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January 31, 2007

A peek at the city's new Botanical Center

Journal photo / Andy Dickerman
Landscape architect Mary Ellen Flanagan, Providence Mayor David Cicilline and city Parks Superintendent Alix Ogden welcome members of the media during a tour of the new Roger Williams Park Botanical Center today.

With plants still arriving, the press got a peek today at the new Roger Williams Park Botanical Center. Like all gardens, its beginnings are modest, but by the time the greenhouses open to the public March 2, the 40-foot tall conservatory should be teeming.

Displays in the main conservatory will change constantly, maintained with the help of local garden organizations. The first, with a red and purple Valentine's Day theme, will pair red anthuriums with purple glory trees.

You'll be able to get married in the adjoining Mediterranean room, framed by a stucco and terra cotta moongate against the backdrop of a modest waterfall. A 68-foot linear pool runs the length of this greenhouse, which will house collections, including camellias and carnivorous plants, and a fish pond. Teak benches are arriving soon from Smith & Hawken nurseries, according to Mary Ellen Flanagan, landscape architect for the center.

Just a single carnivore, a nepenthes, hangs in a white pot there now, its bladders hanging down about eight inches. Priscilla Purinton of West Kingston, vice president of the New England Carnivorous Plant Society, said that in the wild these bladders grow to three-liter size and can catch rats and lizards. Feeding time at the greenhouses could be a must-see show for kids who have seen the movie Little Shop of Horrors.

Two other greenhouses, milling with workers today, will serve as educational spaces and can host small flower shows.

There's no wi-fi in the plans, but Parks Superintendent Alix Ogden said it has been discussed for the future.

If the original, crowded greenhouses, with narrow aisles and the ambience of well-stocked potting sheds, had a nostalgic charm, these airy buildings of light and glass are more obviously public spaces, with wide areas of cement walkways to accommodate lots of visitors. These aren't anywhere as artificial as those at the flower show, and once the plants get growing, they'll introduce their own wildness.

The new facility is scaled way down from the original vision Journal reporter Karen Davis wrote about in May 2003:

A seven-story, glass-encased replica of a landscape in Papua New Guinea, a conservatory with artwork by the late actor Anthony Quinn, and a replica of the 12th hole of the Augusta National Golf Course will be focal points of the new $15-million botanical gardens at Roger Williams Park, scheduled to be completed next year.

None of that came to pass. Mayor David Cicilline, who came along on the tour, scaled back the project to make maintaining it more manageable with the money actually available, rather than depend on private fundraising. The $7.7-million facility was constructed by Gilbane Building Company with federal, state and city money and and major support from the Champlin Foundations.

Among the partners, who'll collaborate on the rotating displays, are:

University of Rhode Island Cooperative Extension Master Gardeners

Rhode Island Orchid Society

Rhode Island Rose Society

Rhode Island Wild Plant Society

Rhode Island Nursery & Landscape Association

New England Carnivorous Plant Society

The American Hosta Society

Gardening for Good

Rhode Island Bonsai Society

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 12:58 PM | Permalink

Radio to go

Doc Searls turns the announcement of the rescue of talk-left Air America radio into a riff on the Live Web.

Like most broadcasters, the AAR folks "get" the Net about as well as a fetus gets a fastball. While everybody with an iPod has iTunes, and while iTunes has a radio tuner for Internet stations radiating streams in MP3, Air America's website pushes Air America Radio Premium, with a picture of an iPod and a link to a page where you fill out a form to open an account, if you don't have one already. This is high-friction stuff, though countless sites put you through it.

Then, if you get past the Premium jivewall (yes, I did), you get a list of all the shows, available as podcasts. Sooo... why hide them? And doesn't "premium" suggest that it costs more? In fact it doesn't, but the suggestion (and the friction) is there.

Just as oddly, the tabbed directory on the Air America site makes a distinction between Listen and Find a Station. The top link under Listen opens a linkproof window that gives you a choice of Real Player or Windows Media Player. (Like many of us, I use neither.) Meanwhile, Air America is actually listed among 29 Talk/Spoken Word streams in iTunes' Radio tuner. Why not say so on the site?...

Radio is live. That's what makes it radio. Nothing is a better-suited companion to The Live Web than radio. If Air America 2.0 really wants to do better than Air America 1.0 (and to be as hip to the Digital Age as the version-number approach makes their ambitions sound), it needs to get hip to the Live Web. Right now it ain't.

I don't have an iPod or other portable player -- I'd lose it. But I was briefly a DJ in college, at the innocently named WBS, the Wellesley College station, and I love to find funky little niche stations where passionate fan play their private stashes.

I was psyched about Web radio till CARP (copyright arbitration royalty panel), in 2002 set the royalty rate at seven-hundredths of a cent per song, per listener, effectively wiping out a future filled with DJs in jammies excitedly sharing their discoveries with far-flung fellow fans. (Kurt Hanson's Radio and Internet Newsletter covered this extensively.)

So sometimes I listen on the Web to quirky alternatives such as KVNF, "Mountain Grown Public Radio" -- "KVNF is grassroots, creative, volunteer based, community oriented public radio serving Western Colorado since 1979." I learned of this one from Willie Hillyard, who comes off his ranch to do a once-a-month volunteer stint there.

And I seldom listen to political radio of any stripe. They're all so angry.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 6:55 AM | Permalink

January 30, 2007

Hard words for Bush, Cheney; Brilliant new U2 video; MST3K to do DVDs; eBay dirty tricks;

The Loneliest President: What’s going on in George Bush’s mind? A psychopolitical survey. at New York Magazine is the introductory essay, by John Heilemann, to 16 shorter essays (Bush on the Couch) by psychologists, politicians and editors -- including JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen, Deepak Chopra, Listening to Prozac author Peter D. Kramer and Scott Dikkers, editor of The Onion satire magazine -- pop-psychoanalyzing the president.

Oddly, perhaps, it's not quite as devastating as some of the recent takes on the vice president:

-- The Unraveling of Dick Cheney wrapup by Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post.

-- Cheney's Ba-Da Boom Crew, also at WaPo.

-- Jon Stewart on Cheney's Appearance on CNN, referencing Wolf Blitzer's interview (Cheney: Talk of blunders in Iraq is 'hogwash')

And today former N.Y. Times reporter Judy Miller is testifying at the Libby trial.

Home again: Dean Baquet, fired as editor of The Los Angeles Times in November for refusing to cut jobs from his newsroom, is back at the N.Y. Times: Baquet Rejoins Times as Washington Bureau Chief

Brilliant: New U2 video for "Window in the Skies" appears to have Sinatra, Elvis, Dylan, and everybody before or since lip-synching it.

MST3K returns: Remember Mystery Science Theater 3000? Bad old sci-fi movies were overlayed with a silhouette of wags -- one human, the rest robots -- in theater seats who made funny comments on the action.

Often abbreviated MST3K, the show ran from 1988 to 1999, first on KTMA in Minneapolis, then on Comedy Central, finally on the Sci-Fi Channel.

It's back, about to take on DVDs.

At Film Crew Online

Three of MST3K's writer/characters — Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy — have started a new venture: The Film Crew.

The Film Crew has been entrusted with a very important
mission: providing commentary tracks for every movie that doesn't have one. Typically, they've chosen to start at the bottom of the barrel,
and now you get to vote on which B-movie will get the Film
Crew treatment on DVD first.

Will it be Giant of Marathon (1959, starring Steve Reeves)?

Hollywood After Dark (1968, starring The Golden Girls' Rue McClannahan)?
Killers from Space (1954, starring Peter Graves)?
The Wild Women of Wongo (1958)?
Pick your "favorite," to be released in July 2007 by Shout! Factory

You're invited to watch two-minute clips of each movie before you vote.

Oddly related: Cat Head Theatre at YouTube. Cats do a selection from Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2.

eBay's bad apples: I bought some Christmas ornaments on eBay from a seller who only accepted money orders -- she said she had been plagued by false PayPal accounts and non-paying bidders. I thought this an excess of caution until I read this blogger's experience:

The way these scammers work is they send you an email asking to purchase your item outside of eBay, then when you won’t bite they hose your auction using a hacked account effectively preventing you from making a legitimate sale and at the same time sticking you with huge sellers fees from eBay. Don’t believe me? Here is the proof.

The overbidding "winning buyer's" alleged account profile showed six negatives and no positive feedback reports, but you can't read the details because he has chosen not to display them.

The seller has yet to receive a refund of his seller's fee from eBay. Go read it all. Here's the link again.

The auction site has to tighten up against this. The big yard sale is a huge boon to small sellers and buyers alike, but if trust vanishes, eBay is toast.

