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Main page August 31, 2006Politician wades online incognito to applaud himself, amusing some nativesFascinating. In the Rochester, Minn., Post-Bulletin, a politician is exposed as his own biggest fan. I couldn't tell where this story was going. Jim Romenesko boils it down: A reporter noticed similarities in the way that user "127179" writes and Rochester city councilman Pat Carr talks. Post-Bulletin managing editor Jay Furst warned Carr in April and July that if he continued to post self-congratulatory or intentionally misleading comments to the website, the paper might report that as news. The Post-Bulletin did that today. Here's the lead of Online praise for Pat Carr -- from Pat Carr:
Only newspaper subscribers may comment, so your login nails you here. Carr is unapologetic. The paper doesn't judge his action, beyond exposing that this ardent Carr fan is Carr -- but the story seems eager to explain why it publicly identifed a user: Carr on Monday acknowledged he wrote all of the past comments except one, which he said a friend wrote while visiting his office. Here's a pdf of Carr's comments the Post-Bulletin subsequently assembled. It includes the howler of 127179 (Carr) insinuating another commenter is a political enemy, and calling him out with, "188395: Your feelings are strong. Maybe you'd have the courage to sign your name to your attack dog missives..." Comments are published in a blue column to the right of the story, and 127179 is right in there commenting on this most recent story about him, as other unknown commenters also discuss him. Still others are concerned that something they write might suffer the same fate at the hands of a Post-Bulletin staffer, and end up named in their own newspaper story. (The editor did warn Carr, a public figure, that continuing in this vein made him "fair game for news stories.") A couple even saw an opportunity to require real names and full disclosure on all posts, which would send everybody back into their own opaque bubbles, content to be merely audience again. (As though letters to the editor aren't gamed.)
"I think, in our business, that we let actions speak louder than words," Hanson said. "Again, our words are our actions and it's unfortunate that did take place." The reaction in blog comments at Say Anything (This Guy Could Be Rochester Minnesota's Next Mayor) tend to give Carr points for interacting with his critics online at all. Posted by Sheila Lennon August 30, 2006Weird search-engine queries end up here; Microscope art; Guest book for PlutoHow Google brings readers here: I don't know how many readers get this blog as an RSS feed, but I do know that many people get here via search engines. Among the strange search terms that somehow have somebody clicking here today: Google Search: pineapple yarns 1 When somebody brags about their "traffic," you have to wonder how much of it is accidental. After that, I needed some word-free Web wonders. Tired of tech, tired of Net politics and mainstream politics, I fled to... cell biology.
Then there's Golgi Apparatus, DNA, and Microtubules of Dividing Cells at the Thomas J. Deerinck Digital Image Gallery.
Deerinck's Vitamin C is lovely, and yes, it's orange. Visual game: Fruit Fall is a bit of fun, especially since it's intuitive -- I'm better at it if I let my hand rotate the fruit without thinking about it much. Ten levels to this free demo, with more fruits that you have to get lined up with their compatriots, a la Tetris.
Pluto Posted by Sheila Lennon August 29, 2006So I tumbled into the flowerbed...Just as I stepped out onto my front steps, I had a premonition of chaos, of falling, Next thing I knew I was in the air, pirouetting. I landed on my side, my right leg bouncing off a step, and in slow motion I saw a geranium in a clay pot falling over. I grabbed for it as I kept rolling left off the step that had broken my fall, tumbling into the flowerbed a couple of feet below. Still reaching up for the falling geranium, I landed on the small of my curved back and kept moving, as though my back were the rungs of a rocking chair. (Curling to save the plant probably saved my back from landing flat -- there's not even a bruise there.) But my calf muscle has a football injury, as though I were tackled by the step. It hurts to put weight on the right side of my foot, and it's impossible to get up from a chair without arms (such as a toilet) without pain. It's RICE for me now -- Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation. I'm using a cane I found tucked away in the house's only closet when I moved in. It's a crooked crook, hand-carved by an earlier resident, but I can't quite get the rhythm of distributing my weight to this "third leg," so I wince regularly. Sitting in the dirt, the first thing I did after determining that nothing seemed broken was to repot the geranium. Posted by Sheila Lennon August 28, 2006New Yorker reviews Dylan interviews; Burning Man starts today; Hot dog-infused vodka?BOB ON BOB: Dylan talks: . by Louis Menand in the New Yorker. This is not a new interview, it's a riff of a review of “The Essential Interviews” (Wenner; $23.95). ...as an interview subject, Dylan probably ranks a few notches above Elvis, who was one of the all-time worst. The trouble with Elvis was that he had very little to say; he was mainly concerned about sounding polite. Dylan is rarely concerned about sounding polite, and he says things, but he sometimes makes them up. He also contradicts himself, answers questions with questions, rambles, gets hostile, goes laconic, and generally bewilders. What makes it truly frustrating is that, somewhere in the stream of inconsequence and obstreperousness, there are usually a few nuggets of gold. The nuggets make interviewers think that the other stuff must be a put-on, that Dylan could speak with the tongue of angels all the time if he wanted to, and this makes them press harder, hoping that the next question will break through the misdirection and resistance, and the man in front of them will turn into “Bob Dylan.” Since there is nothing Dylan likes less than being mistaken for “Bob Dylan”—“If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers,” he once said—this is not a productive interview dynamic. Or, as my husband said, more succinctly, after the Dylan concert in Pawtucket Thursday night, "I'll be your baby tonight but I won't be your Bobby tonight." Related: Modern Times, Dylan's new CD, is released tomorrow. There's a huge collection of "unusual Dylan links" at Hanan Levin's Grow-A-Brain.  