waiting there on the sidewalk at Nation to meet them, and watched for two hours as the manifestants streamed past. When I arrived around 3:30, the streets were empty and calm. An hour later, the circular place was flooded with the protestors and a sea of spectators. I left around 6:45 as the last manifestants were marching towards the place. According to news reports, some angry protestors moved back to the site of Thursday night's riots, Place de la Sorbonne.
...Yesterday morning, my host mother said to me, “the (French) government has been a bastard for months,” by not listening to the people. To get the government's attention, people are engaging in protests, which are mostly peaceful, where they draw power from numbers. An estimated 500,000 people marched across France in protest against CPE yesterday, in cities like Lyon and Marseille. Here, unlike in the U.S., the people actively and unrelentingly challenge legislation. The matter of CPE has riled up the French enough that it seems the law might be overturned....

We used Dropload to pass the video from Paris to Providence. I downloaded FX Video Converter -- 30 day trial -- and it was simple, fast and intuitive at converting the avi files to other formats.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 3:09 PM | Permalink

Danielle Ameden: Photos, clip from yesterday's Paris labor demonstration

Danielle Ameden of Roger Williams University in Bristol has uploaded 85 photos of Paris demonstrations (background, from yesterday), many from yesterday afternoon's massive peaceful protest and some from more sinister nighttime protests. (She blogged that yesterday.) You may view them as a slideshow, or browse as thumbnails.

I've posted a selection of photos from her slideshow below, to whet your appetite. My French isn't good enough to translate all the signs with a lot of confidence.

Students and many adults throughout the country marched against proposed legislation that would let employers fire young workers for no reason, in an attempt to ease unemployment. (???) Story: Guardian (U.K.), France's global warning

Danielle emails that she hopes to blog about this demonstration, which she describes as "pretty powerful," later today. She attached a tiny, 3-second video clip, with sound; I've sent her the URLs of some ftp drops so she can send larger videos later today. (Her email provider limits the size of attachments.)

Here's her three-second movie, with sound, in mpg, Real Media and Windows Media formats.

(Projo.com invited Rhode Island students abroad to blog on our site, linked on the news site's homepage, with email support from me. Eleven have managed to get at least one post out, even if it meant a hike to an Internet cafe and up a steep learning curve; several are posting regularly.)

"How sad this is"

More of Danielle Almaden's photos from Paris

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 11:01 AM | Permalink

March 18, 2006

R.I. blogger reports from Paris demonstrations; dissecting political macho; Sarandon direct; 'Save the Merc'

Danielle Amaden, Paris

Reporting from Paris: One of our R.I. Students Abroad, Danielle Almaden from Roger Williams University in Bristol, is blogging from Paris. She waded into Thursday night's demonstration -- over new policies which aim to stimulate employment by permitting employers to fire those under 26 within two years without stating a reason -- and writes about it today.

Background: Here's a "headline news" report from yesterday:

Around a quarter of a million people took to the streets in some 200 demonstrations around the country, in a clash between youth and the conservative government of 73-year-old President Jacques Chirac.
Paris police chief Pierre Mutz blames the violence on fringe groups of radicals and anarchists.

The next clash could come on Saturday when unions and students will march together in solidarity against a new form of job contract championed by Villepin that will allow employers to fire young workers within their first two years in a job without giving a reason.

Unions fear the age ceiling could be extended to all workers.

From the Guardian (U.K.) , link

They demanded the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, withdraw his measures to alleviate France's high levels of youth unemployment. One in four young people in France is unemployed, but the figures rise to 50% in the poor suburbs.
Mr de Villepin has insisted the way to alleviate unemployment is by paradoxically making it easier to fire workers aged under 26. The hope is it will spur employers to hire young people safe in the knowledge they are not obliged to retain them.

Times (U.K.) link

In Paris, in scenes that conjured up images of the demonstrations of 1968, 2,000 riot police stood guard as about 30,000 students were joined by unionists in a march in the cold sunshine from la Place d’Italie through the Left Bank close to the ministerial district. “Villepin, you’re toast, the students are in the streets!” they chanted.

Updating: Elaine Sciolino for tomorrow's New York Times: link

PARIS, March 18 — Students joined forces with teachers, workers, retirees, opposition politicians and labor union leaders in more than 150 cities and towns throughout France on Saturday in the largest nationwide protest against the government's new youth labor law....