How to make a "floating"Invisible Book Shelf. (Hint: The bottom book is the actual shelf.) It's at Instructables, which is full of how-tos.

Tech note: Google is the new http://

I’ve noticed lately that many users have all but stopped typing domain names directly in the web browser, and started using Google instead. Instead of writing “myspace.com” as the address, they write “myspace” into Google....

You do this, too? It's easy with the little search form...

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:18 AM | Permalink

January 29, 2007

The difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims

Quick, interesting. Don't miss the comments.

Shia and Sunni, A Ludicrously Short Primer. At 3 Quarks Daily, by its primary editor, S. Abbas Raza:

.Even now, many people who hear these terms daily on the news are confused about what the real differences are between Sunni and Shia Muslims, so I, having been brought up in a very devout Shia household in Pakistan, thought I would explain these things, at least in rough terms. Here goes:

It all started hours after Mohammad's death: while his son-in-law (and first cousin) Ali was attending to Mohammad's burial, others were holding a little election to see who should succeed Mohammad as the chief of what was by now an Islamic state. (Remember that by the end of his life, Mohammad was not only a religious leader, but the head-of-state of a significant polity.) The person soon elected to the position of caliph, or head-of-state, was an old companion of the prophet's named Abu Bakr. This was a controversial choice, as many felt that Mohammad had clearly indicated Ali as his successor, and after Abu Bakr took power, these people had no choice but to say that while he may have become the temporal leader of the young Islamic state, they did not recognize him as their divinely guided religious leader. Instead, Ali remained their spiritual leader, and these were the ones who would eventually come to be known as the Shia. The ones who elected Abu Bakr would come to be known as Sunni.

This is the Shia/Sunni split which endures to this day, based on this early disagreement. Below I will say a little more about the Shia....

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 5:53 PM | Permalink

January 26, 2007

Second Life at Davos; Mp3s: Newman, McPhee, Young; Cheney: disclosed; Cats grooving

The World Economic Summit is going on in Davos, Switzerland, and I've been browsing the Times's Davos Diary blog. Yes, there's some stuff about celebrities non grata this year, Iraq as a "war against civilians" and this (From Davos, NYSE Chief Says Tide Will Turn on Private Equity), which sounds important:

John Thain, chief executive of the NYSE Group, offered up some sobering words Friday about the explosive rise of private equity, which has swept many publicly traded companies off of the world’s major exchanges. He said, in effect: They’ll come back to us.

Half of last year’s initial public offerings on the New York Stock Exchange, which the NYSE operates, represented private equity firms exiting their investments, Mr. Thain said, making buyout shops “our biggest customers.”...

But the showstopper is about the virtual world Second Life -- Davos is there:

Virtual world Second Life is a hot topic at the World Economic Forum this year, according to The Independent. Indeed, even the forum’s founder and chairman, Klaus Schwab, has his own avatar, or virtual identity, and Reuters is conducting interviews with major players at Davos at its virtual bureau in the Second Life realm.

The Independent suspects that all this chatter is likely to increase the number of big companies that have a presence in the the alternate computer world owned by Linden Labs. ...

Here's the website for Reuters Second Life News Center. The photo above is the "avatar" of Reuters' Second Life bureau chief Adam Pasick of London, at right, called "Adam Reuters" in SL.

You don't have to join Second Life to see the Reuters interviews live or later. Here's an Interview with Linden Lab chairman Mitch Kapor in Davos -- actually, it's with his avatar, inline in a Web page.

(Mitch Kapor, who made his fortune early with Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet software, went on to co-found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, chair the Mozilla Foundation and found the Open Source Applications Foundation.)

Independent UK from Davos: Get a Second Life: the age of the Avatar has arrived

Davos Conversation is blog central, including big-media blogs.

Free mp3s: Randy Newman, San Francisco 1972; Joe McPhee, New York 2005; Neil Young,
New York 1974.

Wired: What We Don't Know: How did life begin? What's the universe made of? Why do we sleep? 42* of the biggest questions in science

Veep disclosed: CNN: Cheney: Talk of blunders in Iraq is 'hogwash'. Interview with Wolf Blitzer.

WaPo: Ex-Aide Says Cheney Led Rebuttal Effort:

Vice President Cheney personally orchestrated his office's 2003 efforts to rebut allegations that the administration used flawed intelligence to justify the war in Iraq and discredit a critic who Cheney believed was making him look foolish, according to testimony and evidence yesterday in the criminal trial of his former chief of staff...

In Ex-Aide's Testimony, A Spin Through VP's PR begins,

Memo to Tim Russert: Dick Cheney thinks he controls you....

Megalabel? Indie labels combine to form a "virtual fifth major"Ars Technica

Friday cat blogging: How cats groove to different musical styles.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments 2

January 25, 2007

The future is already under way at Providence Geeks

I had a great time last night at the monthly Providence Geeks gathering at AS220 on Empire Street. It was also the one-year anniversary of the event.

I spent some time talking about neighborhood networking with Alan Tear, who's deep into Providence's Summit Neighborhood Association.

I met Jo Lee, cofounder of CitizenSpeak, which offers free email advocacy tools to grassroots organizations and local activists. She and my web-developer daughter found common ground on using their skills for good purposes, and both have a motherly interest in the reopening of Providence's Nathan Bishop middle school. (Meetings are scheduled around the city early next month to discuss the recommendations for city schools offered by Ohio education planning firm DEJONG Inc. ProJo story: Consultant recommends renovating Providence schools, building 7 schools at $792M)*

Blogger Tom Hoffman was joyful as he passed out chocolate cigars to celebrate the birth, at 4:14 a.m. yesterday, of his daughter Vivian Geller Hoffman.

I finally met photo blogger Woneffe (Jef Nickerson) and Matt Coolidge of Greater City: Providence and the Rhode Island discussion hub at Urban Planet.org (with subforums for Providence, Pawtucket and Blackstone Valley, and Newport), where people interested in improving city life gather and post.

O'Reilly tech books author and AS220's house geek Brian Jepson is a fixture of these gatherings, and as we left he was happily poring over a four-inch-thick book on game design by the blue glow of a hublike gizmo.

We arrived just in time to grab name tags -- Jack Templin, always the gracious host here, noted that they spare shy geeks the ordeal of introductions -- before Owen Johnson gave a short presentation of his viral tool Rentometer -- you just can't help plugging your rent in to see how it compares (or whether you can afford to live there at all), and of a more utilitarian property management tool, iiProperty. They're hiring.

If you're at all interested in what's percolating in local tech, here's the place to mingle. You don't have to know motherboards to fit in -- there's as much focus on what's worth doing as there is on how to do it.

The event is billed as a dinner (eating is optional), and, after ordering at the counter, your food is delivered to wherever you're sitting or standing. There's also a full bar.

There'll be another meeting next month. Check the blog at Providence Geeks to find out when.

*Update: According to an email from the grassroots East Side Public Education Coalition, the meeting about Nathan Bishop Middle School is to take place Wednesday, Feb. 7 from 7-8:30 p.m. at Martin Luther King school. They expect to hear Mayor Cicilline on Providence public education and Bill Bryan of Gilbane Construction on building options.

The group has a blog at http://espec.wordpress.com/.

Update 2: Owen Johnson gave the presentation of real estate tools. I originally typed another last name for him. Sorry for the brain blip.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:19 AM | Permalink

January 24, 2007

Providence Geeks meet tonight

Providence Geeks is a loose group -- whoever shows up -- that meets monthly at AS220, 115 Empire St., and tonight's the night. There is usually a short presentation by one of them, and tonight's is by Investment Instruments President Owen Johnson, who'll be showing his company’s web-based property management tools, according to the Geeks' site.

The point, though, is to meet each other, and see what comes from that. All sorts of geeks come, and the start time is 5:30 p.m. Here's the background:

-- It’s totally casual. Wear whatever, bring whoever, arrive and vamoose whenever… And don’t worry about eating or not – come famished or full – eating is optional, and frankly, the least of the festivities.

-- Topics of conversation will vary as they will at any gathering of geeks, but many of us will be talking about AJAX, mash-ups, start-ups, new devices, innovative business models, interaction design, social computing, digital art, web services, etc. etc. etc.

-- Food and beverages are for sale at the adjoining Taqueria Pacifica and bar.

-- There is WiFi so bring your connected device of choice.

