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Main page March 29, 2007JibJab is back: What We Call the News; Karl Rover rap videoThe two-minute video was made to show at Wednesday night's annual TV and Radio Correspondence dinner in Washington DC. There's video of presidential aide Karl Rove rapping at the same event. The whole shebang can be seen at C-Span, linked for now on the homepage there. Imagine if real life had so many TV people around. I've been working long hours on a big project, so blogging is necessarily "link and run" for a couple of days. Posted by Sheila Lennon 'Fail better'
Tom Phillips: "Portraits: Samuel Beckett"
Samuel Beckett watching Waiting for Godot. Marlene Dietrich: 'No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' National Portrait Gallery (Oldest, first, largest...) via wood s lot Posted by Sheila Lennon March 27, 2007Hidden Picasso; Backchannel for WH emails draws House scrutiny; Life magazine folding, photo archive to go online
A Hidden Picasso: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art offers a do-it-yourself reenactment of the discovery of a hidden painting beneath Picasso's Street Scene, which the museum owns. Sliders let you X-ray the top painting, then add color to the black and white image seen on the scan. (I'm as fascinated by the interactivity as by the painting -- Flash tends to force its own speed and timing on readers, so handing control over to us is refreshing.) A Democratic House committee chairman yesterday told the Republican National Committee and the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign to retain copies of all e-mails sent or received by White House officials using e-mail accounts under their control, raising the political stakes in the congressional inquiry into U.S. attorneys' firings. Unburied: A reader emailed that my RSS feed has been down. I edited out some text in one entry that it seemed to be choking on, and the feed came back up. Unexpected upside of this is that I turned on the feed reader in my Thunderbird email program, so blog headlines now arrive to their own folder, and look like emails. Life ends again: Life Magazine folds, blaming newspapers, and plans to put its photo archives on the Web for free for you and me, says the Times. Paperwork? Filling Their Sales: If organic food is so popular, why are so few farms transitioning their land? Smart and informed commenters, some of them farmers, push back a bit in several directions, some dismissing the count: "The number of organic-practicing farms (I call them ecological farmers) in the country is probably triple the number of organically-certified farms." At Grist Magazine, which, at the bottom of its pages, bears the slogans, "A beacon in the smog" and "Gloom and doom with a sense of humor." Posted by Sheila Lennon March 26, 2007Transcript: Couric with the Edwardses; Harleys for mangoes; Bill Maher rant video
Katie Couric: Here you're staring at possible death... Harleys for mangoes: That headline -- which would be an interesting T-shirt message -- is more musical than the story. India to allow Harley Davidson import (For Mangoes). Times of India: NEW DELHI: It's going to be mangoes in return for Harley Davidson bikes. In a quid pro quo, India is going to allow the import of a specified number of the iconic motorcycles at lower duty, while US is finally going to announce the entry of Indian mangoes.
Posted by Sheila Lennon gwb43.com: Parallel White House email system?Kathy Gill, author of the U.S. Politics: Current Events blog at NYT-owned About.com, takes on a story that may be too geeky for for both print media and the soundbite culture: GWB43.com, AttorneyGate and Federal Records Requirements. Here's how it starts: Last week, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) asked Congress to investigate White House staff use of "gwb43.com" e-mail addresses while conducting official government business. (tip) The domain name is owned by the Republican National Committee (see a screenshot of whois registry info) and was probably created as a means for staffers to have e-mail conversations about the 2004 election while at work (bypassing the prohibited White House mail servers). Here's a shot of one of those emails, at Washington Monthly, which ends with "Dammit, it was sent to Susan on her rnc pager and was not supposed to go into the WH system." (Susan B. Ralston...Special Assistant to the President & Assistant to the Senior Advisor Karl Rove, resigned October 6, 2006, "after disclosures that she accepted gifts from and passed information to now-convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff... -- Sourcewatch) Hugely popular and partisan Democratic blog Daily Kos is all over this gwb43.com story. AP mentioned gwb43.com briefly in this March 13 story: Gonzales Rejects Calls for Resignation And in one on March 24, cited, with comments, from Republican site FreeRepublic.com. Stay tuned... Related: Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, credited with bringing this story to national attention, answering those "who seem to be asking, genuinely, what the big deal is": ...there appears to have been a whole process in place to root out prosecutors who wouldn't prostitute their offices for partisan goals. Indeed, what sort of permanent advantage would go to the party in the White House if they were to install only federal prosecutors who would agree to prosecute potential candidates of the opposing party? Posted by Sheila Lennon March 25, 2007Another 'Who killed JFK?' answer; War on Terror diminishes us; Onion to launch video channel
Rolling Stone: The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt. Who killed JFK? The Watergate burglar and ex-CIA man, before he died in January, made a diagram for his son that began with "LBJ," says Saint John Hunt. Or was this yet another spook's diversion? Push back: Paranoia runs deep -- Terrorized by 'War on Terror': How a Three-Word Mantra Has Undermined America by Zbigniew Brzezinski. WaPo: The culture of fear is like a genie that has been let out of its bottle. It acquires a life of its own -- and can become demoralizing. America today is not the self-confident and determined nation that responded to Pearl Harbor; nor is it the America that heard from its leader, at another moment of crisis, the powerful words "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; nor is it the calm America that waged the Cold War with quiet persistence despite the knowledge that a real war could be initiated abruptly within minutes and prompt the death of 100 million Americans within just a few hours. We are now divided, uncertain and potentially very susceptible to panic in the event of another terrorist act in the United States itself. --Robert Fisk: The crushing fear that stalks America: The country is not at war. It is the US military that is engaged in an Iraqi conflict. At The Independent, U.K., ...And I realise that the girl in Dr Noll's seminar isn't spouting this stuff about "jihadists" travelling from Iraq to America because she supports Bush. She is just frightened. She is genuinely afraid of all the "terror" warnings, the supposed "jihadists" threats, the red "terror" alerts and the purple alerts and all the other colour-coded instruments of fear. She believes her president, and her president has done Osama bin Laden's job for him: he has crushed this young woman's spirit and courage. If you spend your life afraid of dying, you aren't really living: you're a wimp. Because death is inevitable, but not, for most of us, right now. More fake news: WSJ: On Tuesday, the satirical newspaper The Onion plans to launch a video Web site... Called Onion News Network, the site will parody the visual style and breathless reporting of 24-hour cable news networks like CNN. In a promotional video currently available on the site, ONN promises TV news that's "faster," "harder," "scarier" and "all-knowing." Escalation: Reader Bill Marsland emailed, "Thanks for the new Tom Paxton. I'd like to find the original to listen to." Here it is: "Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation" written and performed by Tom Paxton (1965). Paxton has updated its lyrics for "George W. Told The Nation") Posted by Sheila Lennon March 24, 2007Wordy tattoo; Mp3s: Faces (early Rod Stewart); Gardening yet?Words in skin:
A Tattoo for the Educated Man at quixoticals: a gallery of unusual things. (Yes, you can enlarge it there so it's readable by clicking on it.)