Postcard announcing Burning Man 2006 (detail) Weird: The birth of weeniecello, hot dog infused vodka. With photos. Posted by Sheila Lennon August 27, 2006Pats (41-0 over D.C.) lack only Branch; The yellow jacket nest that swallowed a car; Update on Steorn (free energy folks)Originally posted 00:48 a.m.; updated with Reche Caldwell stats 11:52 a.m. They looked that good. Reche Caldwell seems to catch passes from Matt Cassel more easily than from Tom Brady, who clearly longs for Deion Branch to return, especially after those incompletes:  Data source: ESPN Play-by-play Branch may yet be the last guy, the final piece of the well-oiled machine. Hope so. Meanwhile, the Redskins' hometown press is cold: A Pointless Exhibition. Even more depressing for Redskins fans: Brunell, Offense: Three and Out / First Unit Has Yet to Score in Preseason
The Montgomery Advertiser ran an AP story (Giant nests perplex experts) that included the photo of the nest that swallowed a car in Tallassee, Ala., above. Playing around with the url of the photo, I discovered that it ended with "MaxW=300" I wondered if it were actually larger, just set to display no wider than 300 pixels, and I played with that number. Here it is, the original 800-pixel-wide photo of a yellow-jacket nest in Harry Coker's 1955 Chevy. If you use a Firefox extension such as Image Zoom , or download the image to a photo viewer, you can see it even larger. Much of it is in perfect focus. Spooky, like hard cobwebs. You can see a bit more of the car's exterior, and read more about giant nests, at this July 10 Alabama Cooperative Extension blog item (What is Causing Super-sized Yellow Jacket Nests?) : “It’s speculated --- and, again, this is only speculation --- that the very mild winter has allowed these nest to survive,” he (Dr. Charles Ray, an Extension entomologist and research fellow with Auburn University’s Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology) says. “Rather than starting spring with a single queen --- as yellow jackets traditionally do --- these nests are starting with possibly a couple of thousand workers and possibly multiple queens.” That would be an evolutionary leap. Update from the Guardian (U.K.) on Steorn, the free-energy promoters (blogged here earlier): These men think they're about to change the world
Posted by Sheila Lennon August 25, 2006Dylan in Pawtucket: Rules of the road
So that's what he looked like. Rick Massimo will be doing the review for projo, and you can get the set list soon on Expecting Rain, if you're curious. Dylan's voice was terrible doing good old songs. Phrasing was bizarre, no news there, but it got extreme enough on Buckets of Rain to sound like William Shatner doing Dylan. The voice barks, mumbles, scatters. Masters of War drew big applause. Somebody yelled, "Play Freebird." Dylan played Just Like A Woman, I'll Be Your Baby Tonight, Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall. He seemed to wake up and sing on Tangled Up in Blue, just a whiff of clear passion pushed. The encore was something like Like a Rolling Stone. This is not a complaint. We check out how it's going with Bob every now and then. Joe said, "I'll be your baby tonight, but I won't be your Bobby tonight." It was a lovely night to be outdoors in New England, cool, and I'd never been on a baseball field at night, under the bright lights that came on between acts. They lit up an all-ages crowd.: A sea of denim, khaki, solid colors. The costumes and characters are gone, and it seems funny seeing old people comfortably at rock concerts, but otherwise it could be seeing Dylan any time in the last 40 years. Except for the roolz. More about that later. The stage was in front of the outfield bleachers, between the scoreboard and the clock. We originally found a piece of grass near first base, between the infield dirt and the foul line. Portafloor covered the outfield a few feet away, and the crowd stretched so far ahead that the musicians' heads were the size of small peas. No cameras. No smoking. No beer sold after Dylan started. Lots of security. No energy. We made our way to the stands, where the sound was better. It was a full house except for some nosebleed seats on the end and an entire section on the third-base line with no sightline, thanks to a peaked tent probably covering sound equipment. We settled into the spacious ambience of the fourth row, alone in the section except for a couple dancing between the first row and the rails. A security guard came down and told them to stop dancing. They sat down. Maybe near the stage people had peak experiences, but this sedentary grandstand crowd lacked only a guy coming down the aisle with peanuts and hotdogs. Rock and roll is not meant to be a spectator sport. Posted by Sheila Lennon August 24, 2006N. Y. Times's 'river of news'; Google as everybody's free Internet, phone and TV provider?; PC Mag readers rate hardware, serviceI'm very busy with work and family -- just a few quick links: News River, wider than a mile...: : Bookmark the N.Y. Times's river of news. It's a continuous feed of just headline links, as they publish. Dave Winer wanted a feed that worked in mobile devices, so he wrote the code for this, and offered it to the Times and BBC, according to Paid Content: Winer Navigates RSS River Of News On Mobile Devices; Starts With NYT, BBC It works really well as a no-frills index to the now, as well. If you're local: Would you like to read projo.com this way? 