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Main page November 30, 2006Defending news mags; GQ interviews Al Gore; Iran president blogs to Americans; Football tonight; Animals levitate; Lego-making
Save the waiting-room schools: I don't much want to wade into the crossfire of the alpha-male news-biz heavies over Jeff Jarvis's post, Whither magazines?, but I'd like to add a small voice that remembers being a girl who first got a general view of the larger world from Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest and, later, Time and Newsweek. Jeff says this: I think that general-interest magazines may well be fated to fade away. General-interest anything is probably cursed. For the truth is that interest never was as general editors and publishers thought it was, back in the mass-media age. Old media just assumed we were interested in what they told us to be interested in. But we weren’t. We’re proving that with every new choice the internet enables. I entirely understand why a middle-aged NYC media pro would say this, but... I first read Time and Newsweek in the eye doctor's waiting room from the age of 7, and the waits were long indeed. (Dad had glaucoma, and sometimes we sat for him, and sometimes for our own frequent, if unnecessary, appointments with his East Side specialist.) Later, in college, a Newsweek subscription was my one glimpse outside my closed world of classes, dating and friends. So when Jeff writes, ...even when I do still read the magazine in print, I want a relationship with the magazine — and, more important, my fellow readers — online,
I think these news-survey magazines aren't for him any more, saturated as he is with sophisticated sources. But it would be a big loss to those newly or casually involved in the world of information if the news magazines -- survey courses on recent events and culture -- were to slip into oblivion. Keep those doctor's office subscriptions coming. And those at the libraries, hair salons, and auto-body-shop waiting rooms -- general education centers, all. Thursday Night Football: Ravens vs. Bengals tonight as the work week's second night of pro football on TV launches. If you have Cox digital cable, it's on Channel 137. From NFL.com, Cincinnati head coach Marvin Lewis used to work under Baltimore head coach Brian Billick. On Thursday night, they will match wits on NFL Network (8 ET). Full Story Political blogger: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posts a message to the American people on his blog. It's in English, with the lines flush right, and not as flowery as you might expect. U.S. dismisses Ahmadinejad's open letter. UPI. GQ interviews Al Gore: Al Gore: Movie star. Sample: Do you know if President Bush has seen the movie yet? Birth of a block: No Transcendental Meditation involved: Scientists Levitate Small Animals, at Live Science. Change of address: Jorn Barger, my personal "first blogger," is back at a slightly different spot. Loony law: Only streetwalkers and the people who solicit them can be found guilty of a prostitution-related crime, under a 26-year-old law with a loophole that exempts indoor prostitution. This is not The Onion. It is The Providence Journal: Two charged at massage parlors. Posted by Sheila Lennon November 29, 2006Avant-garde YouTube; Lou Reed writes; Afghani disembowelled for teaching women; Mozart radio; Ugly animalsElevate yourself: UbuWeb becomes The YouTube of the Avant-Garde: UbuWeb has converted all of its rare and out-of-print film & video holdings to on-demand streaming formats à la YouTube, which means that you can view everything right in your browser without platform-specific software or insanely huge downloads. We offer over 300 films & videos from artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Vito Acconci, Pipilotti Rist, Jean Genet, The Cinema of Transgression, Richard Foreman, Terayama Shuji, Paul McCarthy Jack Smith, Carolee Schneeman, John Lennon and hundreds more -- of course all free of charge. (Links fixed. Thanks to Oscar Martinez for the heads-up that they were broken.) Also Jorge Luis Borges, Merce Cunningham, Man Ray and around 150 others. UbuWeb has amazing stuff -- check out the Resources link at the right of its homepage -- an mp3 of Ethel Waters singing That Da Da Strain (lyrics) , Patti Smith performing a poem, Parade.
One problem: My high-school French has faded away, but here's Dali, in French. And an interview with a cat, in French -- and the cat sounds like it has strong opinions, worth hearing. Scum: Disembowelled, then torn apart: The price of daring to teach girls, in the U.K. Independent. The gunmen came at night to drag Mohammed Halim away from his home, in front of his crying children and his wife begging for mercy. Firefox on steroids: Firefox begins as a browser but extensions turn it into an indispensable tool for whatever you want it to do. This surfer, who may have downloaded all the extensions, posts an amazing screenshot of this bulked-up browser. To celebrate Mozart’s 250th birthday SR launches a new service on the Internet: SR Mozart - a channel dedicated to the music of Mozart. Here you can listen to most of Wolfgang’s important works: symphonies, concertos, sonatas, masses, serenades and divertimenti, trios, quartets and quintets, plus a large selection of arias, duets etc from almost all of his operas. A total of nearly 400 pieces are being rotated, 24 hours a day. Click ”Lyssna nu” to listen and ”Spellistor” to view the playlist for the entire day (and future days). The "Lyssna nu" link on that SR Mozart page opens a little window and starts playing Mozart.
The photo is of a kitten: This kitten is a kohona sphynx, one of only a few cats that bear the hairless genetic trait that has only been found on Hawaii. See folks, even paradise can produce abominations. Staring us in the face: How mirrors can light up the world: Scientists say the global energy crisis can be solved by using the desert sun. The Guardian, (U.K.), The mirrors are very large and create shaded areas underneath which can be used for horticulture irrigated by desalinated water generated by the plants. The cold water that can also be produced for air conditioning means there are three benefits. "It is this triple use of the energy which really boost the overall energy efficiency of these kinds of plants up to 80% to 90%," says Dr Knies. This form of solar power is also attractive because the hot liquid can be stored in large vessels which can keep the turbines running for hours after the sun has gone down, avoiding the problems association with other forms of solar power. Without comment: The stunning size 12 model branded 'too fat' for TV competition Clueless in America: Feeding the tapeworms of desire Posted by Sheila Lennon November 28, 2006Links: 301 ways to save money; Photo, open source gift guides; Top 'censored' stories; Kids' digital library...Busy at work, busy at home, terse at blog... 301 Saving Money Posts -- Hundreds of Ideas on How to Save Money from Free Money Finance. The Photojojo Holiday Gift Guide - What to Buy and Why in 2006 Also, for the electronically gifted, Make magazine's The Open source gift guide - Open source hardware, software and more for the holidays Its companion 'zine, Craft, has softer holiday projects. Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007. Underreported, anyway. International Children’s Digital Library. Traffic Control Game. Your chance to rule the red lights. Otis Redding – Merry Christmas, Baby -- mp3 at Christmas A Go Go! Posted by Sheila Lennon November 26, 2006Tryptophan weekend: Eat, sleep, surf, eat; More Christmas mp3s; Reinstate Saddam?We are all fat and lolling over here, wallowing in a weekend of sloth and sleep, turkey and pecan pie. Music alternates with the drone of TV football. We suspect we're not alone. More 'Santa's Boots' mp3s: As I promised in part one on Friday, more tunes for your holiday mix CD. BigO Singapore, the gifts keep coming: 5. I’ll Be Home For Christmas - Dave Alvin & Rick Solem 6. Jingle Bell Rock - Bruce Springsteen 7. Go Tell It on the Mountain - Christmas Heritage Band 8. River - Joni Mitchell
The Louvin Brothers :: It's Christmas Time "I'm Gonna Tell Santa Claus On You" is a natural -- she's done him wrong, and he's gonna get back at her. Charlie Pride's voice triumphs over ordinary songs. At The Late Greats, the "Duke of Straw" posts A Treasure-trove Of Xmas Music: 92 megs, 22 songs, zipped. (This means all 22 songs are in one downloadable .zip file that will unfurl into 22 mp3s when you "unzip" it. If you don't have a program to do that, Cam UnZip is free and easy. Click on the zip file, browse to the directory you want them to land in or type in one that doesn't exist yet, click "Extract." Done. It creates the new folder automatically.) 1 ~ Ed Harcourt: In The Bleak Midwinter He also points to a live performance, A Christmas Concert from 'World Cafe', at NPR's archive of Holiday Music concerts.