...The giant left-wing C.G.T. workers' union estimated that 1.5 million people protested nationwide; the Interior Ministry put the total at more than 500,000, with 80,000 in Paris.

From the earlier version, now lower in the story:

Under sunny skies in Paris on Saturday afternoon, the police, anticipating trouble, urged shopkeepers along the march route to shut down.

But the demonstrations started peacefully, with balloons and music of the Rolling Stones and Madonna. Protesters were joined by parents with children. Officials from the major unions distributed banners and flags from the back of trucks. Vendors sold hotdogs and kebabs.

Danielle is in the thick of a big story.

Ouch: Linda Colley in the Guardian: link

In America, the excitement about Dick Cheney's shooting accident is over. There are no more talkshow debates about why he took so long to make a statement, and no more news reports about his 78-year-old victim. Even the delicious contrast between the vicepresident's bravery in the face of small birds and the deferments he took to keep from going to Vietnam no longer raises eyebrows. Yet the shrewdest comment I heard on the incident was rarely touched on. What did the vice-president think he was doing, inquired a serious hunter? Real men got up early and went into the countryside hunting wild quail alone with their dog. Going in groups to a farm to shoot specially bred birds was for sissies. It wasn't Cheney's involvement in masculine pursuits that was noteworthy; it was that the mode of masculinity on show was bogus.
Bogus masculine posturing seems to be the style of the current US administration. Its most conspicuous expression was perhaps Bush's "Mission Accomplished" photo opportunity after the invasion of Iraq. There he was, this veteran of the home guard, clad in a snug-fitting flight suit, strutting the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln among real warriors, and claiming victory. It was, wrote one commentator, "a masculine drag performance". Similar posturing went on in the Republican convention before the last presidential election: politicians whose own warlike masculinity was nonexistent strove very effectively to effeminise John Kerry, who really had been a hero....

...They are not acting this way because Americans possess a strong and confident cult of the masculine virtues, but rather because many are anxiously uncertain about just what these virtues are.

She's nearly 60: From the Independent (U.K.), A Fine Romancer catches up with Susan Sarandon, whose movie Romance & Cigarettes opens Friday in the U.K.

The sidebar is that we don't know when we'll get to see Romance & Cigarettes in the U.S.- - it's "collecting dust at Sony Pictures, which inherited the movie as part of April’s Sony-MGM transaction," according to this L.A. Times story, which has slipped into the archives but is reprinted at Kate Winslet's site. Winslet and James Gandolfini star with Sarandon. The hardworking Chris Walken's in there too.

Also orphaned: Newspaper employees launch "Save the Merc,'' says a story in the Merc. From the mouths of those rejected after the KRT sale:

Recent days have brought dizzying change to the San Jose Mercury News. In quick succession, the Mercury's owner, Knight Ridder, was sold to the McClatchy Co. which has announced it intends to sell the Mercury News.

The pending resale puts the paper's ability to cover the community at risk. An owner more interested in increasing profits than in fulfilling the paper's responsibility to the community likely would impose severe cutbacks in news coverage.

Please join the employees of the Mercury News and voice your support for preserving this vital civic institution....

Via JD Lasica

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 5:11 PM | Permalink

March 17, 2006

'A Danny Boy for My Father'

All the corned beef in our house came out of a can.

Mom -- born Marion McQuillian -- was schooled in the ways of lace-curtain Irish by her proud, formidable Irish mother, who had come to America alone at 16 to be secretary to a music teacher.

Mom wouldn't "smell up the house" with the odor of cabbage cooking, the odor of tenement hallways. Maudlin tenors weeping through Danny Boy, like boiled cabbage, were part of a painful past escaped, and best left back there.

Dad would never tell me stories of Ireland passed down from his mother. "It's a tale of misery and woe, Sheila," he would say.

Francis. A. Lennon was "shanty Irish," Mom joked. Even as education and character expanded his world, he played MacNamara's Band (clip) with gusto on our piano, sang Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ra (clip) like Bing Crosby, and insisted on corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick's Day. Every year he got it -- for lunch, somewhere else.

They're both gone now, but all this came back to me Sunday, listening to Carol Noonan's lovely A Danny Boy for My Father (real player or wma) on NPR as we were driving in South County.

Here's a bit of the narrative; the song plays behind it, and takes over at full volume at the end. Turn it up.