Here's a detail -- the very bottom section -- blown up. Today, the author -- Canadian blogger Christopher Trottier -- posts More Thoughts on the Tattoo responding to commenters who find it "pretentious, contrived, and smug." Don't miss the Motorcycle Made Out of Balloons.
Rock roots: Early spring: Liz Donovan offers a lovely intro (Organic longing) to Joel Achenbach's WaPo column (Dirt Rich) about his hippie parents' organic gardening. Here's how Joel starts, When I was growing up in Florida, my mom and stepdad planned to save the world through organic gardening. Go find the counterculture and make a hard left: There we were, virtuous, alternative, crunchy before crunchy was cool. We labored under a brutal sun, hacking the earth, yanking weeds, swatting bugs, beseeching the gods to let food emerge from sandy soil that only a pine tree could love. We had discovered the future, and it looked strangely like a scene out of the Old Testament. He inspires Liz, who moved a couple of years ago from Miami to North Carolina, to confess, I can't grow vegetables. I do OK with flowers. But somehow I just can't get plants to produce food for me, at least not in any useful quantity. (I'm great at scavenging: wild blackberries, peaches from the trees that were already growing here when we bought the place, mangos, citrus and avocados at our old South Miami house; I did manage to grow a wonderful key lime tree from seed and reap the harvest several years before leaving...) Here in southern New England, winter came late -- no snow till January -- and the forecast is "...MORE SPRINGTIME ACCUMULATING SNOWFALL EXPECTED TONIGHT..." The daffodils in our raised bed are about two inches up, the soil around them in a few places disturbed yesterday by squirrels looking for tulips. Our tulip bulbs have spent the winter under wire mesh screening the squirrels can't move, and haven't poked up yet. Squirrels don't like daffodils, so we'll see far more of them than tulips next month, except in the wealthy neighborhoods, where gardening services haul in tulips already in bloom and overnight a perfect spring landscape appears.
No, she said, playfully chiding me for my impatience, we've barely started seeds in the greenhouses. But she frugally allowed that if I had seeds left over from last year, I could start some spinach if I were prepared to lose it to a hard frost. Maybe I'll wait till tomorrow, see if that predicted one to three inches actually happens, or turns to rain. If it's rain, I plant. Posted by Sheila Lennon March 22, 2007Vonnegut's 8 rules for writing fiction; Edwards' bad news: News sites break it first but wrong; Gisele denies pregnancyNot bad at writing rules, either: Kurt Vonnegut, Eight rules for writing fiction. Readers will especially appreciate the first: 1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. This one's fresh: 3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. Worth the click. The Internet made me do it: Some are blaming the Internet for Politico.com's rushing out with a one-source wrong story that John Edwards would suspend his presidential campaign because his wife Elizabeth would again be treated for cancer. This is like blaming the telephone. How Politico Got It Wrong by Ben Smith of Politico.com. When I first landed in this newsroom, way before we'd heard of the Internet, the old timers told me about an old slogan, "UPI gets it first, AP gets it right." This may still be true. Google News shows this: Report: Edwards suspending campaign AP didn't run with it. Many Get Edwards 'Scoop' Wrong -- Based on Single Source at Editor & Publisher. Reuters ran with a single source, too. p.s.: Boston Globe: Bundchen bumps Brady baby rumors Posted by Sheila Lennon Desktop for a rainy day
This is my desktop photo right now -- from Leopolis, the Ukrainian city of L'viv. Via wood s lot. Busy day ahead, blogging will happen later. Posted by Sheila Lennon March 21, 2007U.S. Attorney: 'Why I Was Fired'; 18-day gap in WH emails; Tom Paxton updates LBJ song for GWB; Best 2006 books
Josh Marshall reports there's an 18-day gap in the released White House emails on the firings, discovered by one of his army of citizen readers calling himself DonP in this thread dated March 20, 2007 02:19 AM. The email of Nov 15 ends with "Who will determine if this requires the President's attention" and Meiers says it will take a while as he is gone. The plan attached (page 15) to that says to begin making calls on Nov 15. Sampson had also recommended informing Karl. Comparison to Rosemary Woods was swift and inevitable. Going through these things twice: Lyndon Johnson told the nation, Now he's updated it: Here's George W. Told The Nation (download) George W. told the nation, Blogs together: We have a clean new index of all the Projo blogs, with headline links to each blog's three latest posts. Book lists: Best of 2006: Reading lists for adults and children via Rebecca Blood. I read these, plug a promising title on Amazon, then click my Library bookmarklet (you can get one over there on the right side of the page) and go right to the library catalogue. If they have the book, I request it. Eventually, a phone call tells me it's waiting at my branch. Posted by Sheila Lennon March 20, 2007Spring began at 8:08 p.m.