A Christmas Yuleblog offers Candy Clarinet, an out-of-print Pete Fountain album, with his incomparable horn and an unfortunately insipid chorus. The link goes to Rapidshare, where you may download it for free after a 45-second wait designed to get you to pay for the fast lane. If you want another, there's a 30-meg per hour limit for free downloaders. Another Rapidshare download: Billy Vaughn, Christmas Carols, from The Tuna Melt: ...The album is a collection of instrumental music. And Great Instrumental Music, too. Hard to believe that the guy who is, these days, most famous for playing a 'Rock 'n' Roll' hit called "Raunchy" could make such a Raunch-Free Christmas Album, but here it is! Think Mantovani: Byootiful background music, not a rock riff to be found. Upside: No Burl Ives either. On the fridge: Shelley Powers: Just Shelley: What? No transparent magnets? I, too, have the same mysterious yellow spill down the front of my vegetable bin. Commenters riff on gossip that Madonna has a glass kitchen. Turkey notes for next year: My oven was out of whack, too hot, so I inadvertently invented a turkey cooking method that produced "the best turkey ever." The turkey was 21 1/4 pounds, from a local farm, rubbed with a mixture of canola oil, garlic powder and a little paprika. My range is gas -- a Glenwood from the '40s or early '50s, that came with the house. It's wide -- oven on one side, broiler on the other -- with four burners separated by a central workspace. It's shabby, but I can't afford a replacement stove this solid. But something was wrong. The oven sizzled and crackled like jazz. After a half-hour, the aroma and noise were intense. I peeked, and found a beautifully browned bird. I added a ladleful of stock to the pan (not over the bird) and covered the turkey loosely with a large sheet of heavy-duty foil. I turned the thermostat down to 325. Snap, crackle, pop. Fifteen minutes later, down to 300. Things quieted down in the oven, finally. I added more stock every hour, and 5 1/2 hours hours later, it was perfect. Hubris: Behind the pack in AFC, Pats have more to fear. Chicago Sun-Times. I get nervous when everybody picks the Patriots. If you break it, you fix it: Liberal hawk and New Republic editor Jonathan Chait in the L.A. Times today utters the unspeakable: Bring back Saddam Hussein. Posted by Sheila Lennon November 25, 2006Worst gift ever: The Transparent RefrigeratorWorst idea ever: Invisible Japanese Refrigerator, from Japan's National Electronics. Name it accurately, and people will run away screaming. Invisible? This is a TRANSPARENT Refrigerator. At our house, this fridge would be decadent art after two days, a DaDa poem, a mother-and-daughter photo blotting out the tops of limp carrots set against cranberry sauce in muted Tupperware, overlaid by fingerprints that help soften the hard edges of that mysterious yellow spill, melting down the front of the vegetable bin. If it were Invisible, we wouldn't mind -- it's impossible to clean behind all that magnetic poetry, photos, postcards and dangling phone numbers, all anchored by hard and soft magnets. Some obviously arrived via Christmas stocking. Others advertise nearby restaurants that hope, on those days the fridge is empty, we'll spy their number as we sadly close its door. They wouldn't be bad floating in a thin curtain in space, if the fridge were invisible. These people are crazy. They probably buy food by what colors look best in their fridge. They've been sniffing way too much Windex. (You will, too, if you get this thing). Here it is, spotless, unadorned, and well-stocked, especially with beer:
How much of your life would you want to spend maintaining this facade? p.s. There's a transparent clothes dryer, too, which our cats might like. Posted by Sheila Lennon November 24, 2006'Santa's Boots' and more for your alt--holiday mix CDToo much Bing? Today is a great day to make a mix CD of new holiday tunes and alt-versions of the Christmas music of your childhood. It's a gift your friends and selected relatives will appreciate, it's Buy Nothing Day, and it'll ease your own tired ears. BigO 'zine of Singapore has already made such a CD, and is posting the mp3s a few at a time. Santa's Boots is the page link. You can get the first four today. Here's how the BigO blog Talkin’ About My Revolutions describes them: In keeping with the holiday season, here are some songs for you to enjoy. Note that Santa's Boots is not new, so the links to right to other mp3 CDs are old, and their download period is over. The latest ROIO of the Week is Spontaneous Music Ensemble, and the links on the right of that page do work. I expect to be adding to this post this weekend as I cruise the mp3 blogs for my own CD. If you spot holiday tunes worth adding, please post the details and links at the comments link below. More: Les Brown And His Band Of Renown - I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm (Psapp's Lady Remix) More #2: From Randy's Rodeo, A Christmas Gift For You "For a brief time, I'm offering free MP3's of a five treasures from my voluminous collection - songs I love and that I'm confident you can't find easily at any store." They are, Marshall Crenshaw, "Sock It To Me Santa" (1997) Posted by Sheila Lennon November 23, 2006Happy Thanksgiving from Arlo Guthrie: Video of 'Alice's Restaurant' live, 2005 (18:33)
YouTube - Arlo Guthrie/Alice's Restaurant (18:33) Provided by jguth3 In 1991 Arlo bought the church in Great Barrington, Mass., that had been Alice Brock's restaurant, and turned it into The Guthrie Center, "an Interfaith Church." Wikipedia on Arlo. Happy Thanksgiving. Thanks for coming by. Posted by Sheila Lennon November 22, 2006Dinner-table conversation: JFK, cat talk, polygamous wife, lefty joy, P2P, Donut Robot of Love
Nov. 22, 1963: Lyndon Baines Johnson takes the presidential oath of office on November 22 as Air Force One carries his wife, Lady Bird, Jacqueline Kennedy -- still in her blood-spattered pink suit -- and several White House aides back to Washington from Dallas after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Life Magazine: 100 Pictures that changed the world at Digital Journalist. The Kennedy Assassination - 40 Years Later (NYT, 1963 special)
Adult cats, living apart from humans, have very clear communication with one another. It is spoken mostly through scent, then through facial expression, complex body language, and touch. Ready, set, shop: Bargainist -- Deals, coupons, tips, freebies. Why? The life of a 'sisterwife': 'We don't get very much actual sex': Guardian (U.K.), Maggi, who belongs to a Mississippi-based group of practising polygamists, wrote this account in an internet chatroom of her life as a "sisterwife" in one of the more extreme polygamist groups P2P primer: How BitTorrent Works at How Stuff Works. When somebody asks what this "file-sharing stuff is all about..."
Here is my Belshaw Donut Robot 42. My robot came configured to make 384 donuts per hour automatically. I bought it on eBay for $900, which I thought was a good deal as this particular Donut Robot normally sells for a few hundred dollars more. For losers: The end of lost keys? BBC. A new electronic gadget called the Loc8tor uses radio waves and multiple aerials, plus some fancy software, to locate postage stamp sized transmitters which can be attached to almost anything, within a range of up to 600 feet. The ways we'll be: Brilliant Minds Forecast the Next 50 Years at New Scientist. Tomorrow's another day: Gratitude Not Dead After All This just in: Feelings of genuine thanks return to U.S., unpack bags, 'might stay awhile' Mark Morford at sfgate lets out a whooping joy cry from the left: Now, thanks is back, has some heat and juice and even a sly and knowing smile. Thanks might even forgive us our trespasses as we forgive the BushCo that trespassed against us. Thanks was shocked as all hell by this last midterm election and said, Wow, you're serious about getting your s-- together? OK, let's give it another shot, but don't mess with me this time, all right? Infiltration: Doc Searls' Cluetrain is the top of this Miami Herald holiday business book gift list. It's alive: Middle East map game: Reader Gina Minks sends this link from Rethinking Schools. There are an awful lot of little countries there. This isn't easy. Truth to power: Former president Bush battles Arab critics of his son: Former president George H.W. Bush during a speech to a leadership conference in Abu Dhabi: "We do not respect your son. We do not respect what he's doing all over the world," a woman audience member bluntly told Bush after his keynote speech. Gift lists Fimoculous 2006 list of lists: Includes Best Books, 50 Coldest People in Hollywood, The Best And Brightest, Greenest Cars, many more, and bound to be growing as the year nears its end.
Indexing, not theft: The YouTube Effect: CBS Gets Massive Boost at Mashable: Analysts have long been saying that YouTube is a gift for the TV networks: now we have the stats to prove it. CBS announced today that viewers are flocking to their TV shows after seeing the clips on YouTube. “Letterman” has gained 5 percent (or 200,000 new viewers), while “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” is up 7 percent (or 100,000 viewers) since the CBS YouTube channel debuted a month ago. They’ve uploaded 300 clips so far, which have averaged 857,000 views per day in total - that’s 29.2 million views on YouTube this month. ... If RIAA had treated music the same way, instead of suing file-sharers, the music industry might have enjoyed a similar boom. Historical eats: Thanksgiving Dinner, Civil War Style: Last Thanksgiving, it snowed. Posted by Sheila Lennon November 21, 2006Thankspanicking
Saturday Evening Post, Nov. 29, 1947 Thanks angst? Ever been at a Thanksgiving dinner where the tension of getting the perfect meal on the table resulted in hurt feelings and a meal eaten in sullen silence? I thought so. Michele Martinez at Lipstick Chronicles started panicking a week ago. I think what's unnerving me is simply this -- I'm getting old. Would a page of memories of Thanksgiving "disasters" help? (Lesson: Keep pets outside, remove the giblets bag, frozen may stay that way.) New rule: The aim is a fun feast with family and friends. The perfect meal is the one we end up with. If we burn the green beans, forget the rolls or drop the milk, it's okay. "Oops" will do.
Ah! on Thanksgiving day, when from East and from West, -- John Greenleaf Whittier, from The Pumpkin More Thanksgiving Post covers. The Anti-Black Friday: Buy Nothing Day: "Every November, for 24 hours, we remember that no one was born to shop, we make a small choice to participate by not participating...." The group's TV Spots for 2006 Global streaming TV stations: WWITV: World Wide Internet TeleVision. The portal page boasts 1,786 online TV stations listed. I caught a music video in Benin, and a bit of the news in Senegal, in French. More NFL: Thursday night and some Saturday night games are kicking in now. If you have Cox digital cable, they're all on Channel 137 at 8 p.m.