I'm planning to try to drop by. See you there.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:29 AM | Permalink

January 23, 2007

Live-blogging the Scooter Libby trial

Just a quick heads-up: If you're interested, FireDogLake is live-blogging prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's opening statement at the trial of Scooter Libby now in federal court in Washington: Libby Liveblog: Fitzgerald’s Opening Statement

In case you've forgotten, "I. Lewis Libby, a former aid to President Bush and chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, is accused of lying to FBI agents and prosecutors who were investigating the leak of a CIA operative's name" as AP puts it.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:17 AM | Permalink

January 22, 2007

We needed Deion Branch; Time to go to seed; 'Liberated' from eBay

On the Patriots, two words: Deion Branch. Unlike Reche Caldwell, he'd have caught those critical passes. Bob Kraft lost yesterday's game when he traded Branch to Seattle rather than pay him what he was worth as the reliable go-to guy, the critical receiving end of Brady's magic.

Branch and Seahawks quarterback Matt Hasselbeck never got on the same wavelength.

Cornerback Asante Samuel is Kraft's next test. The intercepting playmaker ends the season as a free agent.

Football season is over. Time to start the seedlings.

Liberated "information": You've seen them for sale on eBay -- dozens of titles such as The Basics of Starting an eBay Business, CIA Book of Dirty Tricks, 470 Crock Pot Recipes -- and Floodle has bought them all for you. Download at will.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:39 AM | Permalink

January 21, 2007

Politics, music, tech, news links while we wait for The Game

I'm cooking a turkey today. Gotta do something while we wait all day for The Game at 6:30 on CBS; we'll watch the Bears-Saints on Fox at 3, and the bird will be in the oven by then. No more pundit blather, just links:

(Michael) Brown: Politics played role in Katrina response. AP:

...former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown said party politics influenced decisions on whether to take federal control of Louisiana and other areas affected by the hurricane.

Brown, speaking at the Metropolitan College of New York, said he had recommended to President Bush that all 90,000 square miles along the Gulf Coast affected by the devastating hurricane be federalized — a term Brown explained as placing the federal government in charge of all agencies responding to the disaster.

"Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking, 'We had to federalize Louisiana because she's a white, female Democratic governor, and we have a chance to rub her nose in it,'" he said, without naming names. "'We can't do it to Haley (Barbour) because Haley's a white male Republican governor. And we can't do a thing to him. So we're just gonna federalize Louisiana.'"

(Louisiana Gov. Kathleen) Blanco reacted sharply to Brown's remarks.

"This is exactly what we were living but could not bring ourselves to believe. Karl Rove was playing politics while our people were dying," Blanco said through a spokeswoman, referring to Bush's top political strategist. "The federal effort was delayed, and now the public knows why. It's disgusting."

The BEAST: 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2006. And you think you're in a bad mood? Gives new meaning to "venting spleen."

The Most Photographed Barn in America at Flickr.

PointlessSites.com: "sites that; are completely pointless, don't have pop up/under ads or too many ads in general, are original, useless, are not offensive." Games, quizzes, dogs in bee suits, etc.

Free mp3s: Alice Coltrane live at UCLA’s Royce Hall on February 18, 2006. Obit wrap and more tracks by the jazz pianist (and John Coltrane's widow) who died Jan 12 in Los Angeles. (Alice Coltrane, Jazz Artist and Spiritual Leader, Dies at 69) at Destination Out.

An animated image showing what pi is. When you send it in an email, it keeps animating.

Entire village suspected of mayor's murder. "You ask why I don't live here? Honey, how come you don't move?"*

Make a winning play in time for Super Bowl: Or today, if you like: Wisconsin Journals offers recipes for basic chili, reuben casserole, reuben soup, Haight-Ashbury granola cookies (with Ghirardelli chocolate chips).

Joost - the new, new TV thing. Andrew Orlowski in the U.K. Register:

Joost is an interactive, IP-based TV software system from the people who brought you Kazaa and Skype...it's free to download and use and requires no special hardware; it's based on proprietary software; and the technology is cooler than the business case.

Surgeon General's Warning: Living Causes Cancer. At Reason.

Big blue sun. NASA.

Correction: In an earlier post, I inaccurately attributed HinesSight, due to a confusion with a similarly named blog. The would-be "anti-Drudge" is the brainchild of Richard Hines of Cincinnati and Atlanta, who publishes several news aggregators and real estate sites, including cincynation.com and atlantanation.com.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 12:04 PM | Permalink

January 20, 2007

High-rez Brady, smashmouth pundits

Driving to Providence on Route 95 North, my daughter and I both did a double take as we whizzed past a dark, moody billboard with the image at right. "Was that Tom Brady???"

TOMBRADYONLINE.NET posted a huge -- 400-dpi, 2.3-meg, 3116 x 4301 pixels -- jpg of Tom Brady, unshaven and tousled. It's a Movado watch ad that was printed in GQ. Suitable for printing. (It wouldn't be hard to put it on a black background and crop out the parts you don't feel are necessary.)

Boring:

During Friday's final news conference before Sunday's AFC Championship Game, a group of Colts flashed their natty threads and said all the right things. Defensive end Dwight Freeney set an unofficial record by using the term, "at the end of the day" six times during a 10-minute Q&A. Quarterback Peyton Manning addressed the "legacy'' questions by doing his Opie Taylor bit, shrugging and saying, "That's kind of a deep word for me.''

That was the Indy Star's Bob Kravitz, praising this "Who me, think?" patter (Please, Colts, save us from another Patriots Super Bowl).

Save us from Opie and the Dolts, Tom.

Smashmouth: Newsday's Keyboard Quarterbacks, Time for Peyton to Mann up.

The Onion: Peyton Manning Looking Forward To Ninth Annual Super-Bowl-Watching Party

All 325 pounds of Vince Wilfork dance after beating San Diego, via Matt's Pats Blog.

Kravitz thinks the Patriots are boring, like the Yankees, winning too much. Absorbed elsewhere, he has no idea we've had our hearts in our mouths most games this season, astonished and relieved when they'd pull another one back from the brink.

We have no idea whether the Patriots will beat Indy. We think we can, we think we can...

But we'd really, really like to see Peyton Manning cry in his decaf.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 12:56 PM | Permalink

January 19, 2007

Pats underdogs again; Dylan as ghostwriter; Free Banksy art; Arabic is hard...

What do they know? The wags at Sports Illustrated are largely picking the Colts over the Patriots, including Nunyo Demasio, who is also picking the Bears over the Patriots. (Double whammy?) Go figger...

At the Indy Star, Bob Kravitz sounds a little tentative about Peyton's last stand (Manning faces another career-defining challenge):

He is the giant blue elephant in the room. The one wearing No. 18. The one with all the TV commercials. Nobody wants to talk about the giant blue elephant. Specifically, nobody wants to commit the blasphemous act of considering the possibility that Peyton Manning is not a postseason quarterback, that he is lacking as a big-game player, going all the way back to his college days.

C'mon. Admit it.

You're wondering whether Manning is going to crumble Sunday against the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship Game...

Sidebar from the Boston Herald: Does Tom have Secret he’d like to share?

Word from San Diego is that supermodel Gisele Bundchen - who once professed her admiration for the New England Patriots QB/QT - was outside the Pats’ locker room after Tom & Co. shocked the Chargers on Sunday.

"She was standing outside the locker room, just kind of leaning against the wall," said our spy in the bowels of QualComm Stadium. "No one noticed her, she was dressed like a high-school kid, just in jeans and a T-shirt. But she is gorgeous." ...

Dylan as ghostwriter: Longtime reader Adam Crane ("Heart is in Matunuck, Body is in Minnesota") writes,

Got to see Bob at the Xcel in October and it was a great show as usual.

Wasn't sure if you've seen this but it is pretty funny. Parody of No Direction Home and the startling revelation that Bob has written every song in the past 30 years. Too funny.

Thanks, Adam! I'd rather be in Matunuck, too.

Land of opportunity: Iranians' love affair with America at Christian Science Monitor.

Only lobsters remain: Sea Sends Distress Call in One-Note Chowders: NYT.

Down Easters said that the more variety of fish in the pot, the “deepah the flavah.” Like most sons of sons of Maine fishermen, Mr. Bridges, 61, grew up eating fish stews that were as diverse and densely packed as the local waters.

Cod, haddock, white hake, halibut, cusk and dozens of other groundfish, fish that live near the ocean bottom, mingled with clams, shrimp, lobster and mussels under the creamy surface of the stew, cresting a puddle of yellow butter here, a slick of smoky pork fat there.

Today there is nothing but lobster to be fished commercially near Stonington (Maine). Lobster floats alone in the local chowder, pinking the cream and, in the mind of food lovers, perhaps elevating Everyman’s dish to luxury status. But when Mr. Bridges looks at a single species stew he sees a dangerously impoverished fishery.

Here's Mr. Bridges' lobster chowder recipe.

T hrd: I'm Trying To Learn Arabic: Why's it taking so long? at Slate. It's not structured like English, and not similar to anything we know.