'Basic societal change': John C. Dvorak in P.C. Magazine, on Google's installation of free wi-fi for a California town: The Google Ploy—A Revolution? Google actually has lit up Mountain View. Anyone driving through the town can pull off the road and do e-mail for free. It cost Google a million dollars to pull this stunt off, but that's chicken feed for Google—a fact we cannot overlook.... Of course access should be free. Don't lock the door to the marketplace and electronic town square. Just looking: PC Magazine's 19th Annual Service and Reliability Survey. See what tech stuff others recommend. Catch up: Video of last night's Chafee-Laffey debate is on the projo.com cover. (It's a javascript link, so I have to send you to a page with the script on it.) The last of the four debates is Saturday (that's a change -- originally it was to be tonight) at 7:30 p.m on WJAR Channel 10 . Dylan is in Pawtucket tonight, playing the PawSox's McCoy stadium. Check out the Decades of Dylan photos. Grigory Perelman declines award, as expected, turning down a million bucks: “He was very polite and cordial, and open and direct,” Dr. Ball (Sir John M. Ball, president of the International Mathematical Union, said in an interview. Background is here. Posted by Sheila Lennon August 22, 2006Free energy? Irish firm invites review of breakthrough; The art buried in books; Lieberman party? Time art critic trashes dead exLiz Donovan, retired now from the Miami Herald, blogs this: Via Eat the Press, notice that one of the highest ranking searches on Technorati is 'Steorn'. What? Turns out this Irish company claims to have discovered a free source of energy, using magnetic fields (Observer story). Futuristic illustrations of cars often envisioned magnetic highways. What's radical here is that what this company describes is a perpetual motion machine -- "...generator configurations that appeared to be over 100% efficient" -- which violates the first law of thermodynamics. From the Our Technology section of Steorn's site: "Steorn’s technology appears to violate the ‘Principle of the Conservation of Energy’, considered by many to be the most fundamental principle in our current understanding of the universe. This principle is stated simply as ‘energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form’. The tech-savvy company has a forum discussion going, where the battle rages. Art in books:  Tuba Detail Jean Coulon, Belgium This is from BibliOdyssey: Symphony of the Absurd, just one of many image collections at BiblioOdyssey, which bills itself as "Books~~Illustrations~~Science~~History~~Visual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart." I imagine the blogger spending days in a rare-book library, mining the treasures of a time when talents were developed to fill lives that lacked TV, YouTube and endless opportunites to be merely a spectator. The images on the blog's right side are a visual index of earlier posts -- a watercolor of Toltec calendar easily hobnobs with Automobile Manufacturer Catalogues, a 1922 theater poster, Ottoman Calligraphy and Fellini Caricatures. Best of all, there's a blogroll of kindred blogs. Get lost here.  Jesse M. King From A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde. The source is a StumbleUpon site by LotusGreen, a "58-year-old single woman" from Berkeley, Calif. -- less a blog than a place to collect and display such finds. Party pooper? City Asked To Un-"Democrat" Lieberman: The New Haven Independent covers the challenge to the Democratic credentials of the Senate nominee of the Connecticut for Lieberman party. Read it with the same fascination as watching a train wreck. Posted by Sheila Lennon August 21, 2006Genius found; Smart game; Pitchfork: 200 Greatest (?) Songs of the 1960sGenius: Ideas. The Times bites off and chews a big chunk of theory, but the theorist takes the cake. Here's how it starts (Elusive Proof, Elusive Prover: A New Mathematical Mystery): Grisha Perelman, where are you? You can grapple with what Perelman made of Poincaré in that story, but the foreign press actually found him: Maths genius living in poverty, in the Sydney Morning Herald: Interviewed in St Petersburg last week, Dr Perelman insisted he was unworthy of all the attention, and was uninterested in his windfall. "I do not think anything that I say can be of the slightest public interest," he said.
Shelley quote: I couldn’t continue trying to find the next great topic; the next Parable; the next Men Don’t Link, and so on. I just couldn’t do it anymore. But that's just the kernel of it. "Feeding the monster" is something every journalist understands. Deeper in, ...what really bothered me the most was that I couldn’t influence issues I thought were important: specifically visibility of women. The popular women now, she saw, write about their careers, to boost their careers. Men do too, of course. But the Web seems more calculated and less interesting than when I started blogging. (Mention Jonbenet and watch your blog traffic spike!) In acknowledging an environment whose interests don't overlap with what she values, Shelley could be Perelman's sister. Meanwhile, her latest tech book is out.