...I really hated this song. Every year my dad offered my Danny Boy services to the annual step-dancing recital at the Ancient Order of Hibernians hall. They made me close the program after all the cute Catholic girls did their Riverdance. ... Adults loved my voice. My vibrato was mature for a 9-year-old but freakish to the ears of my friends. Monday would come and I would endure a week of "Glenda the good witch" jokes, and vow I would never sing that stupid song again. When I turned 12, I finally did refuse to fulfill this annual engagement, and never noticed the disappointment in my dad's face when I made the bold announcement. ...

She never sang Danny Boy again -- until her father's funeral in 1985.

In the car, after this pure voice had banished all the bad Danny Boys before it, my half-Irish husband said, "I think I'm going to cry."

Happy St. Paddy's.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments 2

March 16, 2006

Spring spawns new garden blogs

Spring begins Monday (March 20) at 1:26 p.m. (EST), and we're seeing a resurgence of garden blogs.

Kathy Purdy of Cold Climate Gardening writes that her Garden Links URL has changed, and adds,

You should mention to all your readers on the garden blog page that Garden Voices is where the action is really happening. It's a service provided by GardenWeb (now owned by iVillage*) that collects gardening blog posts from all over (the only criteria is that they're English language) and presents them as excerpts, sometimes with brief commentary from moderator OldRoses. (She's on your list with her own blog, btw.) If you're reading them, it's a great way to get your garden blog fix. If you're writing one, what are you waiting for? Get your blog added to the list. There's no faster way to increase your readership. (I also wrote about it on my blog here.)

*iVillage itself is being bought by NBC Universal.

Albert's Greenhouse blog is one to watch. An engineer has built an 8-by-12-foot greenhouse, and details its life. Albert Huntington of Sunnyvale, Calif., writes,

Albert's Greenhouse blog is about my hobby greenhouse, backyard garden, visits to botanical gardens and conservatories, tropical plants and general horticulture. You don't see a lot of tropical plant/greenhouse blogs out there, so I thought I'd start one.

I haven't started anything yet, but he's inspiring me.

a small garden in maine: Sandra Lawrence writes, "I am just getting started, but do plan to add lots. I am in southern Maine."

They've all been incorporated into the ancient and venerable Garden Blogs list.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 7:30 PM | Permalink

March 15, 2006

Hoard tuna for bird-flu time? Bill Gates wants to 'target' you; anti-gravity video;

Stockpile tuna against bird flu? That's the government's advice. From AP (Preparing for a Pandemic):

Over the weekend, the government told Americans to start storing canned foods and powdered milk under their beds as the prospect of a deadly bird flu outbreak approaches the United States. The fear is that the bird flu will turn into a pandemic and drastically alter the course of American life for a time.
The Red Cross says that if there's a pandemic, we need to prepare for 10 days of being stuck in our homes, and that we may be without power and water during that time. In the event of a bird flu pandemic, Americans should plan for interruptions or delays in other services: Banks might close, hospitals could be overwhelmed, and postal service could be spotty. Experts also say that people need to begin stocking up on extra food and supplies like protective masks, flashlights, portable radios, batteries and matches.

"When you go to the store and buy three cans of tuna fish, buy a fourth and put it under the bed. When you go to the store to buy some milk, pick up a box of powdered milk, put it under the bed," said Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt. "When you do that for a period of four to six months, you are going to have a couple of weeks of food. And that's what we're talking about." ...

A list of essential supplies follows, including water:

"We recommend that each member of your family has a gallon of water for each day, so a family of four needs to have 40 gallons of water available and you need that much water stored because there's a chance that your water will get cut off if there's a pandemic," Washington said. "Workers may not be able to make it, and plants may stop operating. Your family will need to drink water and for hygiene, for brushing their teeth and washing their hands."

archives.gov

Photograph of a basement family fallout shelter that includes a 14-day food supply that could be stored indefinitely, a battery-operated radio, auxiliary light sources, a two-week supply of water, and first aid, sanitary, and other miscellaneous supplies and equipment, ca.1957.

If you have the vaguest memories of '50s fallout shelters, you'll remember debates about whether it was okay to shoot your neighbor if he wanted to break into your fallout shelter in the event of an attack. Since your food supplies were not acquired with him in mind, it might doom all of you.