It's Spring. Spring is also the title of the photo set by St. Louis blogger Shelley Powers that includes this wonderful moment, from a human perspective. And it's the day that's as long as the night, except in Guam: The first day of spring is called the vernal equinox and vernal equinox directly translates from the Latin as Green Equal Night. In theory, all parts of the world have a 12-hour day and a 12-hour night. It isn't true here, our "green equal night" occurred last Monday, the 12th of March, when the sun rose and set at 6:31. Spring or vernal equinox occurs when the sun is straight over the equator and that will happen at 10:06 a.m. next Wednesday. Discover Magazine relaunched today with the natural event in mind, according to its press release, The website relaunch will coincide with the Spring Equinox (March 20), a longstanding symbol of rebirth and renewal. And grapes. The nifty video player that leads its homepage alternates between a YouTube-style "Play" arrow and a video still of a lovely bunch of blue grapes. Grapes are lush symbols, too. Looking up? Tonight's Sky for Tuesday, Mar 20 2007 at Earth & Sky. Posted by Sheila Lennon White House emails on Justice firings; Cool ads; History archives: Discover mag, Burpee seedsPrimary sources: The White House emails about the firing of U.S. attorneys released by the House Judiciary Committee.(pdfs) Talking Points Memo, the New York City megablog of Brown PhD Josh Marshall that drove this story for months, dispatched hordes of readers overnight to read and blog the contents of them. Here are their finds so far. Today's Must Read wraps up the mainstream press reaction. (Newsrooms haven't yet tried to muster similar armies of passionate readers.) A couple of thousand more pages are to be released today. Fashion statements: Muslim veils at the BBC. How to distinguish a chador from a burka, hijab, etc. Art sell:
It's part of Cool Ads Update; two pages of 'em at Dark Roasted Blend. History unleashed: Discover Magazine has opened its archives, beginning with 1992, to the public. Expect hits there to soar. Heirlooms:
Burpee Seed Catalog Posted by Sheila Lennon March 19, 2007Providence Geeks to meet Wednesday, with presentation of free software for schoolsProvidence Geeks meet about once a month in the storefront at AS220, 115 Empire Street, to mill, drink beer, dine, and watch a presentation by a geek. The next meet is this Wednesday, from 5:30 p.m. to 9 or so. The presentation: SchoolTool: Managing an International, Philanthropically Funded Open Source Project from a Victorian in Elmwood "by long-time Providence Geek Tom Hoffman. Tom will present SchoolTool, the open source project he manages, and discuss free software philanthropy. Details here. " More on Tom, a longtime Providence blogger: How did a former Providence school teacher end up working for a South African entrepreneur/philanthropist/cosmonaut, managing programmers in Lithuania and users in Nepal? SchoolTool is a project to create free administrative software for schools around the world, written in Python and Zope 3, funded by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. If you've wanted to check these gigs out, this sounds like a good one to start with. It's a comfortable, casual crowd. Everybody gets a nametag, so don't worry about socially awkward moments. Posted by Sheila Lennon March 18, 2007Being Irish: feasting, music and one fiery femaleLater: I wrote this overnight and added a bit more when I woke up. 6:06 a.m. Dijon-Glazed Corned Beef with Cabbage & Potatoes looked like this last night at our house. Tender, moist, but not waterlogged, since it steamed under foil in the oven, this corned beef may be the best I've ever had. The vegetables cooked in the bottom third of the oven, protected by a coat of butter, horseradish and green onions. They far surpassed the plain boiled-dinner versions. (I can praise it lavishly without boasting, because half-Irish Joe actually cooked it all. I was napping on the couch with a book on my lap. All this overnight blogging catches up.) For dinner music, I tuned to Seasonal Sounds on cable. The two songs I best remember from my earliest childhood came up -- Bing Crosby's Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ra (An Irish Lullaby) and Macnamara's Band. I mentally toasted the McQuillians, Gaffneys and Lennons in those memories -- all gone now, like the Victrola and the piano on which Dad played those tunes, and the happy postwar times they shared.
So I was more than relieved to hear two songs that spoke to another strain of Irishness: Na Connerys (The Connerys), a quiet air by a group of Irish musicians who assembled to make this Celtic Sessions album. (A comment on that link at Amazon names them.) I instantly bought the track at eMusic. I'll post the tune for just a few days, so listen up: Na Connerys.mp3. And Lad O'Bierne's Hornpipe/Byrne's Hornpipe by Dave Miller, a Philadelphia classic violinist turned unfrantic fiddler. He offers a different mp3 track from I Love Irish Fiddle Music on his site: Bobby Casey's Hornpipe/The Gravel Walks. I like the fusion. Both tunes might be easy to hear on a Sunday morning. St. Patrick's Day now is a generic ethnic celebration -- Irish Day, to be followed Monday by St. Joseph's Day and zeppole. But its stars, the leprechauns and grand marshals, Bing Crosby and the bishop himself, seem to be the traditional old-boy network.