This is a marble-go-througher lunch machine: You have to fix it -- your cursor turns into a wrench when you can change something -- at 13 steps along the way to get the hamburger machine to work. I know the 9-year-old will be better at this than I am. It's an odd collection, with no links, not even brief audio clips. Okay, it's lame. The Jackson 5's "I Want You Back" came in at number two. I couldn't even remember the song. (I kept confusing it with the far more memorable Staple Singers' 1972 hit "I'll Take You There" until I saw this video of little Michael singing it on The Ed Sullivan Show in December of 1969. If you were listening to rock then, it was Joplin and Hendrix and Dylan, and you sure weren't watching Ed Sullivan. Indeed, the reviewer notes, "It hit the Hot 100 two months and a day after my birth." Posted by Sheila Lennon August 20, 2006R&B's Barbara George dies at 64; French, Dutch divorce rumbles in Belgium; News links to hometown papers on the Web
Dan Philips sings her praises and passes the mp3s at home of the groove. And he points to an appreciation -- Local R&B legend left music to be with God -- at Houma (La.) Today. (reg. req.) Ethnic strife threatens to divide ... Belgium? The political leader of Flanders, the Dutch-speaking half of Belgium, has caused outrage by saying that the 175-year-old Belgian nation was an "accident of history" with "no intrinsic value". This is confusing from the get-go: Yves Leterme, the Flemish region's premier with the French name, is on the Dutch team. Adding personal insult to political injury, he accused French speakers living in Flanders of "lacking the mental capacity to learn Dutch". He scorned the official notion that Belgium was a bilingual nation, saying: "Look at the difficulties Francophone leaders, and even the king of this country, have in speaking fluent Dutch." The Telegraph (UK) story certainly sounds like meiosis is near: The two halves of the nation read different newspapers, watch different television programmes, listen to different pop music and follow different celebrities. Outside Brussels, road signs and notices are strictly monolingual, to the point of farce. They'd call the new countries Flanders and what? Another version of this story calls it Francophone Belgium. (Agatha Christie's master detective Hercule Poirot was born in the French-speaking town of Spa, in the province of Liege which is Luik in Dutch.) News on the Web: Want to read what the hometown paper of the Arizona Cardinals says about last night's lovely 30-3 Patriots exhibition-game win? Newslink.org offers links to a world of metros, dailies, weeklies, radio and TV stations and more. Posted by Sheila Lennon August 19, 2006Saturday night art - music - football (Junior Seau?); Mp3s of second Chafee-Laffey debate Scene: The email from my daughter read, Got this as an event bulletin from a DJ friend on mySpace Alt-scene: If you're also into football, the Pats/Cardinals game starts at 8. Visit somebody/someplace with better-than-basic cable -- in Rhode Island, it's only broadcasting on the NFL Network. Then go to the art party.
San Diego fans are grumbling, but the 12-time Pro Bowler and likely Hall of Famer could be a very good move for the young Pats. Update: An emailer wants to point out that Miami cut Seau after three seasons there. This is in the links, but if you also need to see it here, here it is. Mp3s of second Chafee-Laffey debate: WPRO has posted audio -- four mp3 files -- of the second debate, on Aug. 17, between incumbent Sen. Lincoln Chafee and his challenger in the upcoming Republican primary, Cranston Mayor Stephen Laffey. (The station hosted the debate Thursday from 5 to 6 p.m. during the Dan Yorke show).
Still ahead, two more debates: • Next Wednesday, Aug. 23, sponsored jointly by The Providence Journal and TV Channel 12 (WPRI), to be aired by C-Span as well, at 8 p.m. It will also be available as live streaming video on wpri.com and projo.com. • Thursday, Aug. 24, TV Channel 10 (WJAR). Here are links to mp3s of the first debate, held Aug. 10 on WHJJ during the Arlene Violet talk show.
Posted by Sheila Lennon August 18, 2006Spiegel interview: Jimmy Carter; Fugs history; Mp3: Susie-Q; Community wireless for TibetSPIEGEL Interview with Jimmy Carter: Former President plain-speaking to the German Press. Excerpts:
...Under all of its predecessors there was a commitment to peace instead of preemptive war. Our country always had a policy of not going to war unless our own security was directly threatened and now we have a new policy of going to war on a preemptive basis. Another very serious departure from past policies is the separation of church and state, which I describe in the book. This has been a policy since the time of Thomas Jefferson and my own religious beliefs are compatible with this. The other principle that I described in the book is basic justice. We've never had an administration before that so overtly and clearly and consistently passed tax reform bills that were uniquely targeted to benefit the richest people in our country at the expense or the detriment of the working families of America. ...The fundamentalists believe they have a unique relationship with God, and that they and their ideas are God's ideas and God's premises on the particular issue. Therefore, by definition since they are speaking for God anyone who disagrees with them is inherently wrong. And the next step is: Those who disagree with them are inherently inferior, and in extreme cases -- as is the case with some fundamentalists around the world -- it makes your opponents sub-humans, so that their lives are not significant. ...Unfortunately, after Sept. 11, there was an outburst in America of intense suffering and patriotism, and the Bush administration was very shrewd and effective in painting anyone who disagreed with the policies as unpatriotic or even traitorous. For three years, I'd say, the major news media in our country were complicit in this subservience to the Bush administration out of fear that they would be accused of being disloyal. I think in the last six months or so some of the media have now begun to be critical. But it's a long time coming. via Robot Wisdom. The History of the Fugs 1964-65. via wood s lot.
Puny, aren't we? Classic mp3: Dale Hawkins, Susie-Q. Backstory at Lil Mike's Last Known Thoughts & Random Revelations. Giving new meaning to bread and circuses: Candidate draws crowd with cheap gas - Yahoo! News RADCLIFF, Ky. - A congressional candidate's offer of cheap gas drew a bipartisan crowd. At Wired: Wireless Works Wonders in Tibet. Small is possible. DHARAMSALA, India -- Across the border from Chinese-occupied Tibet, the tech infrastructure in this high mountain village is a mess. There are photos. Posted by Sheila Lennon August 17, 2006Pachelbel Canon rocks; Old Time radio; Casper the Friendly Ghost 'toon
Radio for summer nights: OTR.Network Library (The Old Time Radio Network) "... Old Time Radio (OTR) enthusiasts. We have over 11,000 OTR shows available for instant listening," Real Audio format. Orson Welles' Mercury Theater, George Burns and Gracie Allen, the Shadow, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy...