...in Arabic, as in Hebrew, people don't include most vowels when writing. Maktab, or "office," is just written mktb. Vowels are included as little marks above and below in beginning textbooks, but you soon have to get used to doing without them. Whn y knw th lngg wll ths s nt tht hrd. But when you're struggling with comprehension to begin with, it's pretty formidable...

Years ago, I lived in Gambia, West Africa, and learned Woloff, a non-written language, by asking "How do I say 'I go'? " then "How do I say 'I went'? " and listening for the difference. Because the concept of grammar didn't exist, I had to figure it out for myself.

This process might work well for Arabic, too. It's easier to get used to and remember the sound of "I go" than to slice and dice tense and case:

Arabic is a VSO language, which means the verb usually comes before the subject and object. It has a dual number, so nouns and verbs must be learned in singular, dual, and plural. A present-tense verb has 13 forms. There are three noun cases and two genders.

FREE: Banksy is offering high-res, printable images of his work:

Everything in the shop is free. All the images can be downloaded to print or use as a desktop.

Serving suggestion:
Prints look best when done on gloss paper using the company printer ink when everyone else is at lunch.

Please do not use this service to launch your own poster company or t-shirt line.

Despite his reputation as a grafitti and "guerilla" artist, some of these are fairly tame.

Background from the BBC: Artist Banksy targets Disneyland from September:

A life-size replica of a Guantanamo Bay detainee has been placed in Disneyland by "guerrilla artist" Banksy....

Banksy is notorious for his secretive and subversive stunts - such as sneaking doctored versions of classic paintings into major art galleries.

In 2005, he embarrassed the British Museum by planting a hoax cave painting of a man pushing a supermarket trolley, which he said went unnoticed for three days.

Last week, he smuggled 500 "alternative" versions of Paris Hilton's album into record shops around the UK. ...

Shame: A voice from Gitmo's darkness: A current detainee speaks of the torture and humiliation he has experienced at Guantanamo since 2002. At the L.A. Times, "JUMAH AL-DOSSARI is a 33-year-old citizen of Bahrain. This article was excerpted from letters he wrote to his attorneys. Its contents have been deemed unclassified by the Department of Defense."

As promised...House Democrats Beat 100-Hour Clock: WaPo.

WASHINGTON -- Hickory, dickory dock, the Democrats beat the clock.

They passed their six-bill, 100-hour agenda with 13 hours to spare.

The last of "Six for '06" bills that Democrats promised voters in the fall passed shortly after 6 p.m. Thursday, about 87 hours after the 110th Congress opened Jan. 4....

The bills passed by the House as part of the 100-hour agenda would:

_Slap a "conservation fee" on oil and gas taken from deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico; scrap nearly $6 billion worth of oil industry tax breaks enacted by Congress in recent years; and seek to recoup royalties lost to the government because of an Interior Department error in leases issued in the late 1990s. Passed Thursday.

_Lower interest rates on federally subsidized student loans from 6.8 percent to 3.4 percent in stages over five years at a cost to taxpayers of $6 billion. About 5.5 million students get the loans each year. Passed Wednesday.

_Make the government bargain directly with drug companies with the aim of reducing prices of prescriptions for Medicare beneficiaries. Passed Jan. 12.

_Expand government-financed embryonic stem cell research. Passed Jan. 11.

_Raise the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour over 26 months. Passed Jan. 10.

_Bolster terrorism-fighting efforts with more cargo inspections. Passed Jan. 9.

Democrats also won approval of internal House rule changes dealing with ethics, lobbying and budgeting. They were passed on Jan. 4-5, the first two days of the new Congress.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 9:16 AM | Permalink

January 18, 2007

Safe, cheap drug kills rat cancers; Iraqi journalists blog; At Yahoo, President of India asks how to end terrorism

Breakthrough: Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers. At New Scientist:

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks. ....

The catch:

The next step is to run clinical trials of DCA in people with cancer. These may have to be funded by charities, universities and governments: pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to pay because they can’t make money on unpatented medicines. The pay-off is that if DCA does work, it will be easy to manufacture and dirt cheap.

The Toronto Globe and Mail reports (Long-used drug shows new promise for cancer) that more information can be found "in a paper published in today's edition of the medical journal Cancer Cell."

Hunted: Inside Iraq is a blog by the Iraqi journalists of the McClatchy (formerly Knight Ridder) Baghdad bureau. They use only first names for security reasons. It's harrowing. Here's a sample:

...I came to the office, and found this message in my phone saying “we are Kata’eb al Jehad, we know you, and we are watching you” isn’t that exciting!!! To get threat from unknown side whether al Jehad battalion or others!

Since a while a got this feeling that am counting down, yet I have to move on because as a single mother, full with ambitions and enthusiasm to achieve better future for me and for two daughters, pushes me to go on, beside, it is the work I love, to let the world understand the reality of what is going on here.

Living in Iraq, working as journalist, not in Iraqi media, but American one, going back and forth to work puts me in great danger because I live in an area fully controlled by the Mahdi army that you have to take different roads each time trying not to draw attention, pretend you don’t speak English, with spreading several rumors that you are working two jobs to justify you coming late to your neighborhood.

Such things are hard to get adopt on but I think I felt that it’s a duty on us to report what is going here since Iraq and specifically Baghdad as it is now one of the hottest spots in the world.

so I red the message, I stood for a while thinking that it might be the hidden camera, that all my colleagues are hiding all of a sudden would jump and say Yaaaa, surprise, but no one was there, I came back and re red the message, apparently this is not a jock, OH my God, they are addressing me personally, they know me, they have been following me … I think got a real threat.

I stood for a second feeling nothing at all, seconds after, I went like small tornado in the office telling everybody, I GOT A THREAT ... HELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLP, DOOOO SOMETHING.

Have you reached sometimes to a moment when you have a struggle within yourself but you can not express it, and you pretend to be ok and normal advising yourself to be calm down, despite being scared is so obvious on you. I hate it when I look like that. ...

Juicy by ~wulfster at Deviant Art

Here's how it was done: The orange slices were arranged on a black background (my granite counter top is black). I suspended a sheet of lexan over the oranges and sprayed water on top. To get the right effect, you have to focus on the images in the drops rather than on the drops themselves. This is the tricky part that takes lots of trial and error. For the best effect, your lights should be below the glass and pointed directly at the subject.

The photo above is a detail. Here's the enlargement.

Ask the world: "What should we do to free our planet from terrorism?" is a question posted at Yahoo Answers -- by the President of India. Background here.

What they've learned: Esquire has a long-running feature headlined "What I've Learned" -- just the quotes excerpted from interviews with dozens of well-known folks. They're short, and go down easy.

A Metafilter member posting as "Not Myself Right Now" has compiled the links. Readers pluck favorite sentences, add their own and make it more.

Here are a few tidbits:

Julia Child:

The problem with the world right now is that we don't have any politicians like Roosevelt or Churchill to give us meaning and depth. We don't have anyone who's speaking for the great and the true and the noble. What we need now is a heroic type, someone who could rally the people to higher deeds. I don't know what's to become of us.

Keith Richards:

I've done a lot of dadding. Whoo, I tell you what—it grows you up pretty quick when that little bugger starts waking up. Suddenly there's this little cute ball of stuff yelling its head off—boom! Snap to! Oh, man, I better take care of this.

Lucinda Williams:

The perfect man? A poet on a motorcycle. You know, the kind who lives on the edge, the free spirit. But he's also gotta have the soul of a poet and a brilliant mind. So, you know, good luck.

Curt Gowdy:

Casey Stengel was one of the funniest guys I ever met. Funny without trying to be funny. My first year broadcasting the Yankees was his first year as manager. I'll never forget, we went to a bar after a night game in Cleveland. He ordered a draft beer and knocked it down in one gulp. I said, "Jeezus, Casey, why do you drink your beer so fast?" And Stengel said, "I drink it like that ever since the accident." I said, "You were in an accident?" He said, "Yeah, somebody knocked over my beer."

Edward Teller:

I have regret connected to Hiroshima. We should have dropped the bombs not on Hiroshima but in Tokyo Bay. Ten million Japanese would have seen the blast and nobody would have been hurt. With the Japanese seeing that, we could have ended the war without killing. Or we could have dropped the atomic bomb over Tokyo at an altitude of twenty to thirty thousand feet, at eight o'clock in the evening, so they would have seen it and felt the shock. Hirohito would have seen the bomb and used it to surrender.

Pamela Anderson:

My breasts have a career. I'm just tagging along.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 8:55 AM | Permalink

January 17, 2007

The etiquette of fighting trash talking with trash dancing

After a death in the family, I've been on the road a lot, attending funeral events at different ends of the state and listening to sports radio as a distraction from sad emotions.