Posted by Sheila Lennon November 20, 2006Seymour Hersh on Iran; Gore film online; 'Fix' your PC; BBC links here, an expat reacts
According to the Daily Telegraph, they had their choice of colors: World leaders ill at ease over tunics and North Korea. The Daily Mail sees Harry Potters: Bush and Putin's thoroughly 'wizard' outfits. Links worth clicking:
It begins, "The most important--and unfortunately the least debated--issue in politics today is our society's steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. ..." Lifehacker's Thanksgiving PC Rescue Kit is a companion piece to last year's How to fix Mom and Dad's computer. If you're even half a geek, it's likely someone will ask you to "fix" a computer this holiday. Here's how. Animator vs. Animation II: Wonderful cartoon for anyone who's ever sworn at Windows. Can't make this up: The BBC extracted one sentence -- the very last -- from my long coverage of the debut of Al Jazeera English TV. The sentence, in a story headlined African bloggers' verdict on al-Jazeera is, It was hot cheeks for Sheila Lenon in Rhode Island in the United States. Hundreds of BBC readers have followed this link to the front door of this blog -- where, this weekend, they got a primer on cooking an American Thanksgiving dinner. Some perhaps thought it odd, as I did, that BBC would misspell "Lennon" and include me among African bloggers. And one reader -- an American teaching in the Sultanate of Oman -- decided to email this ignorant but apparently humble American. An exchange followed, and I blog it here, jumping it because it's long. It's apparent from his answers what my questions are, so I'll skip my part of this email interview. His replies are interesting, offering a glimpse into life in a country many Americans have never heard of, and I hope you'll click on the extended entry link. And, if you're not up on the geography of the Middle East, here's a map to help you find Oman.
Dear Ms. Lennon: I suppressed an impulse to retort that I'm not hayseed and have seen TV in other parts of the world, and instead sent a polite inquiry about how he came to live in Oman. His tone changed. Hi, Okay, the background... which is, I suppose, a trifle odd considering my origins. First off, I was born and raised on a ranch (!) in western South Dakota, where I lived until I went off to university at 18. Started at a small state school in Aberdeen, SD, majoring in German, which led on to a couple years at the University of Salzburg (Austria). After returning to the SD, I didn't quite last a year in that stultifyingly anti-intellectual environment, and ran off to Europe again, but wound up in Iran teaching English due to a chance meeting with an Iranian Jew in Iceland (Back then, Icelandic Airlines was the cheapest way of getting across the pond.). I was in Iran off and on from late 1969 until 1972, with bouts of on-the-cheap, Hippie-style, overland travel sandwiched in there. Made it all the way to Singapore overland, actually, except for a flight from Calcutta to Bangkok because Myan Mar (then Burma) didn't allow travelers to cross their frontiers overland. Also spent considerable time in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, too, of course, not to mention an overland return to Austria by train from Tehran via Yerevan, Moscow, Minsk, Warsaw, and Prague. Parenthetically, here, I should add that the Iran-America Society, a USIS-funded language institute, for which I taught, was structured in such a way that one could teach for two or three months, take off for six-eight weeks, return, and resume the job. Anyway, I returned to the US in '73, went back to university, and received a BA in German Lit from the University of Minnesota, later to be followed by an MATESL from St. Michael's College in Winooski, VT. Finished that in '81 and in September '82 I found myself in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia teaching at King Saud University, where I stayed for 6 years. In '88 I got the job here at SQU, where my wife and I have lived ever since. During those years, we've traveled extensively throughout Europe, Asia, Australia, and, more recently, in Southern Africa. We're both pretty well addicted to travel. Among the more ambitious trips we've made were a 6 1/2 month overland odyssey from Mexico City to Buenos Aires; a 6 week overland trip around northern Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia; extensive driving/camping trips throughout western and "new" (read: eastern) Europe. During one of those runs, we camped beside an East German family in Hungary; we were the first Americans they had ever seen, let alone, met -- July 1986, I should add. Well, we stayed in touch, and in July '89, they arranged a visitor's visa for me for the German Democratic Republic. I flew to Nuremberg, picked up the visa from one of their relatives there, and drove north into the GDR. Little did I know then, in July 1989, that the Wall would come crashing down a mere four months later. In retrospect, that was one of the most fortuitous trips I've ever made because it deepened my understanding of Germany and the Germans in a way that would not otherwise have been possible. I expect I've nattered on long enough! I hope this little narrative has been at least interesting, if not helpful. Cheers!
My wife is here with me. And yes, we do get back to the U.S., once, occasionally twice, a year. As for missing it, well, for me it's sort of yes and no. I miss the scenery in the west and New England. I miss certain people. Can't say as there's much food other than cheap bacon and pork (it's available here, unlike in Saudi or Kuwait, but it's gold-plated, a 200 gram package going for about US$4 a pop). The only time I really wish I were there is during the holidays, but that's not usually possible because final testing for the first semester inevitably falls just after Christmas. As for missing the "freedom" or the "life style," that falls flat for me. Ironically enough, I feel freer here than I do over there, possibly because, as a foreigner, I'm automatically viewed as being beyond the Pale, so it doesn't really matter what one does, so one can be as free to be as eccentric as one wishes. I discovered that years ago in Iran... Basically, here in the Gulf, as long as you don't involve yourself in local politics or try proselytizing, you're fine.
One of the remarkable things about Omanis is their extraordinary tolerance, due in large measure, I suppose, to their long trading -- and even colonial -- history. For centuries Omanis had trade relations with virtually everyone around the Indian Ocean Basin, from Indonesia, Singapore, China, and Malaya in the east to the coastal areas of Africa from Ethiopia all the way to Mozambique. Indeed, they controlled most of what is now the Kenyan and Tanzanian coasts throughout much of the 18th and 19th centuries. with the result that even today many Omanis still speak Ki-swahili as a first language. The coastal East African Arab, the sort one meets in places like Mombasa, Dar-es-Salaam, and Zanzibar is more likely of Omani origin than anything else. In any event, these people quite happily allow churches, gundhwaras, and Hindu temples to be built, something you'd never ever find in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. They're even quite thin on the ground in the Emirates which has the reputation of being the most liberal country in the region. In all the years I've been here, I've never once been encouraged to become Muslim, which used to happen with some frequency in Riyadh. Oman is, at the end of the day, quite a remarkable place. By the way, take a look at this link: members.tripod.com/vvwilliams where I have a fair number of photographs posted. It'll give you some sense of what's here. Talk to ya later! Hi, I've never, ever experienced anything remotely anti-American anywhere in the Middle East or in the Muslim world in general. Now, granted, I haven't been in countries like Pakistan or Jordan or the Palestine (i.e ., the West Bank) since the 9/11 and this preposterously named "War on Terror", but I wouldn't be afraid to go to any of them. I've most certainly never had any trouble here, but then I don't run around being blatantly and bombastically American, either. Even in Europe, I'm rarely recognized immediately as one -- except for when I'm in the UK or Ireland, in which case the accent gives me away instantly, of course. As for being all of 130 miles away from Iran, it doesn't bother us a bit. And if it weren't for the difficulty US passport holders have getting visas for the country, it would be my destination of choice because I love the food, the people, and still speak more Farsi than I do Arabic. I know numerous westerners who have been there in recent years, and everyone, to a man, comes back raring to return. And that includes a couple of Americans, too, who managed to wangle visas. As for teaching, it's English. Incoming freshman students who need to be prepared to function in an academic environment that is mostly English-medium. Education and Islamic Sciences are the only two areas where lectures are held in Arabic, so for the lion's share of SQU students, English is an essential. Imagine if a US student had to walk into a (let's say) Spanish-speaking classroom.... quite a daunting task, especially when one considers how much different Arabic is from English. At least in Spanish, an English-speaker has lots of hooks to hang things on. That's not the case for Arabs! BTW, here's the SQU link if you want to take a look: www.squ.edu.om Olberman? Oh yes.. we get him, albeit recorded with a time delay of several hours. Same with the Sunday talk shows. Also get Fox, though I can rarely stomach more than 30 seconds of those Kool-Aid drinking lunatics. Talk to ya later! Posted by Sheila Lennon November 17, 2006Thanksgiving recipes plus tips for beginnersThanksgiving for dummies: You can do it. From the Greeley, Colo. Tribune. The basics: Cook, meet turkey. Even more basic, from my own experience: -- To streamline all this, buy a bagged stuffing, and milk, a pound of butter and lots of chicken stock. Buy a can of turkey gravy to fortify your own. Have some flour around. People care most about the turkey, the gravy, the (canned is okay) cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and dessert. Sweet potatoes, yams, squash, carrots, green beans, turnip, boiled onions, peas, beets, brussels sprouts, chestnuts and rolls or biscuits are cook's choice.