(Update: As the commenter points out, the Archive misspelled the ghost's name, and I followed suit. Fixed below.) Casper was my favorite cartoon and comic-book character. This 8-minute 'toon may show you why. (This page makes a nice starting point for some browsing through the vaults, too.) Good beat, good to dance to: My First Time With Toots and the Maytals: At The Morning News, a memory turns into an essay: Though Toots and the Maytals’ 1960s reggae standard “Pressure Drop” is perhaps one of the most popular songs of protest and discontent in existence, a song in which Toots appropriates Old Testament-style vengeance in order to stick it to the man, I thought he was singing a love song. To my ears, Toots’s voice was plaintive, sick with wanting. It was burning not with the fires of hell but with the flames of passion. The author is L.A. blogger Vivian Davis. Posted by Sheila Lennon August 15, 200611 more garden blogs join the big list
I've just added 11 blogs to the long-lived Garden Blogs List. Posted by Sheila Lennon Dell battery recall details; Daily veggie recipes; Google updates Blogger softwareDell Battery Recall site: The numbers of the affected notebook batteries, and what to do if you have one. Customers may also call a toll-free number -- 866-342-0011 -- Monday through Friday, 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern time. A Veggie Venture: A vegetable recipe a day. Here are the index and the backstory.
Jill Carroll: I'm getting a lot of Google search hits looking for the kidnapped reporter's serial. Here's the Christian Science Monitor's special multimedia section; if that's clogged, The Providence Journal is running just the story: Part 1- Part 2. (There will be 11 parts in all.) Posted by Sheila Lennon August 14, 2006RFID passports, politicking terror, new Seymour Hersh, new NFL rules and The UnphotographableSome notable thoughts on that last watershed week as we in Rhode Island enjoy this summer holiday. Americans abroad: We beep! Via Doc Searls, Craig Burton on RFID passports: What they told the foreign press: "I'd rather be talking about this than all of the other things that Congress hasn't done well," one Republican congressional aide told AFP on condition of anonymity because of possible reprisals. -- Bush seeks political gains from foiled plot - Agence France Presse via Yahoo! News (The story's author, Olivier Knox, is AFP's White House correspondent. AFP, a nonprofit corporation, is the world's third-largest, and oldest, news agency.)Sunday editorial in the Fayetteville, N.C. Observer, hometown paper for Fort Bragg and Pope Air Force Base: Politicians err if they prey on terror fears in their campaigns ...Even though the plot was apparently foiled, it threw a wave of fear over Americans and Europeans and drew a dramatic reaction. The terrorists were at least somewhat effective, even in failure. Backstory: WATCHING LEBANON: Washington’s interests in Israel’s war.
“The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. “Why oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran.”and The crisis will really start at the end of August, the diplomat added, “when the Iranians”—under a United Nations deadline to stop uranium enrichment—“will say no.” UnPhotographable:"...a catalog of exceptional mistakes. Photos never taken that weren't meant to be forgotten. Opportunities missed. Simple failures. Occasions when I wished Id taken the picture, or not forgotten the camera, or had been brave enough to click the shutter." For instance, This is a picture I did not take of a buddhist monk in full red robes, jaywalking through traffic, rocking out to his iPod at seven in the morning. and, This is a picture I did not take of a woman standing on a beach, pointing the toe of her right foot at the sand, patiently writing the opening of the Gettysburg Address with her foot, in a single line of prose, down the beach, word for word. I'm increasingly impatient with the code and mechanical gizmos needed to transfer thoughts and images from me to you. Mediating devices are also barriers. Writing was such a breakthrough to primitive humans, but now it seems pokey and crude. Writers know that that what's between the lines is what travels, encoded in the arrangement of the words, the rhythm of unconscious choice... The aim is to re-create the experience. Where is the device that simply transmits it directly from my brain to yours? NFL Rule changes for 2006: What draws penalties has changed. Posted by Sheila Lennon August 12, 2006Mp3 audio: Thursday's Chafee-Laffey debateWHJJ has posted audio -- three mp3 files -- of the August 10 debate between incumbent Sen. Lincoln Chafee and his challenger in the upcoming Republican primary, Cranston Mayor Stephen Laffey. (The station hosted the debate Thursday from 5 to 6 p.m. during the Arlene Violet talk show).