The hype over who has a right to perform Shawn Merriman's rude-to-begin-with "Lights Out" sack dance is knee-deep there. LaDainian Tomlinson found deep insult in some Patriots players mimicking the dance on the Chargers logo in the center of the field after their 24-21 win Sunday: "They showed no class, and maybe that comes from the head coach," said Tomlinson.

(The week before, at halftime of the Pats-Jets wildcard game, Merriman had said on national TV that the Pats would lose it. They won, 37-16.)

It's hard to fathom how football -- giant men in chunky bling tripping each other -- and class --"elegance of style, taste, and manner"* -- ever got oxymoroned together, never mind turned into playground taunts, with "He did our diss in our house" the ultimate sin. I don't think Emily Post would have an opinion on this controversy.

So an email from my colleague Pam Cotter pointing to this hoot from DJ Gallo at ESPN.com's Page 2 came just in time: The talk of the NFL

...here are postgame quotes from this weekend that are completely made up, but probably pretty close to what was actually said.

LaDainian Tomlinson, on his postgame actions: "It is disrespectful to do another man's dance. Oh God. Did I just say that out loud? Trust me, that didn't sound nearly as girly and pathetic in my head."...

Can we call that the final word?

I'd stop there, but there are a few more that may tickle the Pats fan:

Adam Vinatieri, on kicking for the Colts in the playoffs: "It's just so tempting to miss them in the hope of seeing Peyton Manning make that face of his. Honestly, if we make it to the Super Bowl and I have the opportunity to kick a last-second field goal to win the game, I might shank it on purpose just to see Peyton's face implode on itself. I have three rings, but I don't have that."

Troy Brown, on forcing a fumble on Tom Brady's third interception: "It will be interesting to see how Belichick uses that as a reason to cut me again this offseason so they can sign me back for less money. I'm guessing he'll say a younger, faster player would have picked up the fumble and run it in for a touchdown. And then I'll say that a younger player probably wouldn't have the guts to punch him in the neck."

Reche Caldwell, on being from another planet: "Mmzorp. Zeep. Zorp. Gazunk."

Stephen Gostkowski, on kicking a game-winning field goal in the playoffs: "Coach Belichick pulled me aside before I went out there and told me that if I missed and made him look stupid for getting rid of Adam Vinatieri, he would destroy everything I love and break up my parents' marriage. That was all the motivation I needed."

So as not to inflame the Colts to superhuman faux 'roid rage, I'll leave you to follow the link and read the Peyton Manning entry silently to yourself.

P.S. DJ Gallo, author of the insights above, runs satire site SportsPickle.com, which is currently leading with Report: Tom Brady Breaks Up With His Goat.

In the photo above, by K.C. Alfred of the San Diego Union-Tribune, Charger Shawn Merriman does the "lights out" dance after sacking Arizona Cardinals QB Kurt Warner Dec. 31, 2006. San Diego won, 27-20.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:41 AM | Permalink

January 15, 2007

Indy sees the Patriots coming

Bob Kravitz, IndyStar: Opportunities don't come bigger than this

Here they come again. The vaunted Patriots. The hated Patriots. The incredible Patriots. The Patriots who just keep showing up every January, standing in the doorway, refusing to allow the Indianapolis Colts past them. You think that's going to be a football game at the RCA Dome next Sunday?

Wrong.

That's going to be an exorcism.

All of the Colts' demons will be there.

Bill Belichick, the mad genius in the $10 hoodie. Tom Brady, the pretty boy with the assassin's heart. Richard Seymour, Tedy Bruschi and Mike Vrabel, all of those familiar New England defenders, intent on once again haunting and taunting Peyton Manning.

Here they come again...

Ah, a tangled furball of fates. I'm not happy about having to watch hours of Peyton Manning next Sunday, but that's a different story.

Kravitz's readers react in comments. The very first came from "PatPatriot of Westwood, MA":

Don't you guys ever get sick of us?

Bwa ha ha ha

We're already there, Bob.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 3:29 PM | Permalink

For San Diego, shock and disbelief as Pats prevail; I picked the score

Providence Journal / John Freidah
Troy Brown strips Marlon McCree of the ball as McCree tries to return an interception in the fourth quarter.

At the San Diego Union Tribune, it's a litany of misery and woe:

Pats make patsies out of Chargers

SAN DIEGO – The Chargers gave Tom Brady one chance too many, and that's all the three-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback needed.

Brady and the New England Patriots shocked league MVP LaDainian Tomlinson and the Chargers on Sunday, winning 24-21 to move within one win of their fourth Super Bowl trip in six seasons.

Down and out:

In the end, after the hype and hoopla, after an entire city insisted this year was different, after the gurus installed them as Super Bowl favorites and the players accepted that responsibility and trust, the San Diego Chargers delivered another wrenching loss to their weary fans.

'A terrible way to go out'

Clearly, the better team lost. And, all things considered, it deserved to.

Players can't explain this loss

“We didn't score,” said tackle Shane Olivea. “We moved the ball. We had everything going for us. We just didn't do enough to put the ball in the end zone.”

McCree had game in his hands and then . . .

“I was trying to make a play,” (Charger Marlon McCree) said, “and anytime I get the ball I am going to try and score. I saw there was an (offensive) lineman in front of me, and I knew if I could make him miss I was off and running.

“Before I had a chance to do that, Troy Brown stripped it. He made a great play, and I was trying to make a big play. (In) hindsight I don't regret it because I would never try and just go down on the (ground). I want to score.”

Asked why he just didn't knock the ball down, since it was fourth down and an incomplete pass would have given the Chargers possession, McCree scoffed.

“Why would I knock the ball down?” he said. “He threw it right to me.”

Voice of the fans

MOVING RIGHT ALONG: Well, that's that! Now will the Chargers please move?

KEITH TAYLOR, Chula Vista

AP
Towering QB Tom Brady and New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick beam after their 24-21 playoff victory over San Diego yesterday.

24-21: I picked this score.

The family gathers at our house for every Patriots game. We watch it with an early ReplayTV, pausing to build up time, pausing to eat, for bathroom breaks, then whizzing through timeouts and commercials.

We pause just before kickoff to build up time and bring out the drinks and appetizers.

As we settled in, my brother called for game predictions.

"Fingers crossed," I said at first. Then, "Gostkowski wins it with a field goal, 24-21."

And that's how it turned out. How did I know? I don't know. Then I forgot about it.

With about 10 minutes left in the fourth quarter -- remember, we're delayed here -- my husband's cellphone rings. It's his brother, in town for a family funeral. "What a game!" I hear booming out of the phone.

I shout, "Don't tell us!"

Joe explains we're not in realtime, he'll call him later.

But it was a ray of hope.

Then Brady uncloaked. I was yelling, "You're Tom Brady, you can do it."
And he did.

And then I remembered: I had called that score. There are witnesses.

CBS announcers Phil Simms and Jim Nantz bordered on offensive through much of the game, sniffing at the Patriots and praising San Diego. We wanted them to eat crow. When they had to acknowledge the Patriots win, they were subdued.

Chargers fans can be forgiven for not seeing this coming. But CBS should know what we know about the Patriots: They find a way to win.

Peter King, SI: Patriot games Twenty reasons why New England beat a better team

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:51 AM | Permalink

January 13, 2007

Video: Patriots sing karoke; Mp3: Chargers' song; Peyton Manning joke

Building up slowly to the weekend's final game, Pats vs. Chargers, Sunday, 4:30, CBS.

Battle of the bands: In the Chargers section of the San Diego Union Tribune today, Bolts' disco-fueled theme hot as ever. Listen to an mp3 of San Diego Super Chargers by Captain Q.B. and the Big Boys.

Patriots QB Tom Brady, former QB Doug Flutie and tackle Matt Light "sing" karaoke -- Garth Brooks' Friends in Low Places (lyrics) They were taking part in a fundraiser organized by Larry Izzo at the Avalon Ballroom in Boston to benefit the families of American troops in October 2005. The Boston Globe covered it (second item).

Peyton Manning joke: This is traveling on the Internets. I got it in email from my brother. You may have heard it with different characters, but I like it this way:

Peyton Manning, after living a full life, died. When he got to heaven, God was showing him around. They came to a modest little house with a faded Colts flag in the window. "This house is yours for eternity, Peyton," said God.

"This is very special; not everyone gets a house up here."

Peyton felt special, indeed, and walked up to his house. On his way up the porch, he noticed another house just around the corner. It was a 3-story mansion with a red, white and blue sidewalk, a 50 foot tall flagpole with an enormous Patriots logo flag, and in every window, a Patriots towel.