Food blogs: Food blog search engine at Simply Recipes, whose Thanksgiving page links both blogger Elise Bauer's recipes and those from quite a few other food blogs. 11 classic stuffing recipes for Thanksgiving at Slashfood A Collection of Thanksgiving Vegetables at Veggie Venture. Unadorned recipe links are below, culled from what we used to call "the wires" but now refer to as "news sites' Thanksgiving food sections." These look solid, use natural ingredients and don't require dozens of them, or all your time. I don't do sauerkraut at Thanksgiving. If you do, you're on your own. The recipes: All-purpose gravy. No drippings required. Vegan Bread And Celery Stuffing Goat Cheese and Apple Triangles Portobello Mushrooms with Zucchini and Goat Cheese Crumbles Root Vegetable Puree. Potatoes, turnips, carrots. Brussels Sprouts With Lemon-Mustard Butter Green bean casserole. If you must. Yes, the kind with canned fried onions. Herb-Roasted Vegetable Mélange Roasted beets with walnuts, grapes, rosemary and bleu cheese Maple Mashed Sweet Potatoes (Kosher) Whipped Sweet Potatoes with Pears Sweet Potato Casserole. Yes, with little marshmallows. Honey Pumpkin-Date Pie With Golden Marshmallow Topping Posted by Sheila Lennon November 16, 2006Trade deficit and the $; Siberian bears still awake; When Dylan played Plymouth; Congress to tackle phone spam?
Opinion: The pain of a weak US dollar: Tough talk in Asia Times from Axel Merk, "the portfolio manager of the Merk Hard Currency Fund, a no-load mutual fund that invests in a basket of hard currencies from countries with strong monetary policies assembled to protect against the depreciation of the US dollar relative to other currencies." Given that context, here's some of what he says. If you have a perspective on this, please add it in comments. I'm out of my expertise here, but this seems like something the voters very much want Congress to address. The United States' massive trade deficit exerts pressure on the US dollar as currency is shoveled abroad in return for goods and services. As the US economy is slowing down and possibly sliding into recession, the rate at which the trade deficit grows may also be slowing; in September, this deficit was "only" US$64.3 billion - still near record territory but not as bad as economists had predicted.
Insomniac bears are roaming the forests of southwestern Siberia, scaring local people, as the weather stays too warm for the animals to fall into their usual winter slumber... This is ominous, but it's awfully nice that the temperatures are still in the 60s in mid-November in New England, and we haven't had a hard frost in my yard yet. The birds are still around, and winter, when it comes, will already be shorter. And the heat hasn't come on much at all. To see the rest of the bear, click on the photo. It comes from a Kemerovo site with photos we think are of the region -- hard to tell, don't speak Russian. Good news for the phone-spammed: Dems to put Congress to work. Chicago Sun-Times: With their new power, Democratic leaders want to craft a constitutional way to stop voters from being flooded with robo-calls peddling deceptive information. They are floating the notion that authorizing calls with fraudulent content should be a crime. "These robo-calls, somehow, constitutionally, we are going to have to find some way to stop this," Reid said. Yes!
His editor found my link through a Google alert, and Lane was interested, since he had been to a Rolling Thunder concert elsewhere. He took the thread and ran with it. TANGLED UP IN PLYMOUTH - Still freewheelin’: Dylan masterpiece resurfaces finds somebody who went (tickets were $7.50). Amazingly, The shows still stand as the most significant musical event in the town’s history. They also marked a notable moment in rock history as well: Dylan launched his famous Rolling Thunder Revue tour from there. Kudos to Lane for finding a local story in an obscure bit of the Web flung up by a blogger. It's supposed to work this way. Free at last: Conservative/Libertarian columnist John Tierney is leaving the elite Times Select crowd, but unless you subscribe, you wouldn't know it. Whatever they (Congress) do the next two years, I won’t be here to kick them around. This is my last column on the Op-Ed page. I’ve enjoyed the past couple of years in Washington, but one election cycle is enough. I’m returning full time to the subject and the city closest to my heart: science and New York. I’ll be writing a column and a blog for the Science Times section. Head spinners: Here's pointage to two of the most unusual blogs around, for those nights when the rational brain cells are used up and parched, and a shot of strangeness feels right. Rigorous Intuition is the larger site for Canadian Jeff Wells' alt-reality blog. Its subhed is, "What You Don't Know Can't Hurt Them," and They are the nefarious dudes who run the world. Did fellow Bonesman Kerry deliberately raise a distraction for Bush before the election? This and more there. Tom Matrullo's IMproPRieTies: "A new commonplaces, fair and balanced watchdog of the zou gou" is a horse of a different color. Um, try this: A stylus - child picks it up, discovers it can represent what until then has been mute, offstage. Soon the impedimenta of everyday life are all around it: mother, tree, rock, puppet, graduate student french exam, history of bees, Bush's cabinet, my catty friend, the introduction to Oblomov, clouds, viable alternatives to global warming, the question of Palestine, the entelechy of irony, a most lively comic talent, what I saw on Youtube, the reason we beat the Persians, 40 centimes, Blessed Event, pissing from Mexican balconies, Clem, giant windmills, teeth set in the skull, spiders, Berubeanism, cojones, my USian friend, the bowling ball... Posted by Sheila Lennon November 15, 2006Watching Al Jazeera English TV, streaming live on the WebI got some screenshots by turning off video optimization, but they're of lower quality than the optimized view.
Al Jazeera English TV launched today, based in Doha, Qatar, and I'm watching it, streaming very smoothly, after clicking "TV NEWS NOW," the top link on the left at that link. (This pulls up a "choose your video" offering a free trial using Real Player, and a subscription link to Jump TV.) So far, it's like watching a CNN with a dizzying whirl of serious foreign-affairs stories: Local reports from Baghdad about yesterday's mass kidnapping, with "Iraqis pointing the finger at militias," Palestinians in Gaza, a rocket hitting Israel, suffering in Darfur, election results from Congo, reactions in Tehran to an Iranian insistence on its right to nuclear technology, Bush heading to Singapore and Indonesia, a tsunami in northern Japan, the arrest of a coup plotter in the Phillipines, a transport protest in Bangladesh, a new law changing the way rape is prosecuted in Pakistan, climate change warnings for Africa, Switzerland and France checking airports for stolen passports, icebergs the size of houses off New England. An interview with the U.N. envoy for peace in the Middle East is next. Many of the presenters are British, including the blonde weather reporter, and all speak excellent English. A commercial for the 15th Asian Games is like a movie trailer for Arabian Nights. A promo for a special about a kidnapped journalist has a clip of him saying, "They wanted me to say Al Jazeera was funded by Al Qaeda." A business report graphic offers stock quotes from the DOW, NASDAQ, FTSE and Nikkei, and today's exchange rates. Cricket and soccer dominates the sports report, but there's a brief spot on . The weather: Hot and sunny, heavy downpours in southern Iran. No sign yet of staffers Sir David Frost, formerly of BBC (but there was a promo for his show), former ABC News Nightline reporter Dave Marash or Josh Rushing, former U.S. marine seen in The Control Room documentary, the channel's military-affairs analyst. I'm sure some will monitor this closely for propaganda and bias, but this brief glimpse -- I've been watching for not quite an hour -- has exposed me to a lot of straight news reporting from countries we don't see covered here. Not a celebrity puff piece in sight, either. I'll come back with background links later, but I thought you might want to take a peek before this pipe gets clogged. The announced URL, http://aljazeera.net/english, is redirecting to http://english.aljazeera.net/News. Update -- The promised links: WaPo, with an embedded YouTube clip. Will You Watch Al Jazeera English? Readers answer in comments. Marash promises Al Jazeera English won't be al-Jazeera Not in the U.S. (yet?) either. Americans should also be able to see what 80 million viewers in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East can see. I hope it's made available on Cox. It can hardly be more propaganda-laden than Fox News, which we have survived and seen through, thanks to having alternatives. I came away from Al Jazeera English's broadcast embarrassed at my ignorance of the news of the rest of the world. Here are the reported icebergs off New Zealand. Posted by Sheila Lennon November 14, 2006Links: Exiled Chinese poet; Lincoln Chafee: NYT op-ed; Toledo Blade: Coingate verdict; 'Paint' like Jackson PollockLooking for the Web 3.0 post? Here's the link.
Journal photos / Bob Thayer Huang Xiang stories: The right to write: City gives safe harbor to exiled Chinese poet and his work, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Nov. 16, 2004 Notes from a Chinese poet's Pittsburgh dream nest, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Oct. 23, 2005 City of Asylum Pittsburgh "provides temporary sanctuary to creative writers under immediate threat of extreme persecution or death in their home countries," including Huang. It is one of five U.S. cities -- the others are Las Vegas, Ithaca, N.Y., Santa Fe, N.M. and, recently, Iowa City, Ia. -- in The North American Network of Cities of Asylum, founded by Russell Banks, Wole Soyinka and Salman Rushdie and other authors.
