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Main page October 31, 2007Bellringer pipes up; Courthouse song; More sports-announcing beefsBack from Amherst -- great trip -- then we segued right into Trick-or-Treat night. I'm handing off to my commenters while I regroup and get some sleep: Three topics, all from comments that arrived during my absence:
That was me playing the Chime at Arlington Street Church. We added "Sweet Caroline" to our repertoire this year, next year I suppose we'll play "Dirty Water" as well... Here's some background on the instrument, with a photo: The Bells
Halle also points to Women's Bioethics Blog, which is more than interesting.
This one should be interesting when the Pats meet the Colts in Indianapolis Sunday: 1. Rooting for one team. It's obvious when you do. Or even more obvious when you don't like a team. Remember their fans are listening too. And there are more... Posted by Sheila Lennon October 30, 2007Kidnapped BBC journo's tale; 235 science journals simultaneously tackle poverty, human developmentI'll be on the road today. I'm looking forward to the trip to this event.
At one point, he was allowed a radio. In those calm, measured tones of the BBC, I heard reports of a claim that I had been executed. A small note: Johnston wore disposable contact lenses when he was kidnapped. After he disposed of that pair, the world went fuzzy for him.
From Nature.com: The Nature journals are pleased to contribute the content highlighted on this page, all of which is free... Taco stampede: Where... Posted by Sheila Lennon October 29, 2007Country music's Porter Wagoner dies at 80When my life is ended, my time has run out Porter Wagoner died Sunday night in a hospice in Nashville of lung cancer at 80. At the Nashville Tennessean, a loving obit -- Country Hall of Famer Porter Wagoner dies at 80 -- some tunes, and a slideshow of 56 photos from his long career.
A modest blog post at Heart on a Stick references Country Music Television's obit (Country Music Hall of Fame Member Porter Wagoner Dies) and adds, Others are going to know way more than me about his best writing and singing, about his role in spreading country music via the TV (21 years!), how he fought to give Dolly Parton a career, how he fought to keep her shackled long after her star had eclipsed his. About that amazing, awful, rhinestone jumpwear. Sing it at the pearly gates, Porter. Posted by Sheila Lennon A high-res local weather map worth bookmarkingWeather Map for Providence, RI 02902 Hi-res weather map with animation and adjustable transparency for cloud and radar layers. Replace "02902" in the url with your own zip code. Adapted by Chirag Mehta from a weather.com implementation. On a clear day, its wonders are less evident, but zooming and panning are so fluid, you might want to drag it to a place with more weather where you can play with it Posted by Sheila Lennon October 28, 2007Frivolous, spooky and odd links
* And, in a decidedly unspooky note, we have Free Rice, a vocabulary testing game that adjusts itself to your level of knowledge. That's not the good part, though; for every word you get right, 10 grains of rice will be donated to a hungry person by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). So click away, and the combined might of JIG just may do some significant good. This one is weird. The words quickly ramped up, and it wasn't much fun but I felt I had to push on to give somebody enough rice for a meal...
Gallery of fantastic creatures.
-- The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra’s “Its A Wonderful Life” More at the link.
Rafflesia arnoldii: this parasitic plant develops the world's largest bloom that can grow over three feet across. The flower is a fleshy color, with spots that make it look like a teenager's acne-ridden skin. It smells bad and has a hole in the center that holds six or seven quarts of water. The plant has no leaves, stems, or roots. There's something really creepy about a plant that's like a fungus with a canteen. Posted by Sheila Lennon October 27, 2007How should sports announcers cover games?