Leavitt didn't address what would happen in the event of quarantine to those who had not stockpiled water, medicines, powdered milk and toilet paper, but the images of New Orleans after Katrina don't offer much encouragment. The next-to-last thing an epidemic needs is a crowd of refugees in one place. The last is desperate people trying to break into homes in search of food and toilet paper.

Leavitt is traveling the country, spreading the message that the federal government won't be much help. The bulk of the money Congress authorized to fight bird flu is going to vaccines, which take 6 months to produce. He was at Brown in January ('Every family needs a plan', free reg.req.)

Related: State Pandemic Plans at pandemicflu.gov; here's Rhode Island's page and plan.(pdf)

Interestingly, the R.I. plan notes,

Quarantine [a period of isolation to prevent disease spread], is not effective in controlling multiple influenza outbreaks in large, immunologically naive populations, because the disease spreads too rapidly to identify and control chains of transmission. Even if quarantine were somewhat effective in controlling influenza in large populations, it would not be feasible to implement and enforce with available resources, and would damage the economy by reducing the workforce.

Flu Wiki

Bird-flu cats reject virus: At least two cats in an Austrian shelter shook off the virus without becoming ill.

iflu.org: Scare yourself silly with an up-to-the-minute world news feed on the virus.

Bird flu cartoons and graphics lighten a Malaysian government veterinary page from last October.

We're beyond this: Just an Online Minute: Bill Gates' behavioral prophecy, at Media Post:

Some media executives have long been touting the prospect of behavioral targeting, or the ability to send ads to consumers based on their interests, as determined by their online behavior.
This morning, none other than Bill Gates added his voice to the proponents of such targeting. And he didn't limit it to online ads. Rather, the Microsoft head focused on the coming paradigm for television.

"TV historically has been a broadcast medium in which everybody's picking from a finite number of channels," Gates told an audience of several dozen people in New York, at the annual meeting of Corbis -- which he founded. (AP photo is at right)

But in the future, watching TV will be a matter of "seeing what you're interested in, having ads targeted to you," Gates said. "That's becoming the standard way video will be delivered," he added. ...

Bill hasn't heard of TiVo and other DVRs, where we skip the ads? The reader has to willingly participate or populist technology will throw up a way to defeat it.

The problem with "targeting ads to your online behavior" is that it's not two-way: You can't tell the site, "I bought the car. Now I want a boat." You're "targeted" and the video will be "delivered" long after you've made your purchase and moved on.

Why the stealth approach?

Why not simply ask the reader what coupons, sales, or deals he or she would like to see this week?

"Who's got rib eyes on sale?" I'd ask, or "Who fixes dryers?" and soon, "Who has lisianthus for sale?" And every few years I might be shopping for something a lot bigger.

I find it irritating when Amazon sends me emails for books and CDs "you might like" based on Christmas gifts I've bought for people with tastes far from mine. Dummies.

Thanks to my colleague Andrea for the pointer.

What goes up: The Hutchison-Effect: The New Philadelphia Experiment? at Google Video.

American Antigravity shows a two-minute clip of things flying upwards. More at
americanantigravity.com

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 7:00 AM | Permalink

March 14, 2006

Word Sandwich; crop circle on Google Maps

Word Sandwich: Should be easy. Isn't.

How to play: The object is to guess the mystery five letter word. Your guesses will float to the top if they are too “high” alphabetically, and they will float to the bottom if they are too “low” alphabetically. (You can hit the enter key after each guess.) A bonus multiplier is applied to your score if you solve the word quickly. There are five words to guess in a game, and there are no proper words.

This game is extremely addictive and extremely frustrating.

Crop circle on Google Maps: A painterly scene of Scottish fields; zoom in to see the design.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 8:59 AM | Permalink | Comments 1

March 13, 2006

Slowlife; Knight-Ridder sold; Google Mars; Bill Withers; cabbage lasagna; Post-American Whitney Biennial

If you've followed this link from neatorama.com and are looking for the post that includes Meret Oppenheim's fur cup and saucer, it's Cat piano, houses made of trees. Welcome.

Site for sore eyes. It's the site of an exhibit about plants in motion.

"A collaborative project of the United States Botanic Garden, the Chicago Botanic Garden, and Roger Hangarter" of Indiana University, the exhibit is available to travel beginning next month; I hope it's coming here sometime. Plant movies.