Peyton looked at God and said "God, I'm not trying to be ungrateful, but I have a question. I was an all-pro QB, I hold many NFL records, and I even went to the Hall of Fame."

God said "So what's your point Peyton?"

"Well, why does Tom Brady get such a better house than me?"

God chuckled, and said "Peyton, that's not Tom's house, it's mine."

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 2:29 PM | Permalink

What Iran looks like; How America looked in the '40s: Homepage in newspaper's windows

Iran today: Discovering Iran (photos). Stunning photos of Tehran and environs -- buildings, people, public art, nature, people napping in a traffic jam -- fresh.

Here are a few, but the set is more than these, and well worth a click:

When American men wore hats: At the interesting photo blog knuttz.net, a large collection of USA Vintage Pictures (1939-1943). America is quieter, emptier, dustier.

This photo shows the Brockton (Mass.) Enterprise displaying hand-lettered headlines and leads in its windows. (This is a detail of a larger photo.)

Update: Click this link, or the photo above, for a larger image that a click makes even larger -- large enough to read much of the news.

That storefront window is the forerunner of a news site's homepage. The "links" -- headlines without their stories -- are understood to go to the full paper. People come by frequently to see what's new.

The hawking newsboy of old movies could deliver news alerts on your mobile:

(The Firefox extension Image Zoom can magnify or reduce any image right in the Web page, on the fly. It's free, of course.)

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 4:51 AM | Permalink

January 11, 2007

Anti-Drudge No. 2, Iraq speech reax; PhotoCon finalists; Borges, poets' mp3s; Don't boil in Ziplocs

HinesSight, by Oregon writer Brian Hines Richard Hines, bills itself as the "Anti-Drudge" (not to be confused with Rogers Cadenhead's original Drudge Retort at drudge.com).

(My apologies to Richard Hines for misattributing his site.)

Today -- when reactions to, and the aftermath of, President Bush's speech last night march down the page -- may be the day to discover it, if you're not thrilled about the "surge."

Lots of lefty links on the left, with lighter stuff on the right sidebar.

Also, Political Bulletin at U.S. News does a reaction wrap so you don't have to: Media Pounds Bush Iraq Plans.

Winning photos: The photographers at Digital Grin are voting for their Photo of the Year. The detail above is from my favorite -- I've never seen a hungry little bird from that angle before.

Mp3s: Jorge Luis Borges audio resurfaces.

Here are excerpts from two of the six Norton Lectures that Jorge Luis Borges delivered at Harvard University in the fall of 1967 and spring of 1968. The recordings of these six lectures, only lately discovered in the Harvard University Archives, uniquely capture the cadences, candor, wit, and remarkable erudition of one of the most extraordinary and enduring literary voices of our age. Through a twist of fate that the author of Labyrinths himself would have relished, these lost lectures return to us now--in Borges's own voice.

And he's speaking English.

Pennsound, an mp3 archive at the U. of Pennsylvania writing program, has released 19 hours of William Carlos Williams reading his poetry. He's the newest addition to a growing list of featured authors that includes Guillaume Apollinaire, Allen Ginsberg, Ezra Pound, R.I.'s own Rosmarie Waldrop (pictured at right), Gertrude Stein, Robert Creeley, Vachel Lindsay and many more.

No brainer: Ziploc Omelets may be Toxic: Who knew that boiling omelets in a Ziploc bag was a trend? Doesn't the aroma of melting plastic suggest something is a bit off here?

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:46 AM | Permalink

January 10, 2007

iPhone ($499/$599) pix and analysis; Public can purchase $100 laptop, if...

iPhone: $499 (4 gig)/$599 (8 gig)

Steve Jobs' Macworld 2007 Keynote, the video. MacWorld covers it.

Dueling photos at Gizmodo and at Engadget.

OSNews: An Initial Analysis on the Apple iPhone

More my speed: From the BBC, Public can purchase $100 laptop

The backers of the One Laptop Per Child project plan to release the machine on general sale next year.

But customers will have to buy two laptops at once - with the second going to the developing world.

Five million of the laptops will be delivered to developing nations this summer, in one of the most ambitious educational exercises ever undertaken.

Michalis Bletsas, chief connectivity officer for the project, said they were working with eBay to sell the machine....

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:47 AM | Permalink

January 9, 2007

Rugs of war; Chargers eye Pats; BCS reax; U.S. won't publish secret ID law; Top freeware

Grim folk art: Rugs of War is a blog devoted to war motifs in rug weaving. There's a book coming, whose cover is pictured at right.

War Rug Motifs is a page of thumbnails at warrug.com, which sells them.

Afghan War Rugs focuses on just those.

Not unrelated: Postcards from The Great War, 1914-1918, at Atlanta's Emory University Library.

The drumbeat begins: Chargers know the Pats' Super hype rings true

BCS reax: Joy and griping at The Gainesville Sun and The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, respectively.

Bus-plungers*: The Most Dangerous Roads in the World at Dark Roasted Blend. Lots of photos. And one truly terrifying tourist hiking trail in China, detail below.

*The headline comes from a phenomenon noted by wire editors -- third-world busses seemed to "plunge" with alarming frequency. An early site called busplunge.org catalogued the disasters. (It ow redirects to this link. The site showed up in my very first blog post in March 2002. Jack Shafer at Slate wrote about the phenomenon last November: The Rise and Fall of the "Bus Plunge" Story.

Gilmore walks, busses: The Supreme Court has let stand an appeals court ruling requiring John Gilmore to show ID at airports. From SCOTUS to Gilmore: Petition for Cert Denied,

John Gilmore is disappointed that the Supreme Court refused to act on the danger posed by the unconstitutional position of the TSA, and its refusal to release the text of the law that it uses to require travelers to show identification. In his Petition for Certiorari, John asked the Court to decide whether the government may keep secret a law that affects millions of Americans every month, when the government has acknowledged what it claims are the contents of the law, and despite the fact that the government has never enunciated any reasonable basis for maintaining secrecy. This country has a remarkable history of publishing its laws, to give the public notice of the behavior the government demands of them. John has pursued this effort because, as he said on www.papersplease.org, "[u]ntil Americans have the ability to know the contents of the laws being applied to them, our Republic is in danger."

John hoped that the Supreme Court would intervene, and make clear that the government cannot deprive the public of the text of the laws that bind them. This issue now is left to the political process. We must insist that our elected representatives control the TSA, and hold it accountable for its actions by, first, demanding that it make public this and any other laws it promulgates to bind the public...

Here's the background -- the incident that started it all. You can find out more about Gilmore, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, at Wikipedia.

Maddening game: Swap Job is an oddly addicting little game that looks like your basic "Swap squares so you have three matching images," but that's only part one. When you swap, the green backgrounds of the squares turn yellow. The object is to turn all the backgrounds yellow, which introduces a maddening randomness to it all. (Sometimes this means you ignore matches in order to concentrate on those squares whose color has not yet changed.) The lower corners are usually the hardest.

Bombs may appear, which turn adjacent squares yellow, and wild cards remove all squares of one icon.

You may still have trouble getting past the first level.

(You might want to turn the sound off. Through my headphones -- which are sitting on my desk -- I can hear an annoying kid urging me to "Hurry up!" when I have no moves, and a loud ticking begins when time grows short.)

Just links: TOP 300 Freeware software! Good list, with categories, augmented by readers' suggestions in comments.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:04 AM | Permalink

January 6, 2007

Blogs to discover; Weekend game; Football food; Rock wonk in House

With the telltale handoff of A World of Friday Links, Shelley Powers goes offline for two weeks, leaving her readers with links to a passel of other bloggers.

...spending more time offline has become my highest priority. As Seth would affirm, Life triumphs Blogging. Perhaps we should extend that to: it may seem as if the world comes to you when you sit in that chair and look into that screen, but the computer is no substitute for a walk in the woods, a trip to the beach, time spent with family and/or friends, or finally creating that first bookbinding project that you won't be embarrassed to show other people. Showing other people, including other webloggers, because in the question of blogging triumphing real life and real life triumphing over blogging, balance triumphs over all....

To the rest of the world, we're off on the sidelines, sitting life out at a keyboard.

As she intends, it will take a while to read all the blog posts she references (and the other posts surrounding them) at each blog.

Shelley links to yesterday's Pelosi post here, and I'm glad. I'd like to see that one find its readers.

Weekend game: Double Maze is a free online dual puzzle. What happens on the left happens on the right, with barricades to make them different paths.

Not as hard as it seems, once you get the hang of it. No penalty for starting over, so feel free to "die" while you're figuring it out.

Ignore the Russian text. All you need to know is "Use the arrow keys."