My Joe (from MA and NH so longtime Sox fan) has been shouting at the Fox guys during the MLB games: says they don't even understand the rules of baseball or the strategies involved. And don't get us started on some of the NBA commentators....... Liz. we agree they're not thinking about what viewers want. How about we tell them? Here's mine: -- Informed play by play with relevant and interesting background on players and stats by people who love the game. Don't break out of that job description for anything less than breaking major news that people will care about. (cf. Howard Cosell when John Lennon died. Dr. Z -- Paul Zimmerman -- at Sports Illustrated is with us: What about the game? Major networks guilty of neglecting on-field action, on Oct. 19 -- before the games that drew my complaints: So which network do I go after first, Fox or ESPN? Getting many letters urging me to go forward in my crusade against network idiocy, equally divided between antagonists of both super-powers. Think I'll do the ESPN thing first because the e-mailers in that camp are more passionate; the Foxies seem to be merely annoyed. Exactly... they often seem bored by the game, treating it as a backdrop for their talk show. That last is from an email from Steve W. of Brisbane, Australia. How would you change sports announcing? Click the Comments link to answer. *Glossary
Slider: The slider is a cross between the fastball and the curve and involves the best features of both. It is thrown with the speed and the pitching motion of the fastball, but, instead of the wide sweep of the conventional curve, it has a short and mostly lateral break; in effect, it slides away from the hitter. Football positions, by describing what each player's role is when playing this position, may make clearer what players are trying to do when the ball is snapped, although this is pedantic enough to mention some obscure ones you may not see. Posted by Sheila Lennon October 26, 2007Free: All-male, bluesy Fleetwood Mac '70; Spy Valerie Plame Wilson's first chapter; Irritating sports announcers
...Fans at the Fillmore West in 1970 might have expected the band to play singles such as Black Magic Woman (which Santana turned into a signature tune) and the rock ballad Albatross. But that was not to be. Instead, it was a true-and-true blues-rock show with Rattlesnake Shake/Underway forming the backbone of the set, followed by the single Oh Well, capped by a raucous performance of Twist & Shout and Long Tall Sally. ...
This deals with her family backgroun and basic training in the CIA. There's so much missing -- represented by stars -- that it's a jerky read. A WaPo review (Valerie Plame, Telling the (Edited) Inside Story) notes, The book is, however, greatly assisted by an afterword by Laura Rozen, a reporter for the American Prospect. Rozen faithfully echoes Wilson's point of view but fills in many of the censored dates, places and other details from published sources. Readers would be smart to turn to the afterword first, before tackling Wilson's disjointed narrative.
The second game of the World Series saw the Fox announcers ignore the game so they could praise the firefighters in California at length -- right through a Curt Schilling strikeout. Then we were warned they had a sad story for us. Joe and I both yelped, "Don't tell us about it!" We're there to watch baseball. Just call the game during the game, please, without filler -- the ambient sound in a ballpark is fine. If you must praise and mourn, please save it for a downtime during pitching changes, when we might be in the bathroom. Posted by Sheila Lennon Where the Taco Bells are: Ellsbury stole you a taco
The "how to..." from Taco Bell's site says, Everyone in line at a participating Taco Bell restaurant before 5:00 p.m. local time will receive a Free Taco, even if it is provided after 5:00 p.m. Free Taco offer is subject to store availability and Taco Bell reserves the right to substitute an item of equal or greater value if due to unavailability. Whether you're looking to snag one or avoid the likely traffic jams, here are all the Taco Bells I could find in greater Rhode Island (if you're elsewhere, put your zip code into this form to find those nearest you): 11479 Mineral Spring Ave. 1076 Reservoir Ave (Rte. 2) 7 Newport Avenue 11 Commerce Way 421 Putnam Pike 877 Bald Hill Rd 784 Tiogue Ave 651 Metacom Avenue 641 W Main Rd (Rte. 114) 139 Old Tower Hill Road 18 Post Road (Rte. 1) 1500 Diamond Hill Rd 195 Marianno Bishop Blvd 514 Washington St Posted by Sheila Lennon October 25, 2007Latchmo, Dylan, Fogerty, Hold Steady, Goo, Caray, Screaming Mimes: 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game'Later: In comments at the bottom of this post, Jorn Barger of Robot Wisdom points to nine more versions he's found. The standout among them is by Pollo Del Mar and it's on their site as an mp3. You might want to dance to it.
Latchmo, on a Hammond XK3 w/ Motion Sound PRO-145.
Craig Finn of The Hold Steady lives in Brooklyn but his heart's in Minneapolis. Here's The Hold Steady's loving-the-Twins version of it, at StereoGum.
The venerable Harry Caray, Aug. 1, 1987.
John Fogerty does a leisurely version.
Screaming Mimes in Cincinnati, May 13, 2006.
Anime to the Goo Goo Dolls version. Posted by Sheila Lennon October 24, 2007'Take Me Out To The Ballgame' -- the best of YouTubeI stayed up late last night watching dozens of versions of Jack Norworth's 1908 classic, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and these made the cut. This first edition has some Red Sox versions, some neutral versions. A second edition tomorrow will have folks singing, "Root, root, root for the Cubbies," and other versions that sound strange to Red Sox fans' ears. Red Sox fans sing it Sept. 26. 2006 at Fenway.