Big fish bought by smaller fish:
Romenesko is all over the sale of Knight-Ridder to McClatchy. Gotta love the wording of this by the San Jose Mercury News, a Knight-Ridder paper:

A source told Knight Ridder newspapers Sunday evening that the company had agreed to sell itself for about $4.5 billion, or roughly $67 a share, for a combination of 60 percent cash and 40 percent McClatchy stock.

Later: McClatchy press release: They'll sell 12 of the 32 KRT dailies, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Mercury News.

Ask directions:
Google Mars, found by ZDNet. (Directly, it's mars.google.com)

Helluva lede:

ON Aug. 1, 2002, I left behind the comfortably roomy semicircle marked "married-couple household" on the Census Bureau pie chart and slipped into an inconspicuous wedge labeled "two or more people, nonfamily." Having separated from my husband of 28 years the day before, I opened our three-bedroom 1927 Colonial Revival house to a group of men and women less than half my age. Overnight, the home I had lived in for 12 years became a seven-person anarchist collective, run by consensus and fueled by punk music, curse-studded conversation and food scavenged from Dumpsters.

The story is Inviting Anarchy Into My Home, in the Times, by 52-year-old Liz Seymour of Greensboro, N.C.

Video: Bill Withers doing Ain't No Sunshine in the early '70s on the live London TV show Old Grey Whistle Test, at You Tube.

Ethnic eating: If corned beef with zeppole for dessert is too much for you, why not celebrate this week with cabbage lasagna instead?

Post-modern cat post: Yesterday, on a typically gray, rainy Providence day, we went with some kids to the "Pet Expo" at the convention center. Crowded and cramped, it resembled a low-rent mall until we finally found the cat-judging section.

There, each cat and its owner had a table with little tents where the star could rest between performances, sometimes shaded behind its winning ribbons. During judging -- the "rings" were numbered spots along a wall lined with cages -- some cats climbed a rope post, chased a teaser toy of colored mylar strips and behaved like cats, while others seemed absent and bored, albeit beautiful. One judge tried to tweak a particularly sleek dullard with the toy, then shrugged in disgust at the total lack of response. Nobody home.

The giant Maine coon cats made the biggest impression on the kids. The Snow Bengal cats, with their fawn-colored leopard spots, are pretty amazing, too.

This odd bit of what passes for entertainment in America in these times came back to me when I read (via a link from Robot Wisdom) iMomus's LiveJournal blog.

Scottish-born musician Nick Currie (imomus.com) is in New York, doing a daily art performance as part of the Whitney Biennial art show (see his Post-American), and he writes about blather in a way that strikes a chord with many commenters:

I've found myself this week in the middle of a certain kind of New York conversation, the kind I used to hunger for, lively conversation about art and projects and ideas and ambition and politics, falling silent. It's not that I don't want to be in the conversation. It's not that the terms of the conversation make no sense to me. It's not even that I'm still a bit jet-lagged and tend to get tired early in the evening. It's just something to do with feeling bored with the way these New York conversations, these American conversations, are framed. I feel like, no matter how much I agree, I won't agree. No American definition of the good life will match mine. I want to opt out of the terms and framings of these conversations even before I get into them. These days I seem to prefer processing things visually; I find that more interesting. I'm sitting in a bar, and there's conversation, but I notice that there's an abacus lattice in front of me, and I want to concentrate on that. Or there's music playing, but the peripheral sounds (rain, ventilation, machinery) are more interesting. The landscape out the window of the plane is more interesting than the film. Silence is more interesting than speech. I just want to look at what people are wearing, watch a crane elevator moving up and down its metal spine, silhouetted against the western horizon....

It ends,

Anything that lifts America away from its dull denims, its dreadful protestant practicality, is fine by me. A use of fashion that lifts America away from itself -- away from its endless small talk about the weather and projects and success -- towards a recognition of the wisdom of India is, well, a correct use of fashion. The ghost of Ginsberg is there, doing good work.

"endless small talk about the weather and projects and success," or cat schlock on a Sunday afternoon. Deal or no deal?

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 5:24 AM | Permalink

March 11, 2006

Free: Fort Minor's "(100 Percent Reason to) Remember the Name" to remix; blogger Kelsea on BBC; Toure interview

Greg Watermann photo
Fort Minor: From left, Cheapshot, Tak, Mike Shinoda (of Linkin Park), Ryu and Beat Down.

Fort Minor's (100 Percent Reason to) Remember the Name is free, and in pieces, to play with: Mike Shinoda's Linkin Park spinoff has launched the Fort Minor Remix Contest.