To the average American, Irish spirituality pretty much boils down to one towering figure: Saint Patrick, the fifth-century Christian evangelist who supposedly evicted the snakes from Ireland and today is commemorated on a day associated more with parades and pub crawls than with piety. But American knowledge of Celtic spirituality and culture is too often limited to the basics. Sure, Patrick may be Ireland's most prominent patron saint, but he's not the only one. Of the three (!) patrons affiliated with Ireland, one is a woman who has a powerful and fascinating history that links her not only with Christian spirituality but with the ancient mysticism of the pagan Celtic past. This figure is Brigit, the Abbess of Kildare.
...Brighid was also seen as a triple Goddess - of poetry, of healing and of smithwork. One of her main symbols was that of the serpent. (Thus Patrick was said by Christians to have driven the serpent from Ireland.) However, after the rise of Christianity in Ireland, Brigid became Saint Brigid and it was her nuns that tended the everlasting flame kept at Kildare - the original symbol of a sun goddess. Beliefnet continues, For centuries, the nuns of Kildare tended a sacred fire dedicated to Brigit on a 20-day cycle. Each of nineteen nuns would watch over the fire for a day, while on the twentieth day the fire was left for Brigit to tend herself. The practice continued until the seventeenth century, when nervous church officials attacked it as a pagan practice. Although the flame was extinguished for some 260 years, a small community of Brighidine nuns returned to Kildare in the early 1990s, and relit the flame, where it continues to burn as a beacon of hope and peace.
-- Brigidine Sisters at Solas Brídhe, Kildare
Fire of Brighid: Their Web distributes the tasks over a network of more than 600 "nodes" so the flame is always burning somewhere. They sign up for shifts online and the homepage poll is "Are electronic candles OK to use for flamekeeping?" All this makes being Irish more interesting and deeply mysterious than the watered-down trappings of St. Patrick's Day, especially the green beer. How to make St. Brigid's cross. Posted by Sheila Lennon March 16, 2007Update: Full transcript of Valerie Plame's sworn testimony before House panelFull transcript from Raw Story. Somebody out there had to have an old-fashioned stenographer. 12:15 p.m. Partial transcript, from Think Progress. My name is Valerie Plame Wilson, and I am honored to have been invited to testify under oath before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on the critical issue of safeguarding classified information. More to come. Also: AP report (story will update automatically) Live blogging (link fixed) in outline form by Lyn Wall of Feet to the Fire. Posted by Sheila Lennon Live now: Valerie Plame: C-Span1; NPR fights Web radio hikes; Smokeless cigarette; 'Rock star' Hawking...10.38 a.m. Transcript to come...
Washington Post (Valerie Plame, the Spy Who's Ready to Speak for Herself) : "They ruined her whole career," her mother said, echoing a refrain of several of Plame's former CIA colleagues. "She has no job." Okay, that was the PSA. I have some longer posts in the hopper, some still in pieces, but for Friday of a very long week, here's emptying the "notebook": · Dark ages redux: NPR Takes First Step To Reverse Internet Royalty Rate Decision After the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decided to drastically increase the royalties paid to musicians and record labels for streaming songs online, National Public Radio (NPR) will begin fighting the decision on Friday, March 16 by filing a petition for reconsideration with the CRB panel. The suggested new rates would increase to $.0008 per-play for 2006 (retroactively), $.0011 for 2007, $.0014 in 2008, $.0018 in 2009 and $.0019 for 2010, which could put some Internet broadcasters out of business and force public radio stations to quit streaming online. Good. Copyright has been turned on its head by RIAA -- its original purpose was to encourage the creation of a public culture, not to make everyone pay a middleman for a chance to experience it. When your book might be published under anyone's name, with a fight to follow, there was no incentive at all to show your work outside of a small circle of friends. It will take a clean heavy like NPR to lead this fight for the rest of us. · Now they tell us: Why your home isn't the investment you think it is. - Wall Street Journal.
· MILAN, Italy -- The NicStic is a cigarette-size plastic tube with a rechargeable heating coil that vaporizes tobacco instead of burning it. · Flying mind: Hawking is out of this world Thousands gather to hear universe's biggest star discuss cosmos. Chron. Amazing. Nice story. Photo is by Mark Costantini of the Chron. World-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking didn't so much visit Berkeley on Tuesday night, as he took over the collective brain of the community and took it for a fascinating, baffling, thrilling ride into the cosmos. Couch potatoes unscathed: From the London Times, The exercise craze that crippled a generation: They were promised the body beautiful and their mantra was “No pain no gain”. Two decades later they are feeling it again — in their knees, hips and lower backs. They are the casualties of the aerobics boom.... Then, without warning, As the craze took off in Britain, Geri Livingston bought a cat-suit and joined an energetic group in a church hall in Cheshire. Oh, I hope there are photos. · Flower poisons: Mad Honey Disease: My husband ate something really bad. Going over what he had had, he mentioned buying honey and putting it in tea. Some quick googling and I had a name for what ails him. This is real, documented in the Mead Digest, a homebrewers' newsletter. Honey produced from the nectar of rhododendrons is the culprit. Its effects are swift. At least it made him laugh. No, we don't really think bad flowers did him in. Note to Joyce: Wayne Miller would like to talk to you, if you're willing to contact him. Posted by Sheila Lennon March 15, 2007Recipes, starting with Dijon-Glazed Corned Beef with Cabbage & Potatoes
This is the version I'm making this weekend. (I may fiddle with it, but I'm starting here.) It's from the Cattlemen’s Beef Board and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. Dijon-Glazed Corned Beef with Cabbage & Potatoes 1 (3 1/2- to 4-lb.) boneless corned beef brisket with seasoning packet Position oven racks in upper and lower thirds of oven. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Place corned beef brisket in roasting pan; sprinkle garlic, contents of seasoning packet and peppercorns around and over brisket. Add water; cover tightly with aluminum foil. Braise in upper third of 350-degree oven 3 to 3 1/2 hours or until brisket is fork-tender. Meanwhile, place butter, green onions, horseradish, ground pepper and salt in glass measuring cup. Microwave on High 1 to 2 minutes or until butter melts; mix well. Place cabbage wedges on half of baking sheet with sides and potatoes on other half. Drizzle horseradish-butter mixture over vegetables, turning cabbage and tossing potatoes to coat. Cover with aluminum foil. Roast in lower third of 350-degree oven with brisket 55 minutes. Uncover vegetables; continue roasting 15 to 20 minutes or until vegetables are tender and begin to brown. Combine glaze ingredients in small bowl. Remove cooked brisket from roasting pan; place on rack in broiler pan so surface of brisket is 3 to 4 inches from heat. Brush glaze over brisket; broil 2 to 3 minutes or until glaze is bubbly and beginning to brown. Carve brisket diagonally across the grain into thin slices. Serve with cabbage and potatoes. Tip: If seasoning packet is not included with corned beef brisket, substitute 1ø teaspoons pickling spice. Serves 6 to 8. County Clare's Guinness Beef Barley Soup calls for six cups of beef stock and a cup or more of Guiness stout. My people would have added water, too. They liked their stew thin.