What American Dream? The accomplished and well-off Kurt Andersen drops a thought bubble about the economy...

The spectacle of a few ecstatic big winners encourages the losers to believe that, hey, they might get lucky and win, too. We have, in effect, turned the U.S. into a winner-take-all casino economy, substituting the gambling hall for the factory floor as our governing economic metaphor, an assembly of individual strangers whose fortunes depend overwhelmingly on random luck rather than collective hard work. And it’s been unwitting synergy, not unrelated coincidence, that actual casino gambling has become ubiquitous in America at the same time.

...that sets up a call for a new populism (Power to the people):

I think practical-minded political majorities can be brought together to fix the big, important things that have nothing to do with religious faith or sex. In polls, between 60 and 70 percent of people now think “it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have health-care coverage” “even if taxes must be raised.” Universal health coverage, protecting everyone against the mammoth downside economic risk of illness, would empower people to take constructive economic risks, freeing them to move to new jobs or start new businesses. We could enact de facto compensation caps for top executives, either by limiting the tax deductibility of CEO pay or, as in Britain, by making CEO pay subject to a shareholder vote every year. We can raise—and certainly not further reduce—taxes on the extremely well-to-do.

We’ve had a bracing, invigorating run of pedal-to-the-metal hypercapitalism, but now it’s time to ease up and share the wealth some. We can afford to make life a little more fair and a lot less scary for most people. It’s not only a matter of virtue and national self-image. Because the future that frightens me isn’t so much a too-Hispanic U.S. caused by unchecked Mexican immigration, but a Latin Americanized society with a high-living, blithely callous oligarchy gated off from a growing mass of screwed-over peons. I think we need to put up with the Republicans’ complaining about “class war!” now in order to avoid a real one later.

The piece is American Roulette in New York Magazine.

Rock wonk in the House: Mr. Rock ’n’ Roll Goes to Congress. The Times follows former Orleans frontman John Hall into the House.

Here's his bio at his campaign site; his music site; the Orleans site; that of Sue Kelly, the GOP Gingrich-era Rep. whom he defeated, and his new placeholder Congressional site.

Football food: This recipe at The (Lakeland, Fla.) Ledger caught my eye. Others at this link - Appetizer Recipes - may also interest you.

OYSTER-AND-ARTICHOKE DIP

1 quart; 32 servings

●1 cup oysters, fresh
● 1/4 cup oyster liquor (liquid of the oysters)
● 1/2 cup milk
● 3/4 pound cream cheese, softened
● 1/2 cup Parmesan, freshly grated
● 1/3 cup green onion, chopped
●2 teaspoons garlic, minced
●2 large eggs, beaten
●1 tablespoon lemon juice, freshly squeezed
●1 cup drained, jarred or thawed artichoke hearts, patted dry
●1 teaspoon salt
●2 teaspoons Creole seasoning such as Tony Chachere's seasoning mix (available in groceries)
● 1/4 teaspoon black pepper, freshly ground
●1 tablespoon hot sauce
●Butter, as needed

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Place oysters in small, stainless-steel sauce pot with oyster liquor and milk.

Simmer 6-7 minutes until oysters are cooked thoroughly. Strain, reserve liquid and allow oysters to cool. Once they have cooled, roughly chop oysters.

In a food processor, combine cream cheese, reserved oyster broth, Parmesan, green onions, garlic, eggs and lemon juice; pulse until smooth. Add artichokes, salt, Creole seasoning, pepper and hot sauce; pulse until just mixed. Fold in chopped oysters by hand.

Transfer mixture to buttered, deep 1-quart casserole dish; bake until mixture is lightly browned and set - approximately 30 minutes.

Serve warm with crackers.

-From "Deep South Parties" by Robert St. John (Hyperion)

NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION PER SERVING: Calories, 56.6; protein, 2.3 grams; carbohydrates, 1.8 grams; total fat, 4.6 grams; cholesterol, 29.0 milligrams; saturated fat, 2.7 grams; dietary fiber, 0.3 gram; sodium, 192.5 milligrams; sugar, 0.5 gram; vitamin A, 56.3 retinol equivalents; vitamin C, 1.6 milligrams; calcium, 34.5 milligrams; iron, 0.6 milligram; alcohol, 0 grams

You may also like Cornbread, spinach recipes enhance new year's flavors

There's also Steamy Smoked Oyster Dip and lots more Seafood Appetizer Recipes at Fisherman's Express.

Pats pundit links tomorrow.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 7:54 AM | Permalink

January 5, 2007

Nancy Pelosi: Grandma Speaker makes history, celebrates with surviving Dead, Wyclef Jean, Carole King...

Nancy Pelosi becomes Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Faye Fiore covered the sea change for the Los Angeles Times:

WASHINGTON — From on high, up in the visitor's gallery, the event playing out on the House floor looked to be either a christening or something more solemn.

On one side of the room, there was Nancy Pelosi holding her infant grandson, his white receiving blanket draped over her aubergine skirt.

Over on the other side, morose Republicans stared at their shoes.

As the congresswoman from San Francisco was sworn in Thursday as the first female speaker of the House, the GOP officially left behind 12 years of power, and children ruled the day.

It made for an interesting tableau. Not only is the 66-year-old Pelosi the first mother to take ownership of the big chair, she is the first grandmother, and she made sure the nation knew it.

Minutes after the House convened at noon, she marched down the center aisle with her grandchildren — five boys and a girl. They fiddled with the goose-neck mike on the table near her seat. They did splits in the aisles. And Pelosi held the baby like a football as he fell asleep in the noisy chamber.

"For our daughters and granddaughters," she said to roaring cheers in her first address as speaker, "today we have broken the marble ceiling."

Even Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), who might have been speaker if his party had held the House, put aside partisanship and the obvious after-gloom of defeat.

"My fellow Americans," he told the House, "whether you are a Republican or a Democrat or an independent, today is cause for celebration."

Pelosi's personal story and the speech that highlighted it managed to co-opt the Republican values platform in one fell swoop, highlighting her deep Roman Catholic faith, her 43-year marriage, her five children who gave her the confidence to "go from the kitchen to the Congress," and her grandchildren who have seemed omnipresent throughout this week's celebrations.

When the speech ended, she invited all the children in the chamber to come up and touch the big gavel, ever the cunning politician expertly scripting the perfect photo: America's new House speaker, second in line for the presidency, surrounded by the satin ribbon and miniature blue blazer set.

The day seemed to be her answer to outgoing Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), who had asked voters before the election: "Do we really want Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco values leading the culture war?"

Those tuning in to watch a wacky liberal were probably disappointed.

She made prominent mention of her long marriage to Paul Pelosi; of her brother, a former mayor of Baltimore; of her deceased parents, who devoted their lives to public service and are now with "the angels."

Her short speech was laced with enough biblical references to rival the GOP's most religious right, including a prayer from St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of San Francisco: "Where there is darkness, may we bring light, where there is hatred, may we bring love, and where there is despair, may we bring hope."...

The first time I heard that prayer, I was a little girl in an America where, we were told, my brother could grow up to be president, and I could become a teacher or a nurse.

Maybe it's the look on Nancy Pelosi's face, or on her grandson's, but the photo above is the one for framing, the day America changed.

Nancy is a Deadhead: Digital Journal: What A Long Strange Trip It's Been:

The new House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, celebrated her first night by throwing a party with a house band not quite everyone will recognize.

Let's just get it out of the way now. Nancy Pelosi is a Deadhead. "'Ms. Pelosi is a huge Dead fan,' her spokeswoman said. The Dead you say? Or perhaps it should say The Grateful Dead. The remaining members of the American band the Grateful Dead played tonight for the party celebrating the new re balancing of power and the installation of Nancy Pelosi as the Speaker of the House. The live music concert touted as "on January 4th, Nancy Pelosi Presents" wound down about 10:30pm EST.

The "House Band", which featured three members of The Grateful Dead as well as members from the band Phish and The Allman Brothers Bandopened the show with a touching "End of the Innocence' by Bruce Hornsby followed by "Touch of Grey" by The Grateful Dead. Then Tony Bennet sang"The Best is Yet to Come" and "I Left My Heart in San Francisco". Near the end of the concert, Wyclef Jean joined the house band to close the live music with Aiko Aiko. The encore was "You've Got a Friend". ...

"TennJed," posting on the Ratboard forums at Ratdog (fan site for the band led by Grateful Dead guitarist, singer, songwriter and founding member Bob Weir) has the set list and band photos, as well as the "Nancy dancing" photo above.