Fort Minor is offering the separated audio elements of "Remember the Name" online under a Creative Commons BY-NC license, so that producers all over the world can easily create remixes of the hit song.

The a capella is really nice.

You can also get the final tune on Fort Minor's homepage. (Very bottom, small print.)

Which came first? I heard the voice of our first student blogger, (Kelsea Brennan-Wessels, An American Student in Rome) for the first time today, on the BBC's The World site.

Kelsea blogged about the popularity of The White Stripes' Seven Nation Army in Rome, and she tells reporter William Troop about it. She and her boyfriend also hum the tune. You can hear the segment here.(5:40): "A song from the Detroit rock band The White Stripes is all the rage in Rome. Fans of a professional soccer team there have adopted "Seven Nation Army" as their anthem. The World's William Troop explains."

Kelsea is out reporting on Rome's zeppole right now, but I hope she'll tell us how that gig unfolded for her.

Homage to Ali Farka Toure: BBC audio again. African musician Ali Farka Toure dies. "Malian musician Ali Farka Toure died this morning in the capital, Bamako, after a long fight with cancer. The World's Marco Werman recalls his own trip to visit Toure five years ago and tells host Lisa Mullins of the legacy that Toure leaves behind. "

Extended interview with farmer Toure (mp3, 14:13)

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 11:50 AM | Permalink

March 10, 2006

The Profumo Affair

There it is on the AP wire, Profumo, Scandal-Plagued Briton, Dies:

LONDON -- John Profumo, a former British Cabinet minister whose liaison with a prostitute nearly brought down a government, died after suffering a stroke, an official said Friday. He was 91.

The scandalous tale of Christine Keeler, the woman in a triangle in 1963 with Profumo, the British secretary of war, and Eugene Ivanov, a high-ranking Soviet naval attache and intelligence agent. is told in great detail in four parts on a New Zealand site, nzgirl:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

The photo of Christine Keeler, playmate of the powerful, needs only a pillbox hat to be an emblem of the early '60s -- before The Beatles. Phil Ochs even wrote a song called Christine Keeler, lyrics to be sung to the tune of Walk Right In.

The money quote from her "mentor," Stephen Ward: “Goodness, with your friend Eugene one hand and your new friend (Profumo) you could start a war!”

Wikipedia has more on the central figures, and the rest of Lewis Morley's photos from that shoot.

Keeler is 64 now, living in London.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 9:05 AM | Permalink

March 9, 2006

Mp3s: Canned Heat, Neil Young, Beach Boys, Alpine dub; Marley's Rastafari mentor dies; Edit pictures online

Woodstock flashback: Four fine mp3s accompany this story about white blues band Canned Heat. It's at diddywah, a blog that seems to post a story and the music to go with it about once a week; the song links decay. Writing about music makes so much more sense when you can hear it. Negotiate via the archive links on the bottom right.

Thanks for the sweet link go to first blogger Jorn Barger at Robot Wisdom.

Bonus? Poking through diddywah's blogroll, I found this unlikely sound at Tuning:

Alpine Dub? I'm stayin!
Canadian expat musician the Man Cable (best to let that one go) was lurking about in Berlin , when he hit on the idea of combining traditional Alpine music with dub...

...they invite you to download their excellent second album (an EP actually) Jo-Delay , in it's entirety . Combining two of my most favorite musical things, yodelling and dub, augmented by double bass, pocket trumpet and other jazzy tunemaking objects, the band could have come across as willfully kitsch.

Instead, it sounds like Julie Andrews couldn't help but burst into a restrained yodel as German rastas play a summer wedding.

Jamaica mourns: Rastafari icon Mortimo Planno passes on. The Jamaica Observer reports on the life and death -- Sunday -- of "Brother Kumi," an early and influential Rastafarian, Bob Marley's Rasta mentor. (He wrote the lyrics that turned The Orioles' Crying In The Chapel into Selassie Is The Chapel for Marley and The Wailers.)

Planno's odd book, The Earth Most Strangest Man: The Rastafarian, is online. Publisher's notes are here. You'll see why they matter. (The site is slow, be patient.)

Pixoh, free image editing through a Web page, has launched with a basic set (crop, resize, rotate) , Flickr integration and a vote is underway for which functions to add next. (Red-eye fixing, and a set of controls for brightness, contrast, etc. are leading.