...Back in December 2000, after one of the closest elections in our nation’s history, Vice President-elect Dick Cheney was the guest at a weekly lunch meeting of a small group of centrist Republicans. Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and I were honored to have the opportunity to visit with him on the eve of a session of Congress in which, because of Republican defeats, the Senate would be evenly divided at 50-50. Noe verdict: Noe guilty of 29 felony counts; convictions include racketeering, theft, forgery. The Toledo Blade broke the story. Here's their report on the verdict:
Tom Noe, the once high-flying Republican financier who went from college dropout to millionaire coin dealer, was found guilty today of stealing money from the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation and using the cash to erase debts and buy and furnish million-dollar homes. Background: If Dilbert worked in news...: From John Robinson, editor of the Greensboro (N.C.) News-Record. The Editor's Log: How the newsroom works. Funny and true graphics compare management's view of news production with the staff's. The Web jobs in the newsroom are different -- always on deadline, but the "presses roll" whenever when we finish making the page and put it up, so nobody's scowling about overtime for the delivery truck drivers.
Splatterware: "Paint" like Jackson Pollock. An online toy. Posted by Sheila Lennon November 13, 2006Updated: Web 3.0? 'Macaca' speaks; Transparent butterflyI've updated this with some feedback from other bloggers furthering the idea. Scroll down to "Update" if you read this yesterday, "Updated again" if you read it today.
Astronaut Bowman as he appears in the "eye" of the renegade computer HAL 9000, in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The "Semantic Web" does not mean machines that think. Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense: John Markoff of the Times tries to explain the next-gen Semantic Web, on which he plants the moniker Web 3.0. (Web 2.0 is mashups like my R.I. Beaches map, but futurists foresee many possible Web 3.0s.) From the story, Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.
...the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.” The original question would seem to yield thousands of results -- every decent Southern U.S., Central American and Caribbean hotel. You could go to Orbitz now and click on Beach in the Explore section and pick a place. "Cheapest fares" comes from simply churning the data. Trip reports filed by humans who've been there are still the best way to pick a vacation spot. While "spotless" may be findable by this software, you might not think to specify that you like swim-up bars or really dislike phony culture shows. But if you read someone raving about local bands playing every night across the street from a Jamaican resort, or discover that your favorite band is playing the resort circuit in Playa del Carmen that week, that intangible may make your decision for you. It's hard to quantify, anticipate and code for. The Semantic Web is different from this "collaborative filtering" -- the wisdom of the crowd, or at least those generous enough to contribute to the lore. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web and pathfinder on this project, was co-author of a 2001 Scientific American article, The Semantic Web, that begins easy and goes as deep as you can hang in. It starts with a fictional scenario of a brother and sister planning their mother's medical treatment, with computer agents automatically sifting appointment times and covered providers to suggest a plan. Brother doesn't like the traffic between him and the chosen hospital, so he sets stricter location limits and has the computer redo the plan. Then, the explanation: The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users. Such an agent coming to the clinic's Web page will know not just that the page has keywords such as "treatment, medicine, physical, therapy" (as might be encoded today) but also that Dr. Hartman works at this clinic on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and that the script takes a date range in yyyy-mm-dd format and returns appointment times. And it will "know" all this without needing artificial intelligence on the scale of 2001's Hal or Star Wars's C-3PO. Instead these semantics were encoded into the Web page when the clinic's office manager (who never took Comp Sci 101) massaged it into shape using off-the-shelf software for writing Semantic Web pages along with resources listed on the Physical Therapy Association's site. Real world: When restaurants are online in realtime (yet to happen), my computer could display Providence restaurants serving cordon bleu tonight at what prices, ask me to choose one (around when?) then make a reservation, reserve a portion of chicken cordon bleu for me, and notify the restaurant's computer if I'm hung up in traffic. It will not think about chicken cordon bleu. Its mouth will not water. And -- being my agent -- it will not suggest I've had enough calories already today and should have salad instead. Bonus: The HAL transcripts. Update: A couple of bloggers more tech-savvy than me address this post, and further it. Programmer and tech author Shelley Powers, On Meaning: What most people want (from the Semantic Web) is what Sheila is describing: systems that work together seamlessly; that integrate immediately; that help us do something we couldn't do before. Anne 2.0 (Anne Zelenka): It’s Not Meaning We Need, But Action: An Existentialist Approach to Web 3.0: Sheila Lennon points out where this morning’s NY Times article got it wrong. It’s not about meaning. It’s about software agents who can do our bidding and remove some of the friction from managing our days... Earlier David Weinberger (The Semantic Argument Web) explained why it's impractical to expect the Semantic Web concept to get much further than better searching: For example, if we had a schema for expressing contact information, the Semantic Web would enable us to search for web pages where the metadata attribute "last_name" has the content "Bush" and it would find all the Bush relatives without finding a single page about rhododendra. Even if you and I don't know precisely what a schema is, I get that this solves the Google problem: All the cordon bleu pages would have an extra term readable by a search engine that would indicate "recipe" or "restaurant" or "cooking school" -- terms I could have included in my search query. And that's the rub, why the fully realized Semantic Web is practically impossible: It's too labor intensive and tedious to add this metadata -- descriptive data about the data -- to every page and every bit of information on it. But you can expect a system that's already monitoring restaurant tables and how many orders of cordon bleu are in the inventory to respond to my computer's input: It's not "meaning" -- it's literally "message" and the message is very simple. "Ordering one, Harry."
The Main Menu screen for Sixth Sense Cafe restaurant software. (I have no idea whether this software could participate in any of this. It's here to illustrate, an example of what's already in use.) Later: Is this all there is? The Semantic Web can't be just automation. Shelley notes its resemblance to a Slinky -- no practical use. But I'm up for impractical uses. Shelley's "web of meaning" sounds really good. Updated again: Marketing/PR pro Jeneane Sessum leaps in with Web 3.0, Google Docs and Spreadsheets as E-Room Killer, and Giving Thanks. And she's definitely leaping. Backing in, Enter Google, barely making a sound, but unleashing the most simple and powerful document collaboration platform -- for FREE -- with google docs and spreadsheets. I was blown away when I started using it just last week. You can collaborate with others, including your clients, real time, inside of documents (uploaded word documents, excel spreadsheets and others), in a shared space. You can administer editing and viewing rights. You can export and import to common file formats. You can even subscribe to docs via RSS to track changes! I mean HOLY CRAP. All of these years I've been begging for this, and Google tosses it out there like a crouton atop a luscious salad. If John Markoff found Web 3.0 in a travel agency, Jeneane has wrenched the term away from him and relocated it to a networked space: Remember the people you have met--people you've always thought, "Damn, I wish I could work with her," and understand that you can, we are, and that is a very very very cool thing. With four women now in this conversation, it only makes sense that Jeneane has crossposted this to BlogHer, as Web 3.0 and the Networked Worker: Creating a Work FORCE. I had wondered if Web 3.0 might have a jobs component. I'd like to see that build out.
Frank Rich, NYT: 2006: The Year of the ‘Macaca’: Brilliant and hopeful. Too bad they lock these folks up. It doesn't make me want to pay Times Select to be among the elite who read them regularly, just makes me sad that the Times keeps them out of the hoi polloi's linkage and conversation. The macaca incident had resonance beyond Virginia not just because it was a hit on YouTube. It came to stand for 2006 as a whole because it was synergistic with a national Republican campaign that made a fetish of warning that a Congress run by Democrats would have committee chairmen who are black (Charles Rangel) or gay (Barney Frank), and a middle-aged woman not in the Stepford mold of Laura Bush as speaker. In this context, Mr. Allen’s defeat was poetic justice: the perfect epitaph for an era in which Mr. Rove systematically exploited the narrowest prejudices of the Republican base, pitting Americans of differing identities in cockfights for power and profit, all in the name of “faith.”... Sheer gossamer: Rah, maybe: Usually the hometown sportswriters drum up a little drama before a game against the Patriots (except in Buffalo, where they expect little), but the coverage of today's Jets game is flaccid. The Jets haven't beaten the Patriots since December 2002, which makes writing about it a stretch. But the Daily News turns in the best of the bunch, while predicting a score of Pats 28, Jets 13: Is this the end? Update: Flaccid Patriots. Jets win. Bring back Deion Branch, at any price. Please. Posted by Sheila Lennon November 11, 2006Video: Lou Reed at Web 2.0 for AOL; Free mp3s: Patti Smith closing CGBG's, Dylan '75; Black Friday ads
But of course it's Web 2.0 so there's video, and the geeks are dancing to Gravity. The video of how the set started suggests how steep the curve must have been for all of them. Another happy ending. Don't miss the comments on that post.