Extremely tempting: Flaky Cheddar Scones at the Freep. "These savory scones get their tenderness and tang from plain yogurt rather than buttermilk -- a plus for cooks who don't often have buttermilk on hand." And a few more under a great headline: Old Irish-nouveau fusion. In my house, celery salt was the only seasoning, so this cuisine has come a long way. On that link, Irish Parsnip And Apple Soup, Cider-Braised Chicken And Cabbage, Irish Cream Scones With Lemon Curd. Here's how to make Home Cook recipe: Michael's Favorite Soda Bread. He calls the caraway "optional but recommended." I'd stay away from it. Why ruin a perfectly good raisin bread? The Globe offers Boiled dinner, as unadorned as it sounds: Corned beef and root vegetables on top of the stove. No seasoning but a bay leaf and peppercorns, unless you count the maple syrup, mustard and and horseradish. It's pretty hardcore -- hope you love plain carrots.
If you have leftovers, here you'll learn how to make a couple of sandwiches, corned beef and cabbage dip corned beef and cabbage salad, and a simple crockpot corned beef and cabbage. Later...The comments on the Simply Recipes blog's New England Boiled Dinner Recipe include variations and enhancements. I especially like the tales of the origin of the dish, such as, The story around the table this past weekend related to me was that the Irish usually had ham not corn beef. the cabbage was cooked over the ham to hide it from the landlords. (Who has money for ham?) The cabbage would be quite odorific and the ham was not found. The corn beef is a american thing, partly related to lack of refrigeration but also the mixing of culture: Irish, British, Polish, German, and Jewish all enjoy this recipe, so does the Ukrainian part of my family as well as my Russian friends. Ahhh America. The Irish Soda Bread Recipe there has photos at every step. Posted by Sheila Lennon March 14, 2007The newest slang, from Double-Tongued dictionaryLate-breaking words: Double-Tongued Dictionary ("Slang, jargon, and new words from the fringes of English") comes with a fine pedigree and is eminently browsable. shoulder tap Posted by Sheila Lennon March 13, 2007Buddhist monks overrun by fire ants seek peaceful solutions; 'Fishing hurts'
From the Malaysia Star, Deadly ants bugging monks: PENANG: It is common to see “Beware of Dogs” signs. But one warning “Beware of Poisonous Ants”? Well, they did try a vacuum cleaner, thought they got the queen and released them in the forest, but it didn't help. Boon Keng urged anyone who is able to solve this bugbear to contact the temple at 04-228 0503. What would Buddha do? Hint: BBC passes along, They cannot encourage anyone to harm the ants, but the chief monk says that if someone turns up unbidden and deals with them without the monks' involvement then that is the will of the universe. Sounds like wiggle room to me. Readers commenting at the end of the Guardian UK version -- they missed both the phone number and the hint -- are posting herbal and vegetable solutions that seem more suited to a few seen in your kitchen than to a full-scale infestation. Newer: USM don to help rid temple of ants: PENANG: The ants that have been troubling monks and devotees at a Buddhist temple here with their sting will have to be destroyed, said a Universiti Sains Malaysia entomology professor. (That link leads to a big closeup of the dead specimen whose portrait is at right; here's the species page, at AntWeb.)
Among the headlines, Deadly Poisons from the Deep If this post isn't already ironic enough, there's one more headline, this from July 2005: ‘Charlie the Tuna’ creator drowns. Posted by Sheila Lennon March 12, 2007TimesSelect to be free if you have a .edu email address'NYT' Opening TimesSelect to Students and Teachers for Free. At Editor & Publisher, The New York Times is opening up access permanently to TimesSelect to all students and faculty who have .edu e-mail addresses beginning on March 13.