This could be useful if you're away from your tools.

Resizing, adjusting levels and optimizing photos to a blog server one by one is a tedious chore, and probably one of the reasons you see so many gray blogs. I use PhotoResize400 to resize if I don't need to crop -- you just rename that 400 in the icon's name on your desktop to the width you want, and drag a photo file to it from any Windows Explorer window. A new photo is created, named "(filename)-400.jpg."

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 3:21 AM | Permalink | Comments 1

March 7, 2006

Desert bluesman Ali Farka Toure dies

Nov. 21, 2000: Two-time Grammy award winning guitarist Ali Farka Touré smiles on the banks of the Niger River in his hometown of Niafunke, about 110 miles northeast of Mopti, Mali.

Ali Farka Touré died today, after a long illness, bone cancer. He was in his late 60s. Among his influences, John Lee Hooker. He came to prominence with his Talking Timbuktu CD, recorded with Ry Cooder.

I just ripped some clips from his 2005 Grammy winning CD for traditional world music: In The Heart Of The Moon by Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabaté, a Christmas present from my daughter. These are all 192kbps mp3 clips, around 30 seconds, but enough to give you the flavor of his work.

-- Debe
-- Ai Ga Bani
-- Hawa Dolo

Times Online: Brilliant African guitarist who won international fame and influence without ever losing touch with his roots

WHENEVER Ali Farka Touré was asked to state his profession, his preferred response was that he was a farmer. He owned and cultivated extensive lands in Mali in the semi-desert region of Niafunké, where in later years he was also the mayor. But he also happened to be arguably the finest guitarist Africa has ever produced.

A virtuoso on both the acoustic and electric instruments, he won a Grammy award in 1994 for Talking Timbuktu, his collaborative album with the American guitarist Ry Cooder, and he had just won another with Toumani Diabaté, for their In the Heart of the Moon. Touré’s intricate, fluid playing was acclaimed by such Western rock guitar legends as Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, who were often seen in the audience at his concerts....

BBC: My memories of Ali Farka Toure
Joan Baxter, Former BBC correspondent, Bamako, Mali

Thank you for your music.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments 1

March 6, 2006

Jon Stewart : Oscar clips; Free mp3s: Kleptones; Providence Geeks dinner Wednesday; Camel jockeys become issue in ports deal

Host bits: Just the Jon Stewart clips from the Oscar show. Quicktime Video 9.9MB 13:39. At One Good Move.

1:49 a.m.

Free mp3s: (Links fixed. Sorry.) Kleptones put a four-song EP -- EP1 -- online;

Sample a track from our forthcoming album-mix-type-thing,
"24 Hours", along with three bonus
b-sides. This is the first in a series of three or four EPs
that will preceed the release of the album. Each one will
be deleted to make way for the next.

2100 Uptight Jet - I Want Jah Back - Take Me In Your Broken Arms - Jeepster Riddim

Or click here
for the full EP in a zip file. All tracks VBR 192ish Kbps
MP3 - Cover

Providence Geeks to meet, greet, eat: Wednesday is the second Providence Geeks Dinner at AS220, on Empire Street, from 5:30-7 p.m. More about the monthly gathering at the Providence Geeks blog.

I kid you not: Camel jockeys become issue in ports deal.

Old fashioned politics: Retired journo Tom Matrullo -- brilliant and angry -- lays into John Kerry after receiving yet another canned appeal for money: only the dead sleep well. The comments leave this plane.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 10:03 AM | Permalink

March 5, 2006

Art Buchwald goes out his way; 19 new indie games

The Final Days of Art Buchwald: The legendary humor columnist has rejected dialysis and is eating all the junk food he wants, entertaining Kennedys and waiting to die in a Washington hospice. Turns out, his kidney function is better than doctors thought, and his final days have stretched out to six weeks now, despite a bump when vascular problems led to an amputation of his right leg below the knee.

Buchwald was to join a long line of great writers who have earned the group's Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award at the National Society of Newspaper Columnists' annual convention in Boston in June, but he's unlikely to make it so it was delivered early by current president Suzette Martinez Standring of the Milton (Mass.) Times, who writes a lovely report at Editor & Publisher (link on the headline) and at NSNC about visiting him for two days.

I'm slated to be on a blogging panel at that convention, and when I was first invited I told colleagues I was excited by the opportunity to meet Buchwald. Alas.