Buy season: Leaked Black Friday Ads: Doth the Retailers Protest Too Much? by Elana Centor at BlogHer. Links there for those who observe the retail rites of an all-night parking-lot vigil Thanksgiving night. With respect for others' rituals, I'm not of that tribe. I have enough stuff. This Christmas, I want the really hot item -- peace on earth. Sunday football: The Patriots play the Jets in Foxboro tomorrow, 1 p.m. on CBS. Eric Mangini versus mentor Bill Belichick. At the same time, Washington plays Philadelphia on Fox. Dallas plays at Arizona at 4 on Fox, and the Bears play the Giants at 8:30 on NBC. Posted by Sheila Lennon November 10, 2006New garden blogsI've also published these to the ever-longer, ancient and venerable Garden Blogs list.
ragged radishes- an Otley allotment is "the gardening blog of a novice allotment owner... I’m plot no. 27 on the Burras site in Otley, West Yorkshire," blogs Lucy Crosbie. That's it, above. (An allotment is one's very own plot in a community garden -- there are allotment links on the blog if you want to know more.) She writes, I've recently taken on a really overgrown plot (over 5 years untouched) in Otley, West Yorkshire UK . My plan is to show people (even novices) what they can achieve and also allow me to look back in a few years and see just how much the site has come on. There's a shed under way now. Mediterranean Garden Spain: Colin writes, This blog is about our Mediterranean Garden, in rural Alt Emporda district of Girona, Catalonia, Spain. Just 25 kms from France and a similar distance from the Mediterranean coast of the Costa Brava. The micro climate is fashioned by the nearby Pyrenean mountain range as well as the sea. He overwintered cannas outdoors when temperatures dipped to 10 degrees F. I may try that... In the Garden Online is both a blog and a site for Michigan gardeners, and it sports a fine autumn theme these days.. I'll be back to browse her techniques and plant selections. By George! - A Blog! is the work of George Brookbank of Tucson, Ariz. George was an extension agent for years, has several books on Amazon and, until recently, wrote a desert gardening column for the Tucson Citizen. Now he's turned to the Web, and blogs at the Community Gardens of Tucson site. Posted by Sheila Lennon Aftermath: Leaders, losers, numbers
Profiles: Harry Reid, an Infighter With a Sharp Jab Podcast: Helen Thomas: Change in Iraq if Dems get some backbone (mp3 audio, 7:20) Tool: Missouri blogger Shelley Powers plans to monitor her Congresspeople's votes, pointing to useful tool worth bookmarking: RSS feeds of their voting records. (Presumably this will be available for the next Congress as well.) Here's what Lincoln's Chafee's page looks like. She adds, With this election, we're going to start seeing a global pushback on all of the so-called morality issues. It's going to take time, and a lot of work, but I think we're seeing fatigue with the morality play we keep putting on with each election. People have more to worry about in their lives than whether Fred and Ray can get married, Sally have an abortion, and Joe get stem cell treatment for his Alzheimer's. We saw this in Missouri, in Arizona, and South Dakota. I look for what happened in these states to gradually become more widespread. To me, this makes us all winners this election. Net gain: What the Democrats' win means for tech. Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache at CNet. "On a wealth of topics--Net neutrality, digital copyright, merger approval, data retention, Internet censorship--a Capitol Hill controlled by Democrats should yield a shift in priorities on technology-related legislation." Flush: Online Gamblers Worked To Defeat Sponsor Of Anti-Gambling Legislation: InformationWeek reports, Representative Jim Leach, R-Iowa, the sponsor of the anti-gaming legislation, was defeated in this week's election.... Conservatives free at last? Blogger Jon Swift exults (No Holding Back), The liberal media seems to think conservatives should be unhappy with the election results but that just shows how out of touch they are. When Republicans had both houses of Congress it was actually quite a burden. With great power comes a great sense of responsibility. Many conservatives have felt that we had to restrain ourselves in order to not risk alienating voters. But now the gloves can come off and for the first time in 12 years we don't have to hold back any longer. We can tell you what we really think and we are ecstatic about our newfound freedom. Around America you can almost hear conservatives singing, "Oh Happy Day!"... Rove's movement: The Great Revulsion. Paul Krugman is also let loose from Times (Pay to Read) Select this week: ...we may be seeing the downfall of movement conservatism — the potent alliance of wealthy individuals, corporate interests and the religious right that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. This alliance may once have had something to do with ideas, but it has become mainly a corrupt political machine, and America will be a better place if that machine breaks down. Bottom line: Political Animal Kevin Drum crunched the exit polls: ...I was only able to find a grand total of seven groups that broke for the Dems by substantially more than the overall gain of 5 points. Here they are: Posted by Sheila Lennon November 9, 2006Shakeup, shakeout, falloutAround the world:
Thank you, America. The Guardian (U.K.): For six years, latterly with the backing of both houses of a markedly conservative Republican Congress, George Bush has led an American administration that has played an unprecedentedly negative and polarising role in the world's affairs. On Tuesday, in the midterm US congressional elections, American voters rebuffed Mr Bush in spectacular style and with both instant and lasting political consequences.... BBC: As Oscar Wilde might have put it: "To lose one House may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness." Rumsfeld in his own words begins with May 2001: "Once in a while, I'm standing here, doing something. And I think: 'What in the world am I doing here?' It's a big surprise." Voices: Foreign reaction to U.S. midterm elections. The Toronto Star. At home: From the exit polls conducted for the National Election Pool, Rhode Island men broke 50-50 for Chafee and Whitehouse; women chose Whitehouse 57-43; whites broke 50-50; African-Americans chose Whitehouse 85-13, Latinos 77-22. Non-human: Animals Win in Arizona and Michigan. The Humane Society of the U.S. reports, Voters in Arizona and Michigan gave a voice to animals this year by speaking out on ballot initiatives in landslide votes that will protect farm animals and mourning doves. Blogs: Denver defense attorney Jeralyn Merritt of Talk Left is the blogger "being interviewed about blogging while watching herself being interviewed about blogging. I wonder if she'll blog about that." Fallout: Biden says U.N. envoy Bolton "going nowhere". John Bolton, the controversial former undersecretary of state in charge of non-proliferation, was nominated by President George W. Bush to be U.N. envoy in March 2005. Who's who: CQPolitics has profiles of all the new members of Congress. Flashbacks: Iraq Wins the Election, What Now? by Tom Hayden Jerry Brown makes a bit of history: He was elected California's attorney general Tuesday. Rare sighting: Maureen Dowd -- n parole during free-access week at Times (Pay-To-Read) Select -- writes of the President's Come-to-Daddy Moment: Poppy Bush and James Baker gave Sonny the presidency to play with and he broke it. So now they’re taking it back... Posted by Sheila Lennon November 8, 2006Changes, insecurity, defense and Cheney's clout; John Hall victory song videoUpdated 7:35 p.m.
Thanks to Take 19 for serving up the link in a post titled A picture is worth 1,000 words. That refers to a Journal-News picture and story. Current Republican Rep. Sue Kelly is waiting for the final ballots to be counted before she concedes. 4:34 p.m. 1:54 p.m. The easy analyses will focus on the sports and war of politics. Who won which race. Who knocked whom out of the ring. Who captured the most territory. But there are other things that matter. For example, 600,000 dead in Iraq since the American military occupation began. The problem here isn't just that we botched the job enormously. It's that there are other jobs we'll botch again no matter who's in charge, if we don't change the way we make war, keep peace and understand who and what our enemies are. On the latter, "Terrorists" doesn't cover it. Here's John Robb, reviewing Fred Ikle's Annihilation from Within... The language is a bit dense after that if you're still in election mode, and not a terrorism expert like John Robb... John Robb was a mission commander for a "black" counterterrorism unit that worked with Delta Force and Seal Team 6 before becoming the first Internet analyst at Forrester Research and a key architect in the rise of Web logs and RSS. He is writing a book on the logic of terrorism. and his band of informed commenters. I rephrased it a bit, shorter: Rapidly advancing technology will make it possible for small groups to threaten anything they dislike with homemade doomsday weapons. Our antiquated nation-states won't cope: some states will completely collapse, others will turn into police states, and some will be taken over by coups. The Web reference is not accidental. Indeed, the blurb for Robb's own new book, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, explains, Our enemies are now much smaller than that: small, ad-hoc bands of like-minded insurgents, organized less like bees in a hive than like the millions of users for Wikipedia, each with its own competing, but complementary agenda. Put this way, it also sounds eerily like the "assault" on newspapers from bloggers, video and alt-sources. As least the analogy may make it easier to grasp the problem, and confirm your suspicion that taking your shoes off in airports is sheer voodoo. I'm listening to the President say it is his job to protect us while I read Robb saying that's old thinking that won't work -- government can't protect you. The discussion needs to get smarter. What Robb foresees (Security: Power To The People): Security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already... Many thanks to clueful Doc for beginning this new conversation. Rumsfeld out: NBC's Chris Matthews is saying the President broke with the Vice President in this decision. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have been joined at the hip for decades. The new Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, is part of his father's team. Gates at Wikipedia: Robert Michael Gates (born September 25, 1943) is an American intelligence official. He served for 26 years in the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council. Under President George H.W. Bush, Gates served as Director of Central Intelligence. After leaving the CIA, Gates wrote his memoirs and became president of Texas A&M University, serving on several corporate boards.... Posted by Sheila Lennon The morning after on the WebSurfing around after four hours sleep... Conservative law blogger Ann Althouse on the CNN blog party: What happened last night? Waking up this morning in my quiet hotel room, I realize how insanely hard it was to try to watch the election returns at that blogger party at Tryst. The notion that we were in some way bringing you the news is utterly absurd. We were struggling to watch it -- hear it -- on TV, something you could do not only more directly -- that's always the case -- but also more easily. To be on camera, under the lights, in the middle of a whirl of activity, expected to perform on cue the way you ordinarily perform naturally in the privacy of your home... oh no! The obvious analogy is to a porno movie! Wonkette adds, in one of his (!) few sentences of OMG BLOG SLUMBER PARTY quotable on a news site, "Plus, the special super-fast CNN wireless network doesn’t work, unlike the normal wifi network here at Tryst, which we’ve never had problems with." Blogger Shelley Powers of St. Louis stayed home and wrote (Viva La Vote), I hope they had fun, got a lot to eat and drink, but I beg to differ with CNN: that's not weblogging. Same as the election today: that's not democracy. We can't go in once every two years and ignore what happens in our government the rest of the time. We also can't continue to be polarized over issues. Every time we are, we lose a little more of a our freedom, a little more of our rights. Corporate fodder. That's what voters are today, corporate fodder.Netroots Victories. At liberal site MyDD, Chris Bowers discusses the 2006 version of Net politics. Post Mortem Why Republicans got shellacked in the midterms by Fred Barnes at the conservative Weekly Standard: THIS ONE IS PRETTY EASY TO EXPLAIN. Republicans lost the House and probably the Senate because of Iraq, corruption, and a record of taking up big issues and then doing nothing on them. Of these, the war was by far the biggest factor. Unpopular wars trump good economies and everything else. President Truman learned this in 1952, as did President Johnson in 1968. Now, it was President Bush's turn, and since his name wasn't on the ballot, his party took the hit. What the...? No. by Christy Hardin Smith of Firedoglake. This post may grow... Posted by Sheila Lennon The opposition party may have won the House and SenateUpdated 3:05 p.m. WaPo, earlier: (Webb, Allen Race Too Close to Call): Webb addressed his supporters gathered in a Tysons Corner Hotel at about 11:10 p.m. and predicted that he would be declared the winner when all the votes are counted. Posted by Sheila Lennon Emancipating Lincoln