The House Democratic Leadership &
The House Democratic Caucus
For a Celebration Concert Honoring
Speaker Nancy Pelosi
with Special Musical Performances by
Tony Bennett
Carole King
Wyclef Jean
And
Your House Band
Featuring
Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Bob Weir,
Bruce Hornsby, Warren Haynes,
Mike Gordon, and Special Guests
With Special Appearances by
Amy Brenneman
Richard Gere

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 8:52 AM | Permalink

January 4, 2007

Affordable expat living; James Brown: a veteran rock critic's memories; What's 200 calories?; Virtual tour of 10 Downing

Where does the greenback go farthest?

I joke that, barring a winning PowerBall number, I'll never be able to retire in America. Years ago, while editing a travel section, I came across a story about American retirees in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico, crowing that they'd be paupers in the States but there they could afford good Scotch.

If you're harboring similar thoughts, Burma is your best bet. In other ways, it may not be:

A $100 dollar Social Security check from America would buy you $1,073.30 worth of the Burmese lifestyle, such as it is.

I think I'd prefer Jamaica, actually. Here's the entire list, from The Audacious Epigone, who -- way too young to retire -- is only thinking of running away

Please, Please, Please:10 Memorable Moments with James Brown. I missed this on vacation, but veteran rock critic Wayne Robins digs up his own memories for a unique memorial.

You say you want a resolution? What Does 200 Calories Look Like? Photos of foods in the amounts that deliver 200 calories. The stated weights are in grams, so you may need to know that 28.35 grams is an ounce. Here's a calculator.)

So what's what? Six pounds of celery; a pound and a quarter of broccoli; nearly a half-pound of smoked turkey; 3 eggs... all 200 calories.

Sad: One and three-quarters ounces of cheddar cheese or one ounce of peanut butter or mixed nuts -- paltry amounts -- contain 200 calories.

More at the link.

Tony's place: 10 Downing Street, the virtual tour. Like the White House, it's impressive but not cozy.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 6:54 AM | Permalink

January 3, 2007

Time-lapse Picasso; College team nicknames; Phones for 'boomers and their parents'; Russian high-rise art; Painting with radioactivity

Unseen hand: You can watch this Picasso painting emerge in a two-minute time lapse video.

According to art blog Tinselman (The Mystery of Picasso),

In 1955, French director, Henri-Georges Clouzot had the most amazing idea. He would film Pablo Picasso as he painted 20 artworks, ranging from quick sketches to widescreen color oil paintings.

...Unfortunately, because of contractual obligation, almost all of the art created for this film was destroyed at the end of the production.

The mighty Reddies and other improbable monikers: Watching the college bowl games, I marveled at the silliness of burly linebackers and other very big men calling themselves wolverines (Michigan), eagles (Boston College), tigers (Clemson) and terrapins (Maryland). It sounds like cabin assignments at summer camp.

College Nicknames lays out all the monikers, and suggests these matchups could be even odder:
The Tomcats --- Thiel College (Greenville, Pennsylvania) -- against the Great Danes of the University at Albany (N.Y.) or any of a coupla dozen Bulldogs.

The Blue Boys of Illinois College vs. the Wonder Boys of Arkansas Tech.

The Whittier (Calif.) Poets could take on the Mastodons of Indiana University.

How would you like to be a Super Bee (U. of Baltimore), a Horned Frog (Texas Christian), a Hustlin' Owl (Oregon Tech), a Violet (NYU), a Student Prince (Heidelberg College, Ohio) or a Troll (Trinity Christian College, Ill.)?

Most apt: The Black Flies of the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. Imagine the mascot. Imagine them playing the Banana Slugs of UC Santa Cruz...

Cellphones for dummies: 'Phones for boomers & their parents' read the headline on one story about the no-brainer JitterBug cellphones. (Get it? The jitterbug was the dance of the big-band era and of American Bandstand.)

Not especially cheap, but the operators, they promise, will be courteous. (It's a proprietary network, with operators who'll program your phone for you or look up numbers.)

Calling it "Just a Phone" would have avoided the unfortunate association with the camp "I've fallen and I can't get up..." commercials of a generation ago.

Life in trompe l'oeil: Real Urban Art: In a Moscow suburb, "As an experiment the dull gray houses were painted to different colours."

Amazing close-ups make it seem like these folks are living in Lollipop Land.

Unhealthy glow: Undark and the Radium Girls details the sad tale of radium poisoning in the factory workers who painted the glow-in-the-dark luminescence on watch dials at US Radium.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 6:00 AM | Permalink

January 2, 2007

Fixing a hot PC; NFL playoffs picture; Vacation report

What I did on my vacation: My computer fan had been getting loud. If I opened a couple of dozen Firefox tabs, it sounded like a noisy air conditioner. Occasionally, it crashed. But it still generally worked --even if it did drown out the TV -- and I had Christmas shopping to do and a job to go to. There just wasn't time to delve deeper.

Finally, in the waning days of vacation, I searched around and found a little free utility called Speedfan that might tell me which fan was failing.

Amazingly, when I ran it, the fans looked fine, but a flaming icon warned that the temperature of my CPU -- the computer itself -- was 67 degrees Celsius -- that's 153 F. (Googling around some more, I found it should be in the 40s.)

Old-house dust. Cat hair. They must be blocking the vents inside the computer.

The HP support site offers a troubleshooting page with diagrams of where the fans are.

Off came the case. Sure enough, solid walls of dust had accumulated. A vacuum-cleaner hose stuffed into a kitchen funnel took care of that.

When it restarted, the computer was nearly silent, quietly purring as it did when it was new (My family pooled their pennies to give it to me last Christmas.) Speedfan now shows the CPU temperature as 41 degrees C -- that's 106 F.

Repair cost: $0.

This is fairly common as computers age. I'll pull the case a coupla times a year now that I know how to prevent this.

Coffee with a 'drop' of milk. This photo by an amateur photographer wows them at DPChallenge, a digital photography contest site. IreneM writes,

It took a LOT of images and about 5 hours of drip, drip, dripping milk into coffee with a pipette to get this one but it’s been worth it in the end. For the lighting I used a Nikon SB 800 on one side of the coffee and a Metz slave flash on the other. The biggest problem I had (apart from getting the splash in the first place) was getting the coffee colour bright enough without blowing the white of the milk.

NFL playoffs: AP quotes N.Y. Jets wide receiver Laveranues Coles (Mangini, Jets face familiar opponent in first round of playoffs):

"I guess we didn't have much luck, I can say that much -- any time you have to go play against the Patriots," Coles said Monday. "They're an excellent football team and I really didn't want to play them in the first round."

That's how I felt about Denver -- but the Broncos were eliminated from playoff contention Sunday by the lowly San Francisco 49ers in overtime. I wasn't looking forward to Indy, either.

But Denver's loss means Kansas City will face Indy this weekend, and running back Larry Johnson could be the Colts' biggest headache. Johnson broke the NFL record for rushing attempts in a season Sunday with 416. In that game he had 33 carries for 138 yards and three touchdowns as Kansas City beat Jacksonville, 35–30. Indy's defense famously can't stop the run, relying instead on Peyton Manning's offensive prowess in the air.

Manning's autopassing could also be threatened by his old Patriots nemesis Ty Law, now catching interceptions for KC.

It's going to be a glorious weekend on the couch.

The playoff schedule:

Saturday, Jan. 6
4:30 p.m. on NBC -- Kansas City Chiefs (9-7) at Indianapolis Colts (12-4)
8:00 p.m. on NBC -- Dallas Cowboys (9-7) at Seattle Seahawks (9-7)

Sunday, January 7
1:00 p.m. on CBS -- New York Jets (10-6) at New England Patriots (12-4)
4:30 p.m. on FOX -- N.Y. Giants (8-8) at Philadelphia Eagles (10-6)

The Super Bowl is Feb. 4.

Broncos tragedy: Rocky Mountain News has extensive coverage of the fatal shooting of Denver Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams in a limo early New Year's morning.

Other vacation moments: During the Rose Bowl, I paused the game and fired up the video of Fleetwood Mac recording Tusk with the USC marching band to show the family.

James Brown, Gerald Ford and Saddam Hussein arrived together at the pearly gates, and this time, I just watched, without firing up the forebrain to extrude words. Tabloid Baby stepped up to offer a match-the-tributes quiz.

The Christmas dinner update: All turkeyed out, our family opted for a beef tenderloin cut into Chateaubriand steaks. It was incredibly tender and tasty, and much less labor intensive than rising at dawn to stuff a bird, making gravy and finding burners for all the traditional sides. And, to my surprise, it even cost less.

There were even leftovers after five tore into a three-pound hunk o' meat, but that might be due to the dips and cheese of the cocktail hour before dinner.

I'd definitely do it again. There's way too much going on at Christmas to get frazzled over turkey.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:43 AM | Permalink