Harpo Marx plays it on harp on I Love Lucy, 1955.
Buck O'Neill of the Negro League sings it a capella.
An elderly man identified only as George plays it on organ, just like at the ball parks. Budweiser lizards and ferret do it. When the Red Sox won the pennant in 2005, the night before the parade through Boston the bells of the Arlington Street Church at Boylston and Arlington Sts., where the carillon is still played by hand, played Take Me Out to the Ball Game. There is no separation between church and sport. Posted by Sheila Lennon Daily photos of the political campaigns in Iowa
Citizen photojournalism: At The Stumping Grounds, six freelance photographers cover the presidential campaigns in Iowa with a daily photo. They're good -- sometimes a candidate, sometimes a crowd, sometimes a fragment -- and the photos load quickly. You could start when they did, June 1, and just whip through them by clicking "Next." The only negative: No captions, which leads to "Guess whose finger" and "Who's in those shoes?," but only a few are obscure. via MediaStorm Posted by Sheila Lennon October 23, 2007Wi-fi in shelters keeps Calif. fire evacuees connected
Here's the link -- 'Fire blogging' tech expert on how fellow evacuees and networks are holding up -- and his report on the tech capacities: The shelter set up a dedicated computer room with an 802.11 a,b, and g network which worked like a charm. Lots of people brought notebooks when they left their home, so there was a whole lot of IM traffic in and out of the shelter. The local cell networks were subsumed by traffic early in the day so people were texting friends and loved ones a lot. On his own site, ForbesOnTech, Jim Forbes is also fire-blogging. He's praising the shelter -- "hey put on nice spaghetti feed and provided games and television for kids and adults. And no pet at the evacuation center went without water and at least a knish and a reaffirming stroke between their ears." -- and slamming AM radio: With the one exception of the San Diego AM radio fox affiliate, the new has been incredibly superficial. There have been almost no details on what routes are open or how to get to the Fallbrook Gate of Camp Pendleton to drive across the base and get on I-5, which is open to Los Angeles. But there has been a lot of sniveling from one specific radio talk show host, Roger Hedgecock on the lack of air tanker support for the San Diego firestorm. Never mind that the winds make it unsafe for tankers to fly, or that the voters of San Diego turned down a bond measure that would have provided organic air tanker support in 2003. The bond was turned down because it would have increased taxes. Well D’oh! Last night, he ended up moving: The big out call came from the police department around 1 p.m. so I loaded up my useless cats and my road dog and off I went to an evacuation center at the north end of Escondido. I stayed there until about 6 tonight and decided to haul ass for Azusa, where I know my dog and useless cats will be safe for the night... There's been nothing from him today. Let's hope he's conserving his battery on the mountaintop. Wednesday update: Today, he's back posting. Related: SignOn San Diego is all over this, including a firemap Doc Searls, newly a fellow at Harvard, tracks what's happening "back home," with lots of good links, not all of which are available at all times: Fire news, cont’d Also: San Diego Fire Resources (Witch Fire & others, Oct 2007) at Jim 2.0's blog. One of them is a live Webcam, with large views from four directions: Lyons Peak Cameras Posted by Sheila Lennon Guardian America: British paper's Washington-based site launches
Guardian America, the American version of the liberal British news site, has launched. Quick impressions: Slowly, quietly, Rooney is starting to fulfil his potential It's about an English soccer star. No World Series news. The Guardian today launched its US website with an exclusive interview with presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. And a style note (Do we realise what we're doing?): Guardian America, the US edition of the British newspaper, won't use American spellings and punctuation. What will make it a Guardian publication will be its adherence to the Guardian stylebook, a volume that since the 1920s has gone through several editions and revisions and which is available in bookshops and here on the Guardian's website. There's always room for more good journalism. I hope this isn't just an advertising vehicle. Posted by Sheila Lennon Out of Iraq: Refugee Riverbend in DamascusRiverbend, the Iraqi girl blogger of Baghdad Burning, last posted Sept. 6 as her family prepared to leave Iraq for Syria. Now she has posted from Damascus. ...A refugee is someone who isn’t really welcome in any country -- including their own... especially their own. Posted by Sheila Lennon Joni Mitchell '75 demos: 'The Seeding Of Summer Lawns'
In 1975, Joni Mitchell signalled a switch in direction when she released The Hissing Of Summer Lawns. It was a rich album with textures unseen on a folk album. It wasn't rock for sure. Hissing was the singer-songwriter exploring new sounds outside the folk idiom. Nine demo tracks at BigO, Singapore. The blog there is Talkin’ About My Revolutions. Posted by Sheila Lennon Students' energy-efficient house designs compete in Solar Decathlon, Germans winGermany wins the 2007 Solar Decathlon!. The blog Inhabitat has been covering the event:
It has just been announced that the German University, Technische Universität Darmstadt is the winner of this years Solar Decathlon competition! In order to win this prestigious design competition, the German team had to beat out a whole slew of American universities on U.S. turf (the National Mall in Washington DC). Frankly, however, we’re not surprised to see a winning design emerge from the land of high-quality engineering. And the Darmstadt Solar Decathlon house was a worthy winner of the coveted prize. The stunning solar house was simple, elegant, and extremely innovative in its use of solar shutters and fold-up interior space. There's a gallery of the exterior of all the entries at the official site. The first visual impression of the bunch is boxes, and shoeboxes, slants and angles. Only one, below, has a visible curve. but Inhabitat has better photos of some, with interiors.