Lincoln Chafee looked happy and likable again at his concession speech. With a 62% approval rating, he lost. Rhode Islanders like him a lot, but most want checks and balances more, so hardworking Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse won. Some even think they're setting Chafee free. Nice way to go out. Republican conservatives may not have turned out for him: At Anchor Rising, Keep Chafee... Out of the Senate At the end of the campaign, Chafee attacked, risking that likability, which struck me as a mistake. Whitehouse, wisely, largely ran against George Bush, replaying a video of Chafee saying, "I’m running as a Republican and that’s the party I’ll support." In the light of that, it seemed at least inefficient that Chafee canceled out the votes of our other senator, West Pointer and Democrat Jack Reed, 40 percent of the time, according to Whitehouse. That he would -- of course -- vote for his party's control of the Senate sealed it. What will Linc do next? Start a new party? (*) Buy the Journal? Write a novel? We're looking forward to it. Godspeed. Posted by Sheila Lennon Still the One: N.Y. songwriter to rock the House
The Times Herald-Record reports, Hall upsets Kelly in unofficial results Hall, who won the enthusiastic endorsement of the New York Times and the Herald Record, can be seen at YouTube in an interview with Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert. Tunes and band photos at that Orleans link. Updated 2:57 a.m.: Hall closed his victory speech by singing Steven Van Zandt's song "I Am A Patriot." (lyrics and clip - Orleans was a lightweight dance band, catchy tunes on the jukebox in certain bars. Hall's early pop success needn't have led to substance, but it seems it did. Good luck, John.
Posted by Sheila Lennon November 7, 2006S. Dakota: Abortion ban headed toward defeatThe Argus Leader Media of Sioux Falls, S.D., reports, Opponents of South Dakota’s abortion ban are maintaining their lead over those who favor the law. Update: The percentage held: S.D. rejects abortion ban Side effect: Vote against abortion ban pays off for Democrats: When the South Dakota Legislature passed a ban on nearly all abortions earlier this year, Democrats saw an opportunity to recruit quality candidates for this election cycle. Posted by Sheila Lennon Democrats pick up Pa., Ohio, Rhode Island so farWaPo homepage shows key races. Philly Inquirer: Sen. Santorum concedes defeat in Pa. Webb and Allen are virtually tied in Va., No results yet from Montana. Posted by Sheila Lennon Key race: Dem Whitehouse beating Lincoln Chafee for Senate in R.I.The Projo Election Day blog is covering this in depth, but for those of you coming here from elsewhere, the "closely contested" Rhode Island Senate race is not a squeaker. Former state Atty. Gen. Sheldon Whitehouse has unseated Republican Lincoln Chafee. With 475 of 565 precincts reporting, the R.I. Board of Elections count so far is: Sheldon WHITEHOUSE Democrat 165,482 - 53.28% Posted by Sheila Lennon Contested races: actual returns nationwide; Early Senate exit polls, nationwide9:22 p.m. 9:00 p.m. The National Election Pool, which compiled the results under high-security, comprises ABC, The Associated Press, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC. The effort aims for accurate, reliable data which could also be used as a check on machine totals. Incomplete, certainly, but interesting, here they are: VIRGINIA D: 52 RHODE ISLAND D: 53 PENNSYLVANIA D: 57 OHIO D: 57 NEW JERSEY D: 52 MONTANA D: 53 MISSOURI D: 50 MARYLAND D: 53 TENNESSEE D: 48 ARIZONA D: 46 The polls are now closed. Real results to come. Posted by Sheila Lennon Update: Blog links for election-day news junkies (CNN blog party starts; Exit polls; Dan Rather on Comedy Central tonight)Updated 7:27 p.m. (Dialup warning: The main page is very heavy because the first post contains the graphic logos of each participating blog. There's a blogroll list as well.) CNN has parked these bloggers at Tryst Coffeehouse, in the Adams Morgan section of Washington, D.C. Some of these same bloggers are also participating tonight in an IM chat with ASAP, the younger, fresher division of The Associated Press. Updated periodically. Think their own blogs will get any attention? Updated 5:38 p.m. Most important to voters: * 42% corruption 57% disapprove of Iraq occupation, 62% voted on National rather than local issues. Fun returns: Dan Rather will analyze election results with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert tonight at 11 on Comedy Central's live, hour-long Indecision 2006 special. Fishbowl DC missed that one. Opinion: Lefty astrologer Nancy Waterman looks at Four Senate Races but, lacking exact birthtimes for the candidates, there's no way to know whether dominant aspects affect areas concerned with their public or private lives. 6:00 a.m. The 7 to 7 News Blog that leads the Projo.com homepage will cover news and polling-place scenes during the day. Then at 7 p.m., Projo's Political Scene blog morphs into the Election Day Blog (new logo, same URL) at 7 p.m., covering local races and referenda, including the hot casino question. My newsroom assignment tonight is to keep the blogs up (from home, should we have internal server problems downtown) and to use this blog to cover analysis of key races elsewhere and political blogs. Here are some places for do-it-yourselfers to start early: Pollster.com has final pre-election polls for each Senate, House and Governor race, with nifty charts like the one below. If you want to peek in on the hardcore political nail-biters during the day, check out Democrat Underground and Free Republic. From the left and right, respectively, you'll catch the political headlines, very local reports from every state and a dizzying scroll of election-day emotions. Each has thousands of members, and they'll be linking to every scrap and ripple of news and rumor. In Rhode Island, the biggest left and right blogs are R.I. Future and Anchor Rising, respectively. It could get weird. CNN is trying to incorporate bloggers directly into its coverage of next week's midterm elections by inviting them to an "E-lection Nite Blog Party," an event aimed at corralling some of the top online opinion makers in one place to provide instant reaction as the results come in. Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow is not amused. He considers it Painful: Seriously, you don’t ask newspaper columnists to sit in front of a laptop and write their columns on air, and we’re way past the point that bloggers should have to humiliate themselves like that in order to get a few seconds of airtime. This isn’t 2002, we all know what blogs are. If bloggers have something to contribute to the conversation, let them sit at a roundtable on election eve and contribute their thoughts like any other opinion writer, without treating them like teenagers at a TV dance party circa 1962 who need to be lured into the studio with “plenty of food and beverages, natch. “ We're not sure why they couldn't stay home and do this, but why turn down a free trip and a chance to meet other famous bloggers? The fun begins at 4 p.m. with bloggers from Captain's Quarters, Huffington Post, Eschaton, Crooks and Liars, Ankle Biting Pundits, Think Progress, National Review Online, Firedoglake, AmericaBlog, Redstate, La Shawn Barber's Corner, MyDD, Townhall. Technorati, the blog search engine, saw the CNN blog up briefly today, but it's down now. Maybe when you read this it will be live again. (Sometimes a blog is tested, then unpublished until launch time.) Technorati has a clip from their "participating bloggers page" before it went 404: Participating Bloggers Ann Althouse John Aravosis Patrick Hynes Betsy Newmark Ed Morrissey John Amato Duncan Black Christy Hardin Smith Patrick Gavin Robert Bluey Bob Cesca Glenn Reynolds La Shawn Barber Stephen Warley Marc Lamont Hill Jerome Armstrong Jim Geraghty James Joyner Pam Spaulding Scott Johnson Nick Gillespie ... This is obviously a matching quiz with the blog list above. I'm expecting CNN will add the proper links, but Googling can sort them out if you can't wait. Fishbowl DC has put together a 2006 Election Coverage Guide for TV and NPR, a Who's Working Tonight guide to political media. See you back here later today... Posted by Sheila Lennon November 6, 2006HBO voting machine documentary online; Eat crow in Indy; Stop the robocalls! Flaming with tagsHBO SPECIAL: Hacking Democracy is online at Google Video, all "1 hr 21 min 57 sec" of it. A friend in the stands said it was sad there -- "Everybody was cold and there was nothing to cheer about." You can see Deion tonight on Monday Night Football as his new team, the Seattle Seahawks (4-3), meets the Oakland Raiders (2-5) at 8:30 on ESPN. Audio harassment: The Republican National Committee recording woke my husband up from a nap again yesterday to "remind" him there's an election tomorrow. The Democrats just hauled me off the toilet. Is this part of democracy? (Bill Clinton just called. I'm going to work so I can get away from my phone.) New Hampshire prohibits prerecorded calls to phone numbers on the Do Not Call List. What would it take to get that happening here? How can we get politicians to regulate their own campaign tactics? Do we have to get rid of our landlines to stop the robocalling? Cellphones don't get phone spam. Folksonomy gone wild: "News, Sports, Weather" is a taxonomy -- official labels. Labels we apply on our own -- fun, mistakes, weird, summer, beach house -- are called a folksonomy. At Amazon, where readers can tag at will, hapless Kevin Federline's new album is being damned with short phrases. Amazon.com: Playing With Fire: Music: Kevin Federline. Posted by Sheila Lennon November 5, 2006Football today; Exit polls; Diebold out of its depth? 'Borat' star's TV marathon
AP Football today: While we putter in anticipation of tonight's 8:30 p.m. Patriots-Colts showdown on NBC from Gillette (where the dome team will play in temperatures forecast to be mid-30s), there are other games today: 1 p.m.: 4 p.m.: Denver Broncos at Pittsburgh Steelers, CBS But the big event is tonight. Keep Peyton shivering on the bench, don't give him time to set when he's out there, run a lot. From the Indy Star: At How The Star's writers see it: Four-way split, all by three or four points. Excerpts from the reader interactive segment on IndyStar.com/Colts: Average predicted score: Patriots 31 Colts 26 (Seventy-five percent said Patriots would win.) Details at the Indy fans' discussion boards there: Colts-Patriots: Who will win?