Still ahead, three more: • Thursday, Aug. 17, on the Dan Yorke Show on WPRO radio (630-AM) from 5 to 6 p.m. • Wednesday, Aug. 23, sponsored jointly by The Providence Journal and TV Channel 12 (WPRI), • Thursday, Aug. 24, TV Channel 10 (WJAR). A majority of Rhode Island voters choose to be "unaffiliated" between elections. From elections.ri.gov: What type of Primary Election does the state of Rhode Island conduct? The Rhode Island primary is Sept. 12. Posted by Sheila Lennon Bacon mayonnaise; Garlic experiment; Cuba's green revolution; Garden blog
BLT with Bacon Mayo Makes doctors angry (and 2 sandwiches) In a post about Deconstructing Garlic, blogger Dominic Armato reports the results of his scientific kitchen test comparing minced, crushed and microplaned garlic, and found mincing makes a far superior tomato sauce. Upgrade: I really like the Del's Lemonade made with Splenda that comes in cartons at the grocery store, but it's a little sweet for my taste. I dose it with key lime juice, and it gets an edge. You can use lemonade to tame a key lime martini, turning it into a less potent mixed drink. The good life in Havana: Cuba's green revolution. Originally published in the U.K. Independent, this could be news to use as gas prices drive the cost of faraway food out of reach: With no subsidies and limited resources, the Cuban regime took the decision to look inwards. Ceasing to organise its economy around the export of "tropical products" and the import of food, it decided to maximise food production. By necessity, this meant a back-to-basics approach; with no Soviet oil for tractors or fertiliser it turned to oxen, with no Soviet oil for its fertiliser and pesticide it turned to natural compost and the production of natural pesticides and beneficial insects. It is estimated that more than 200 locally based centres specialising in biopesticides annually produce 200 tons of verticillium to control whitefly, and 800 tons of beaveria sprays to control beetles. Garden blog: High-Altitude Gardening is a stylish blog from Park City, Utah. The author: "Kate is a certified master gardener who wishes she lived in zone 7 intead of zone 5." And she's never had hollyhock rust. I love the old-fashioned single-flowered hollyhocks, but they always succumb for me. I can't get to the Garden Blogs list from home, but I do want to highlight some new entries this weekend. I'll blog them first, and add them to the big list Tuesday. Under terms of the buyout program, editorial and business office workers age 50 and over with at least 20 years’ service will receive a payment equal to 2-1/2 years’ salary and “other compensation,” payable in a lump sum or other methods. Updated: Here are more details, from the Plain Dealer's business blog (light registration required): Details of the buyout offers (for employees covered by union contracts)
Phooey. AP found Pats coach Bill Belichick during the second half. Trust me: Two photos worth looking at. Posted by Sheila Lennon August 11, 2006Patriots 8 p.m., CBS -- that's all you need to know
Journal photo/Glenn Osmundson
Appropriately, the temperature is in the 60s this morning, and will be at game time, too. Terrific way to kick off a three-day weekend. Yes, we have Monday off, as Rhode Island alone officially celebrates what some still call V-J day, although its name has always been Victory Day. We'll call it whatever you want, but we fiercely cherish our extra summer holiday. Later today, I hope to add a new bunch of blogs to the Garden Blog list. Posted by Sheila Lennon August 10, 2006Photos: 100 people's 100 sq. ft. in Hong Kong; Iran 2005; Newport Jazz videosTime to give the right brain some treats...
photographs of residents in their flats in hong kong's oldest public housing estate: The photographer, Michael Wolf, was born in Munich, grew up in the U.S., and lives in Shanghai. The photo above is not typical, but it's my favorite.
Iran 2005, a photo set at Flickr. The sign above is also not typical, but... James Van Allen dies. A loving and thorough obit from his hometown paper, the Iowa City Press-Citizen, for the man whose name is synonymous with radiation belts. Posted by Sheila Lennon August 9, 2006Exit poll results; Video: Lamont, Lieberman won/lost speeches; Traffic, not 'hacking,' probably took down Lieberman site, say conservative geeks5:21 p.m. 10:48 a.m. Lieberman Concession Speech - Aug. 8, 2006 (Part2) Lieberman Campaign Manager, Sean Smith, on Website Attack In Joe Lieberman's "I lost the first half" speech last night, the strangest moment to me was when he said, "Come to my website...'when it is unhacked.' " Hacked? When you get more traffic than your server can handle, your site becomes unavailable. This used to be called "Slashdotting," since a link from the programmers' favorite website delivered so much traffic to little sites that they could exceed their bandwidth limits, or the capacity of their hosting servers, that the favored site would crash. It happened last night to popular liberal blogs (such as Firedog Lake and MyDD) and to the official results site of the Connecticut Secretary of State as people tried to get election results as they came in. At 9:58 last night, with 83 percent of the results in, famous lefty blogger Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos noted in this post, Right now, (this) site is getting hit at the rate of 2,000 users per minute. Lieberman's site, joe2006.com, was hosted at MyHostCamp.com, which could handle a modest volume of traffic, but near election day any candidate's site needs to beef up its bandwidth. Several conservative sites now have explanations by technical people wanting to correct the embarrassingly clueless leap to the