The rationale, as explained by GM Vivian Schiller in the release: “We want students to have unfettered access to the full, rich content of The New York Times, especially the varied opinions expressed by the 22 columnists whose voices are heard through TimesSelect.” Well, yes. After all, how awkward to have columns very few have read leading the Commentary pack in the Pulitzer Prize betting? That's the fate of business columnist (and Providence native) Joseph Nocera. Some bloggers with subscriptions (TimesSelect is free to Times print subscribers) have been copying the columns of their favorite TimesSelect columnists as a public service. We assume, now that the mainstream file-sharing world will have access, that this practice will spread, if the wall doesn't soon fall completely. Posted by Sheila Lennon March 11, 2007Nico Muhly: 'Genre-bending' young composer who grew up in Providence leads off Carnegie Hall festival Friday
THERE is no easy label to hang on Nico Muhly, a 25-year-old Juilliard-trained composer in New York. His music — typically small, elegant parcels filled with clear melodies, pulsating rhythms and the occasional alarming abrasion — has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and prominent international halls. Vibrant, erudite and endlessly irreverent, Mr. Muhly sees no reason to ally himself with any particular stylistic camp. He doesn’t need the company: he has more than 1,000 friends on his MySpace page. Nico is the 25-year-old son of Providence painter Bunny Harvey, a professor of art at Wellesley College, and documentary filmmaker Frank Muhly. Nico Muhly is not your grandfather's classical musician, nor his electronic one: “There’s a generation for whom the first chord in ‘Music in 12 Parts’ is totally, totally, totally an emotional moment,” he said of a seminal Glass work. (You can hear the chord here.) So it might not surprise that Muhly's own compositions are wildly original. In “The Last Song,” which will receive its premiere at Zankel, the vocalist and banjo player Sam Amidon sings a rustic folk ballad, accompanied by shimmering keyboards, snipping scissors and the scrape of a knife sharpener. Zankel Hall is at Carnegie Hall -- it was originally the Recital Hall. Tickets for Muhly's concert are $25 and $35 and can be purchased online. Here's the program. The blurb from Carnegie about the series begins, In his fourth and final season as holder of The Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall, composer John Adams curates the third annual In Your Ear festival from Friday, March 16 to Sunday, March 18. This year’s festival weekend focuses on young, genre-bending composer/performers, with music ranging from English Renaissance choral works to American bluegrass to contemporary chamber arrangements of British electronica. The featured performers are Nico Muhly and Vox Vocal Ensemble, Chris Thile & The Tensions Mountain Boys, and Alarm Will Sound. All performances take place in Zankel Hall. Mp3s of some of Nico's earlier work are linked at his MySpace page and at the bottom of nicomuhly.com Bonus link: Defining Nico Muhly is an interview published March 1 at NewMusicBox. Nico Muhly talks, at length, largely about music and process. There's video in the page, much of it from the interview, with a track of his music behind it, and clips of others, and of the composer himself, performing his pieces. Posted by Sheila Lennon March 9, 2007Friday fun: '77 Nina Simone, '07 Nanci Griffith mp3s; New gameFree mp3s at BigO: · Nina Simone Live at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, England, December 1977. · Nanci Griffith Live at the Mermaid Theatre, London, March 2, 2007.
Buy towers, upgrade them, sell them if you've put them in a useless place. Easy level is easy. As you can see above, I start by targeting the entrance. Old Man Musings -- much further along -- makes them wander winding rows of firing towers to slow them down. Miss enough of them and you're dead. Posted by Sheila Lennon March 8, 2007Katha Pollitt on Women's Day news: 'Big whoop"Happy (?) International Women's Day: Feminist writer Katha Pollitt at Talking Points Memo,
and Reuters' Trouble for Chile's Bachelet after first year headline seems more negative than the story. Just the factual paragraphs:
George Bush would probably love to be in such small trouble. Posted by Sheila Lennon International Women's Day around the world
These are quick links to the tip of the iceberg, breadcrumbs that can lead you in many directions.... Sticks of Fire in Tampa writes, Today is International Women’s Day! Because we live in America, you probably haven’t heard of it… but community radio WMNF will be celebrating it all day with female deejays and female-oriented programming throughout the day. See the schedule online, and as always, you can stream online or check it out in the archives.Thinking Girl: Today is also Blog Against Sexism Day, which started last year here. Today is the day that bloggers unite to voice our objections to the continued marginalization of women and girls worldwide. Blog Against Sexism Day includes links to dozens of bloggers adding a post to the conversation. It's also the day of the Global Women's Strike 2007. International Women's Day - African Women Blogging Women's Day 2007 - Celebrating (Pakistani/Muslim) Women by blogger IFaqeer. ...the person that I would really like to be heard from more is another kind of Muslim woman: the activist, the human rights lawyer, the person fight back against oppression, and to make the world a better place for all of us--comfortable with her faith, her community, and often her nation; but still being in the forefront of working to make them work better for her co-religionists, her neighbours and her compatriots.- Turns out, iFaqeer is a Pakistani man living in Silicon Valley. Posted by Sheila Lennon Reporter's query: Because of your computer, do you seldom have to leave the house?Do you work from home, browse the Web for fun, have groceries delivered by Peapod, movies by Netflix, everything else from Amazon, eBay and the like, so you seldom have to leave your house?
If you're willing to share your tale, post a comment here so we can pick up your email address (it won't display publicly) or email Wayne with some details of how you've configured your home life so you rarely have to leave it. We do a lot of Web-enabled cocooning at our house, but not this much. Posted by Sheila Lennon March 7, 2007Video: Patrick Fitzgerald on the Libby verdict; Cat's eye closeup; 3d homepage; $1.5 million Bugatti crashes; God's party?Linking around...
Related: For Cheney, Political Toll May Follow Libby Verdict: N.Y. Times, Now, Mr. Cheney faces a civil suit from Mr. Wilson. 
Cat's eye: Click the photo to see its amazing detail. (Source: Reddit poster viclopez) Rare gourmet treat: Delicious Cat Milk. Drive this page: Screenvader is a 3D Web homepage. Mouse around to explore it. (Not for the dialup modem set.)
A car worth more than £800,000 was involved in a collision with a van before crashing into trees... Cartoon: God: Republican or Democrat? The latest from Pain Comics' Tim Kreider (weekly archive). Posted by Sheila Lennon March 6, 2007Will you be photographed naked for your country? Can we Google it later?Yesterday, 1,991 people clicked on a blog item I wrote nearly two years ago, on May 25, 2005, on the handmade blog page I used before blog software: Nude X-ray photos at airport security?