Exit polls: Exit poll analysts going to great lengths to get it right 'They'll be sequestered to prevent early leaks that can cost credibility.' Matea Gold of the L.A. Times writes, ...This time around, the members of the National Election Pool — a consortium of five broadcast and cable networks and The Associated Press that commissions exit polls of the major races — have decided to sequester two analysts from each news organization in a secret "quarantine room" in New York, where they alone will get access to the first waves of data from precincts around the country. With deep suspicion of how easily computer voting machines could be programmed to spit out a predetermined result, some tech-savvy Democrats insist those results were accurate, and that sly number-changing slipped past a generally clueless press corps and electorate. The winners of 2000 and 2004, as you might expect, think this is hogwash. Just as only landline owners -- who tend to be older -- can be telephoned by pollsters, early voters (in states that permit that) can't be exit-polled.
Now the company has ordered its nameplate removed from the front of its voting machines, Gimbel reports, suggesting it may be getting out of the kitchen. The photo above is of the Diebold AccuVote-TSX voting machine. Bonus links: Time: Can This Machine Be Trusted? "The U.S.'s new voting systems are only as good as the people who program and use them. Which is why next week could be interesting" Wall Street Journal: Can Electronic Voting Be Trusted? Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Computerized vote systems raise fears of potential fraud
Clips at YouTube. The Pat Buchanan clips are special. Posted by Sheila Lennon November 3, 2006Do your political robocallers leave their numbers? Friday mp3s; Tale of the sale of a 'list of linksAre Political Phone Calls Driving You Crazy? Of course they are. (I got recorded intrusions from two out-of-state governors yesterday. I'd never heard of one of them.) But that question is actually the headline of a story by San Francisco Channel 7, KGO-TV, which unearthed an interesting fact: "There are some that are clearly illegal," says San Francisco attorney John Brown, an expert in telemarketing law. He says that under the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, political groups are exempt from typical Do Not Call rules. However, they still must meet other specific requirements. I haven't heard any phone numbers either. Imagine, if we could call them back, what we'd say to them... Here's the law. This is section (d)(3): (3) Artificial or prerecorded voice systems Have you heard any phone numbers on these calls? Update: I just got a call from a third party, suggesting I call the office of the candidate, an incumbent, to thank him for the job he's doing, and giving a number to do so. Mp3s of the week at BigO:
Check the sidebars there for earlier, still downloadable tracks. 'It was just a list of links. And we didn't even write them ourselves.' The Aftermath (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought) is a brilliant, simple first-person account by Aaron Swartz, whose bankbook just swelled on the sale of Boston-based Reddit, which he co-founded, to Wired Digital, owned by Conde Nast, whose flagship publication is... Vogue magazine. Aaron is 20 years old.
The point, of course, is the tool itself, and that the value of the site is in the readers who feel it's theirs. There's too much out there and no way for one person to find it all. People interested in similar news and information will eventually gather together at one of many sites like this. Along with the software, they get Reddit, which is less tech-oriented than bigger "social news" sites like Slashdot, Digg and digg.dot.us, which combines the previous two with Del.icio.us. The closest to an art version of this concept is in the "tagging" at Del.icio.us: Here's the arts section. To narrow it, just add something like +surrealism at the end of the word Arts in the search box. This is a folksonomy -- people making up their own tags rather than fitting everything into predefined containers. If Reddit's current readers go away, Conde still has a publishing and participation tool for loyal readers at their core products' sites. Aaron Swartz, by the way, a few years ago wrote the online tool that gives bloggers a special url, with the blessing of NYT, for Times links so they won't slip into the archives after 5 days. His own blog is Raw Thought. Posted by Sheila Lennon November 1, 2006Flickr Halloween; Minn. paper restores some stock listings; GM crops obsolete? Best Web 2.0 sites; Machines voting
Halloween at Flickr. The zeitgeist in pictures last night. The collage of fine jack-o-lanterns above is a nice way to get into it. A more sober collection: E&P's 7th Annual Photos of the Year Contest Reversing a trend: Now On Saturdays: More Stock Listings. Minneapolis Star-Tribune brings back stock listings. Well, some of them. On Saturday. Still... it's bucking entropy. Although an increasing number of people are using the Internet to track their investments, we recognize that a number of people aren't online or prefer to review their portfolios in the newspaper. We've heard from many of them in the months since we reduced the listings, and this restoration of stocks and mutual funds is intended to meet their needs. Good. It's still about the readers. Naturally selecting: This crop revolution may succeed where GM failed Gene splicing has been made obsolete by a cutting-edge technology that greatly accelerates classical plant breeding. Access to Tools: Best of the Best Web 2.0 Web Sites Counting the votes: Miami Herald: Glitches cited in early voting ...Debra A. Reed voted with her boss on Wednesday at African-American Research Library and Cultural Center near Fort Lauderdale. Her vote went smoothly, but boss Gary Rudolf called her over to look at what was happening on his machine. He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist. ATMs don't go out of synch and start giving money instead of depositing it. A computer can change anything, easily. How can there be a double check without running two separate voting systems? Is it over yet? In this sour and sullen election season, I wish somebody would strike up the band and play Happy Days Are Here Again and mean it. IIt seems unrealistic to expect Iraq to settle its internal differences peacefully when politics here is so nasty. How could demonizing the opposition offer an appealing model of democracy to countries new to it? Posted by Sheila Lennon |
We're dense: 
As for Western women traveling here, there's really no problem as long as you don't run around in short shorts, tops with spaghetti straps, or smoke on the street. That's true, at least, in the villages. Here in the Muscat Capital Area, you can do all that sort of thing in up-market parts of town. It basically depends on the kind of locals you're likely to encounter. As for swimming, two-piece suits are really not on anywhere except on beaches near the major hotels like the Al-Bustan, Shangri-La, The Chedi, Grand Hyatt, or the Intercontinental Muscat. One-piece ones are okay on more remote beaches, though it's probably not a wise idea to spend a day at the beach alone anywhere, really. But that's true elsewhere, too, by and large. 
The trade deficit is a component of the broader current-account deficit, which also includes investment income. The current-account deficit is the shortfall that needs to be covered by foreign investors for the dollar not to fall. Last year, foreigners needed to purchase $805 billion in dollar-denominated assets just to keep the dollar from falling. That's more than $2 billion every single day.
S.R. Sidarth: 
Here's a five-step plan guaranteed to make an obscure company absolutely notorious.
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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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