conclusion the site had been hacked. At National Review Online, which earlier propagated the hacking story, there's Lieberman Site "Hack": ...While it’s possible that someone actually hacked joe2006.com, from what I’ve seen, this seems to be the least likely option. More likely, this whole episode started last night with a simple over-usage of bandwidth. In the rush to get the server back up, a temporary site using minimal bandwidth was likely uploaded — “Vote for Who You Know, Vote Joe.” I looked at the source code on this particular page, and it didn’t appear to be coded by a hacker — the code was much too fancy. (Who ever heard of a W3C-compliant hacker?) Probably, the page was put together in DreamWeaver or FrontPage. My instinct tells me FrontPage since cPanel can be setup with FrontPage Extensions. (Nevermind that a hacker would be more likely to say something obnoxious about or denigrating of Lieberman.) The Post-Chronicle published a detailed email chiding the site's handlers for letting it stay down so long (Joe Lieberman Website May Not Have Been Hacked - Report): here is what you do when that happens: a. You grab your local backup (you do have a local backup of your files (both scripts and database snapshots, right?). b. You find a host that specialized in high bandwidth hosting and you get an account going ASAP. There are plenty of ISPs that would take your money to expedite this. c. You move your files up, test that everything is working d. You redirect your DNS so that Joe2006.com points to you new server; this change doesn't take very long to propagate because you make sure that the DNS update uses a very low TTL (time to live). e. If needed, you separate your mailserver mail.joe2006.com from your webserver joe2006.com/www.joe2006.com so as to keep your mail up and going. Steps a-e can be accomplished, especially with the kind of site Joe had up and running before this incident (nothing particularly complex), in less than an hour or so by a competent sysadmin." At BBS News in N.C.. Lieberman Site Probably Not Hacked -- Website Nameservers Could Have Been Pointed to an Alternate and have been Back Up Immediately: in reality every blogger and most fifteen year-olds could have put that Joe Lieberman's Web site back up on GoDaddy or any number of other Web hosts and have it 'resolving' or showing up in your Web browser in minutes.... At this writing, http://joe2006.com/ is still down, and still blaming Ned Lamont. This was obviously not a campaign for the 21st century. A Senator who'd keep his site down and blame the outage on his opponent rather than find someone technically competent enough to bring the site back up probably shouldn't be making Internet policy anyway. Prediction: Joe Lieberman will drop out of the race in September. Bonus links: Connecticut Bob -- blogger and Lamont poll worker -- did some fine "citizen reporting" yesterday from the right places at the right time. A check from Hillary Clinton’s HILLPAC is being cut to Ned Lamont for five thousand dollars. She’s the first one to be counted on and make good on her promise to support the winner of the Connecticut primary. Posted by Sheila Lennon August 8, 2006'Jukebox Vanishing America': See a R.I. screenwriter's R.I. movie, then go to the cast party
Jukebox Vanishing America is a screenwriter's love letter to jukeboxes, and to a Providence bar with a great one. The 8-minute documentary -- written by Providence native Matthew Turner -- will officially screen Thursday night at 9 at the Cinematheque at the Columbus Theater, 270 Broadway, as part of the Rhode Island International Film Festival. You can also see it online here or -- much more fun -- earlier Thursday evening on the "set," Nick-A-Nee's bar at 75 South St. (at the corner of Chestnut, one block in from Point Street). Jukebox was filmed in one day at "Nick's" -- you'll see lots of shots of the empty bar and its memorabilia -- where it will screen at a pre-festival party from 6 to 8 p.m. Matt and producer Lance Miccio of Happy Trailers HD plan to be there.
After the screening at the festival, Nick's will host a party at 10 with live music by Dino Club, whose lead singer, former Schemer Mark Cutler, and lyricist Scott Duhamel have roles in the film.
Shots of these marvelous machines and their times alternate with comments by Terry in front of a beauty, and by Mark and Scott on the bench in front of Nick's award-winning, 10-plays-for-$1 twin jukeboxes. The bench invites you to spend some time browsing the tabbed pages of titles as you make your choices. If "browsing tabbed pages" sounds Webby, this isn't.
The age of beautiful music players serving up soundtracks for youth has splintered into a million personal mp3 playlists while, as Scott says, "Jukeboxes are a shared experience." Mark recalls how your buck can set the mood of the whole scene for 45 minutes. (Wurlitzer still makes jukeboxes, including one that can play your iPod, which could make for some room-emptying moods.) You always know what kind of joint you're in by the tunes on the jukebox.
It deserves to grow into a full-length movie. This trailer is just a taste of where this history could go: Many jukeboxes were high carnival art, everybody has a jukebox epiphany story and the soundtrack could be unforgettable. The photos at the links of Jukebox Guide and Pinball Rebel make clear how many jukeboxes have already vanished. Wikipedia has the short course. Posted by Sheila Lennon August 6, 2006Hendrix at Woodstock, a 56-minute video; 479 M.C. Escher drawings; Soldiers' videos from Iraq
Video: Hendrix at Woodstock: At Google Video, 56 minutes, 39 seconds of footage of Woodstock '69 and the entire Monday morning performance by Jimi Hendrix.