This blog received an award from NSNC in 2004, and I accepted it at the convention in New Orleans that year -- my first time in that city, and I'm grateful to have seen it before Katrina gutted it. Because I'm shy in crowds and schmooze badly, I covered it to give myself something to do. Here's that story, back in my handmade html blog: Writing, Rhythm & all that Jazz, June 10-13, New Orleans.

Update: The leading link of the item above went behind a pay wall at Editor & Publisher. I've changed the link to another site where it's still alive, under a different headline. As of this date, May 24, 2006, Buchwald is still alive and thinking of moving to Martha's Vineyard.

Related: Headline links to
Buchwald's columns at WaPo;

19 games to play and rate: The 2006 Independent Games Festival finalists are up, and you're invited to try them and vote for your favorites.

This list leads to their homepages, this one to downloadable demos at GameSpot (free reg. req.)

My favorite so far: Dodge that Anvil, above, a platformer with great 3D action as you help a rabbit pull carrots from a field while anvils and exploding balls rain from above. (Online link -- tends to crash -- and downloadable demo.) Here's an interview with the game's creator, Jake Grandchamp, at Gamasutra, which is profiling the finalists's creators.

IGF is compiling links to these and other interviews at GameDev.net.

Someday I'll write a serious analysis of games as meditation and stress relief, but for now I just play 'em. The family 8-year-old and I like the same games.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 2:40 PM | Permalink

March 3, 2006

Weekend! Free mp3s: Carla Bley live; New garden blog:

Free mp3s: Carla Bley, Escalator Over The Hill: Live 1997, is the ROIO of the Week [Recordings of Indeterminate Origin] at BigO, Singapore.

New garden blog: At Calendula & Concrete, Christa Carignan blogs her plot at an organic community garden in Washington, D.C.

She pulled these carrots from the garden today (March 3!), the last of the fall crop.

This week, she writes, "Yesterday, I saw the season's first daffodils. Snowdrops and crocus are bringing life and color to people's yards."

Her Zone 7 garden is south of us, of course. We grew snow overnight.

Bashful show: Shy Person's Talent Show: A wonderful idea, happening Saturday night. Too bad it's happening in Eugene, Oregon.

Forever amber: Want to see a photo of a 30-million-year-old spider?

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 6:49 PM | Permalink

Firefox extension contest winners

Extend Firefox Contest: Mozilla has announced the winners of a contest to encourage developers to write useful add-ons to the free, open-source Firefox browser.

These extensions don't offer grand new function, but some offer functions previously unavailable -- ways to preview and organize those 54 tabs you have open so you can find the one you're looking for, for instance. The developer tools obviously encourage more development, but won't matter to the average Firefox user.

First geek reactions at Slashdot.

The lovely pastel palette on my tabs above comes from the Colorful Tabs extension; Tab Mix Plus offers lots more function, including an optional X in the current tab to close only it.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments 2

March 2, 2006

Sepia snowy night

Fluffy March snow out the window tonight.

The only car that had trouble making it up the hill was a fishtailing long low SUV. No idea what sport it's supposed to be useful for. Not street slalom, for sure.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 8:24 PM | Permalink

March 1, 2006

Cat piano, houses made of trees

Enough with the words...

Unfortunately, this wasn't fun for the cats, who've been dead for hundreds of years...

Comments on that post at the Athanasius Kircher Society lead to organism, a blog entirely about making art with living systems.

(Giant cockroaches drinking from a bathtub? Or is it all about scale?)

Back at the Kircher blog -- which is touting House Trucks this week -- is an earlier pointer to a proposal reported at Discovery News to weave houses from living trees (for your descendants, I suspect).

A Tree-Dweller's Dream House
Pictures: Courtesy of Charles Spence | Pleached Huts
The habitat is based on an ancient gardening method known as pleaching, which weaves together tree branches to form living archways, lattices or screens. These huts have been created with pleaching.

Do the trees complain?

Meret Oppenheim. Object. Paris 1936. Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, cup 4 3/8" in diameter; saucer 9 3/8" in diameter; spoon 8" long, overall height 2 7/8".

Thank you Meret Oppenheim, who first showed me as a teenager that some grownups make objects like this and are taken seriously. Only much later did I learn that the surrealist was a woman.

Bonus: Athanasius Kircher, Dude of Wonders

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 7:06 PM | Permalink | Comments 2