I suspect the ruckus was caused by William Saletan of Slate, who began his Saturday column -- with links and headlined Digital Penetration: Invasion of the naked body scanners at Slate, and linkless in the Washington Post on Sunday as Naked Came The Passenger -- with, Psssst. Want to see Susan Hallowell naked? Look at the Feb. 24 New York Times. She's on page A10. Susan Hallowell was. How long before the rest of the flying public are enshrined in similar galleries in our birthday suits? Saletan's piece ends, Hallowell volunteered for this notoriety. But what happened to her mustn't happen to others. In the age of body scans, privacy means keeping your name, your face, and your nude image apart. That job doesn't end at the security gate; it begins there. Will your scan leak? "Images will not be printed, stored or transmitted," TSA swears on its Web site. Directly above that assurance, the agency has posted four nude pictures—"actual images shown to the Transportation Security Officer during the backscatter process." And you thought airport screeners had no sense of humor. Does anybody really believe that the raw images won't leak? How much do you think an airport screener could get for nude celebrity backscatter scans? The celebrity mugshots at The Smoking Gun didn't come from the celebrities' publicists, after all. Road trips look better all the time. Posted by Sheila Lennon March 5, 2007Daylight savings time starts Sunday: How to tell your PC and other gizmos
"Spring ahead" moved from the first Sunday in April to the second sunday in March. That's just ahead, this Sunday, March 11. Time to deal, or be late. Some computers, all cable boxes and TiVo should update automatically, courtesy of the system providers. If you're running a Mac, Apple's auto update system should handle this; MAC OSX Hints offers a way to check it: Update timezone files for earlier Daylight Savings Time. For Windows users, there's a patch from Microsoft for your operating system. (A patch is just what it sounds like -- a fix, a little piece of code you download and run that changes the code already in your system that acts on the old dates.) Do I have to update my computer? The home users section shows you how to check which version of Windows your PC is running (Start--> Run--> Type (or copy) sysdm.cpl--> OK), then offers you a download. Save this file to your PC and click it to run it. It tells your operating system the new dates of DST. Handheld devices: Updating Windows Mobile-powered devices for the new Daylight Saving Time notes, To make sure your appointments on your Windows Mobile devices are accurate, you’ll need to update your device. If you regularly synchronize your device with your PC, you’ll need to update Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Outlook as well. Cell phones: Most cell phones synchronize with the phone's service provider. Do the steps at Microsoft above if your Windows phone synchs a calendar with your PC's calendar. Digital Video Recorders: TiVo says it sent an automatic update patch last month. Older Replay TVs, including Panasonic Showstoppers, need to be patched. ReplayTV sent a system message telling users they have to update before March 11 using their remote controls, and directing them to a Web page for instructions: How will extended Daylight Saving Time affect my ReplayTV set top DVR? The process is at that link. (Basically you trick it into connecting to the ReplayTV Service to receive the DST update.) Slacker alternatives: You can change the time on your computer before you go to bed Saturday night by right-clicking on time in the lower right corner of your screen and clicking on "Adjust Date/Time." The clock window will pop up (below). Select the number representing hour in the timestamp and make it one hour later (e.g., 1:50:49 --> 2:50:49). Then click Apply, click OK, you're done. The time in the corner should have sprung ahead. 
 You will have revisit this again on Nov. 4, falling back an hour then. (DST ends the first Sunday in November, moved from the last Sunday in October), and twice every year thereafter until you buy a new computer, so this isn't easier in the long run. (And if you're the odd slacker with an Outlook calendar, this tweak won't update your appointments.)
Do nothing: You can be wrong for three weeks every spring and fall, or right half the year. My car's clock spends the entire winter being wrong -- it's permanently on daylight savings time, and I mentally correct it every time I look at it. Nothing wrong with doing it this way, either.
Posted by Sheila Lennon March 4, 2007New royalty rates threaten Internet radio, fledgling U.S. businessesThe creation of a public culture staggers again. The latest blow came down Friday. Kurt Hanson's Radio and Internet Newsletter (RAIN) has tracked this for years, and now leads with Daniel McSwain writing,
The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has announced its decision on Internet radio royalty rates, rejecting all of the arguments made by Webcasters and instead adopting the "per play" rate proposal put forth by SoundExchange (a digital music fee collection body created by the RIAA). In 2002 the panel set the royalty rate at seven-hundredths of a cent per song, per listener, so we're escalating here. Listener-supported Radio Paradise reacts: For some time, we've suffered with a system where we pay a large chunk (10%-12%) of our income to the Big 5 record companies - while FM stations and radio conglomerates like Clear Channel pay nothing. Now they want even more. In our case, an amount equal to 125% of our income... Scroll down at RAIN for Hanson's take on all this. Worth noting: Here at RAIN, we're guessing that Pandora has an audience approaching that size. (Pandora founder Tim Westergren claims that Pandora now accounts for 1.5% of all Internet traffic.) Such a royalty obligation might exceed the total proceeds of all their recent rounds of venture capital plus all their sales revenues to date. On the Internet, it hardly matters to the listener if the stream originates in the U.K. or the U.S. But is putting U.S. companies out of business the intent of our government? David Oxenford at Broadcast Law Blog notes that the law of unintended consequences applies here: In the recently proposed XM/Sirius merger, about which we wrote here, the satellite radio services were arguing that competition from Internet Radio lessened any anticompetitive threat from the anticipated combination of the companies. Similarly, broadcasters have argued that webcasters provided competition that justified a relaxation of the multiple ownership rules. If many Internet radio stations disappear after this decision, these two proceedings may well be affected. Earlier, he wrote, ...the rates are going up significantly over the next few years. More importantly, especially for smaller entities, there are no royalty rates based on a percentage of revenue as were in effect for small webcasters under the Small Webcasters Settlement Act. Who in Congress will speak for the little guy? Bonus links: Doc Searls: The Promise of Radio Paradise: An Open-Source Challenge to Commercial Radio, Linux Journal, January 2002. Radio-Locator, radio station search engine How to create an internet radio station Update: Doc Searls picks this up (RIAA moves to kill Internet Radio) and adds, in reference to the fects of the 2002 fee-per-song-per-listener structure, As it developed, Internet radio didn't die. Instead, what happened was the growth of talk radio on the Net, mostly in the form of podcasting. No doubt an unintended consequence of the CARP ruling (creating high bureaucratic and financial costs for broadcasting RIAA-sanctioned music on the Net) was the growth of podcasting. Alas, I'm seldom available for talk radio of any sort. If I'm coding or making pages or writing, I can't pay attention to others' thoughts and words. I need music then. My commute is short, and I'm seldom alone, uninterrupted, long enough to catch an entire podcast, no matter its length. I would so much rather hear little niche streams from the "record collections" of friends and kindred souls than the loops of music "stations" on cable TV. These must still be passed around privately. Podcasting isn't a substitute. Posted by Sheila Lennon March 2, 2007Free mp3s: Bob Dylan sings Dr. Seuss?