Your Guide to Soldier Videos from Iraq: Last Tuesday, Mark Glaser's MediaShift at PBS, offered links and a measured military response. Friday, Media Guardian U.K. published Don't Look Now, which leads, Last week the Pentagon ordered American servicemen in Iraq to stop posting private video clips on the internet. 'Baby, Give Me a Kiss': The man behind the 'Girls Gone Wild' soft-porn empire lets Claire Hoffman into his world, for better or worse Joe Francis, the founder of the "Girls Gone Wild" empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He's pushing himself against me, shouting: "This is what they did to me in Panama City!" She's dead serious. Glad I don't have her beat: "Claire Hoffman covers Hollywood and the adult entertainment industry for The Times." Via BoingBoing. The world is round: I was listening to CSNY's Star Spangled Banner from the Camden tapes at BigO Saturday afternoon, volume cranked up. My husband, who'd been visiting his mom, surprised me in the doorway to the den, dancing and saying, "Play it, Jimi..." Posted by Sheila Lennon August 4, 2006Here's to the late 'Cosmic Muffin'; SI: Best QBs ever; Greenland ice cap beer; WaPo's first blogger's last post
You can hear his last radio report here. The Saugus Advertiser has a long, affectionate obit: ’Born under a charitable star’. More photos. Pros' pros: Photo Gallery - Top 10 Clutch Quarterbacks of All Time at Sports Illustrated's SI.com. Yeah, Tom Brady's in there, at number four. Fossils filtered: Greenland ice cap beer launched. BBC. A brewery in Greenland is producing beer using water melted from the ice cap of the vast Arctic island. WaPo's first blogger's farewell: How the Web Was Won: Leslie Walker of The Washington Post looks back on eight years of chronicling the Web: ...As I sit to write my final column (I will be editing technology news at The Washington Post through year-end, then taking an early-retirement offer and doing personal writing while pursuing new opportunities) I have been re-reading what I wrote in the early years, when the Web still mystified most people even as it kicked off an investment stampede that ended badly in 2000. Posted by Sheila Lennon August 3, 2006CSNY '06 tour mp3s; New poll: Lamont leads Lieberman 54-41; Sportscaster Leslie Visser to NFL Hall of Fame; Solar down under; TMZ: The site that broke the Mel Gibson story11:05 a.m. 10:22 a.m. Aug. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Antiwar challenger Ned Lamont has surged to a 54 percent to 41 percent lead over U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman among likely Democratic voters in next week's Connecticut primary, a Quinnipiac University poll found. Visser blazes NFL trail to honors. Newsday:
Related: Quotes about CBS Sports' Lesley Visser. The big guys get officially mushy. How Australia got hot for solar power "Down under, they're all over alternative energy - starting with a 1,600-foot tall 'solar tower' that can power a small city." What’s a TMZ?" "Behind the story of an up-and-coming entertainment news site that broke the biggest celebrity news of the summer." ...by reporting (Mel) Gibson’s arrest and anti-Semitic ranting late last week, complete with Smoking Gun-style police reports, TMZ has for the first time affected the national (or at least dinnertime) dialogue—to say nothing of one of the most powerful Hollywood careers. X-rays reveal Archimedes secrets Invisibility without magic: invisibility may be possible. Posted by Sheila Lennon August 2, 20069/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes; Filesharing: An IP address is not a person; Dylan radio archives
A few links before I melt. The AC in the bedroom worked great, and I'm heading back there now. 9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes in Vanity Fair: How did the U.S. Air Force respond on 9/11? Could it have shot down United 93, as conspiracy theorists claim? Obtaining 30 hours of never-before-released tapes from the control room of NORAD's Northeast headquarters, the author reconstructs the chaotic military history of that day—and the Pentagon's apparent attempt to cover it up. VF.com exclusive: Hear excerpts from the September 11 NORAD tapes. Click PLAY after each transcript to listen Related: Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate. RIAA forced to drop download case ... In the recent case in California of Virgin vs. Marson, where Mrs. Marson had a claim being made against her on the basis that she owned the computer and paid for the internet through which the illegal file sharing was taking place, the RIAA has decided to discontinue the case. The assumption being made is that the use of an IP address as evidence against file sharers is not enough to prove that the person being charged committed copyright infringement. Others, as in this report, are now suggesting that the best way to defend yourself against the RIAA is to open up your WiFi network to your neighbours. Essentially, the more people who are using the internet through a shared IP address the weaker the evidence the RIAA can summon against you. For the RIAA this situation couldn’t really get much worse. Despite the pyrrhic victory of having Kazzaa legitimised earlier in the week Ray Beckerman, leading RIAA attorney, made this comment regarding the recent landmark case: "Faced with evidence that numerous other people had access to the Internet connection and/or the Bob Dylan’s “Theme Time Radio Hour” archives. Posted by Sheila Lennon August 1, 2006$10 to see John Fogerty, Willie Nelson Friday at TweeterUpdated 10:06 p.m. Today only, at LiveNation, $10 (plus $3.40 in fees) lawn seats at Tweeter Friday night for John Fogerty and Willie Nelson. Posted by Sheila Lennon |
The most outspoken member of the Rochester City Council is also an active user of the Post-Bulletin's Web site and frequently comments about local issues, politics and even other council members.
Just when this can't get any wierder, the story ends with something like a Zen 
Three years ago, a Russian mathematician by the name of Grigory Perelman, a k a Grisha, in St. Petersburg, announced that he had solved a famous and intractable mathematical problem, known as the Poincaré conjecture, about the nature of space.
Genius: Values. Right after this, I read Shelley Powers' post (
Reason to watch: Maybe 
Lost it: I just lost the rest of this blog item, a Patriots wrap.
Jukebox opens with photos from back when, then dives into Scott reminiscing about his early jukebox days. There are lovely shots of old jukeboxes, of course, and a bit of history narrated by fan and collector Terry Moran (at right), of Budweiser distributor McLaughlin & Moran, a man who's known a lot of jukeboxes.
Screenwriter Turner, who holds degrees in film from Rhode Island College and Boston University, lives in Los Angeles now and is trying to get Jukebox, his first film project, turned into a feature film. He says he's gotten encouraging phone calls from documentary great Ken Burns and Henry ("The Fonz") Winkler. (Minor update: Matt clarifies that Burns sent a letter.)
The Cosmic Muffin died. I missed this last week. The former WBCN radio astrologer, aka Darrell Martinie, died in Saugus, Mass. If it weren't for the Muffin's three-minute "weather reports," would any of us know not to make major decisions when 
my passport photo blogging since 2002 garden blogs archived headlines  Sheila Lennon is features & interactive producer of projo.com, the Web site of The Providence (R.I.) Journal Rhode Island |
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