Parody or the man having fun, this is wonderful. Out of the mists of the anonymous Internets, just in time for The Cat in the Hat's 50th birthday, comes Dylan Hears A Who (where the songs automatically start streaming when you load the site) or as separate mp3s at BigO Singapore, which credits DHAW and guesses at the original tunes. Seven songs: Oh, The Things You Can Think! [Like A Rolling Stone] I've been listening as I try to track this down. Sure sounds like Dylan. Even the harmonica. And the little vinyl turntable at the original site crackles through my speakers when the songs stop. Buzz: To everybody who's curious about that amazing Dylan/Seuss thing I posted the other day (hi, MetaFilter!): I don't know anything about it, and the guy who sent it to me doesn't either, and it's one of those crazy Internet mysteries. What trips me out about it, though, is not just the awesomeness of Dylan singing Seuss (or Zimmerman singing Geisel, if you prefer) -- it's the fact that it was recorded by someone who knows how to recreate the sound of Columbia Records 1966. The Dylan Hears A Who site is claimed by eyeberriedpall.com (get it?), which hosts two other audio-related sites -- for electric cowbells and audio plugins -- and slyly asks, "[This is not what you were looking for, is it?]" Posted by Sheila Lennon March 1, 2007AsianWeek fires 'Why I Hate Blacks' author (but not editors who okayed it)
The 22-year-old author of a column titled "Why I Hate Blacks" in the regional newspaper AsianWeek has been dismissed, and the paper's editors said Wednesday that they suffered "a serious lapse in editorial judgment" when they published his column. It's not the first failing of Asian Week's editorial process when Eng showed up. In November, AsianWeek published Proof That Whites Inherently Hate Us by Eng. The "proof" is a paranoid rant. His "evidence" begins, "How many American films feature Asian heroes who are not stereotyped?" Why I hate race-baiting columns Debra J. Saunders WHAT PEOPLE in the news business want to know is: How did the "Why I hate blacks" column by Kenneth Eng that ran in AsianWeek Feb. 23 ever make it by the paper's editors? Both stories are from the San Francisco Chronicle. The report of Eng's firing includes a quote by Keith Kamisugi, who came by this blog to comment after I ran news of his group's petition decrying the column, which they reproduced in pdf form after it was pulled from the AsianWeek site: Some of the paper's critics have said the editors who approved this week's column should be held accountable for its contents, but Fang has so far refused to address the subject. If Eng wants to hate, I'm not telling him what to feel. He can blog it, rant on ihate.org.uk, shout it from every street corner. But when AsianWeek -- repeatedly -- adopts his work as their own, the publication becomes complicit. Kudos to Kamisugi for the diligent follow-up, for taking the fight to AsianWeek, and for keeping the offensive column out there. More: Posted by Sheila Lennon Audio clips: Dorothy Parker reads her favorite work
Dorothy Parker made two full-length LP recordings of her work in 1964. A record company, Verve, asked her to read her poems and stories for a record called The World of Dorothy Parker (Verve V-15029). Her other LP is from Spoken Arts called An Informal Hour with Dorothy Parker (Spoken Arts 726). It is the best of the two: Parker reads more than two dozen of her favorite poems. It is from the latter that most of these audio clips are taken. The verse and stories were first published between 1923 and 1933, so she was reading, for posterity, work she had written as a young woman. The shortest clip is 14 seconds, the longest 1:33. Here's the famous Men -- it's 35 seconds and. like the others, requires the free RealPlayer. One more: Resume, just 17 seconds. A collection of 194 of her verses is easily browsed at oldpoetry.com. Posted by Sheila Lennon |
It's still early enough here that crocus sightings are news, but I want to grow salads now in that bed, which actually looks more like a giant's coffin. Yesterday, I told my colleague Paula Constantine, a Master Gardener, about my bed, and asked if she'd planted anything yet. 
In her own voice: Valerie Plame, whose CIA career was ended abruptly when she was named in a column by Robert Novak as an operative, speaks today before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. C-Span1 expects to broadcast the hearing 
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 changed the dates of daylight savings time, but some of the electronic devices in our homes don't know this yet.
"We think the editor responsible for green-lighting the column should be removed," said Keith Kamisugi (at right) of the 
The 
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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