Inhabitat is a stylish and interesting blog, worth bookmarking. Cutlery that's 70 percent potatoes? That's here.... Related: A Right Livelihood Award to Grameen Shakti which has installed more than 110,000 solar home systems in rural Bangladesh.
via Jeff Hess's Have Coffee Will Write. Posted by Sheila Lennon October 22, 2007Journalists, librarians and the public good, with a break for amazing cakesThink, wring hands, repeat: Doc Searls blogs today (Stop and listen) about Hal Crowther's eminently readable The future of the newspaper — without the paper. Crowther references former L.A. Times editor John Carroll's April 2006 speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, What Will Become of Newspapers? Every journalist believes that he or she works, ultimately, for the reader—not for the editor, or for the publisher, or for the corporation, or for those opaque financial institutions that hold the stock. Working for the shareholder means getting you to click on as many pages a possible so we can show you their ads. You had a big appetite this weekend for stories about the Red Sox and Halloween. See where this is going? Doc: Well, crap was king in most newsrooms long before Don Henley wrote and sang Dirty Laundry. Really, is Rupert Murdoch any better or worse than William Randolph Hearst? But Hal’s right about every business model he trashes here. Including the one thanks to which countless bloggers have become no less obsessed with eyeballs than any other “journal” — traditional or otherwise — that lives mostly to serve ego and advertising. More importantly, he’s right that we haven’t found the business model that makes a living, and not just a cause, for full-time truth-hunters. The first -- and at this time, only -- comment on Doc's thoughtful piece tosses a bucketful of cold water. The punch line: I’ll take the openly partisan model of the 19th century over the sanctimonious “eat your spinach” model represented by Crowther. The sooner he and his kind pass from the scene, the better. Unh-uh. Sorry. Those are no longer your choices. The Red Sox or Halloween. No substitutions. My own, view-from-the-trenches opinion is that newspapers should not be public companies, forced by Wall Street to deliver annual growth rates incompatible with the nature of their products. (How much annual growth in your clicking and reading time do you expect?) Privately held companies can sustain healthy, stable annual profits and invest in innovation. If they're willing to go through some lean years in order to retool and get it right, they can. Kudos to those who are buying back their stock and taking the hit in the interest of the longterm survival of their journalism.
Mike's Amazing Cakes is a Redmond, Wash., sculpture studio for cake. These are amazing. via Rebecca Blood.
The Internet Archive, whose main claim to fame is the Wayback Machine, designed to archive the internet's web history, has created a new project: the Open Content Alliance. It's purpose is to open the nation's library collections to universal web search. The Times has the details (Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web ): But the resistance from some libraries, like the Boston Public Library and the Smithsonian Institution, suggests that many in the academic and nonprofit world are intent on pursuing a vision of the Web as a global repository of knowledge that is free of business interests or restrictions. Posted by Sheila Lennon October 21, 2007Panties for Peace uses superstition against Burma's junta; Flickr to add editing tools; Farm bill makes us fat
· Post Your Panties for Peace! Global action Beginning 16th October The Burma military regime is not only brutal but very superstitious. They believe that contact with a woman’s panties or sarong can rob them of their power Here's a list of contact addresses -- street, phone, fax and email -- for Burmese embassies around the world, including Washington, D.C. and the U.N. Mission in New York. The Irrawaddy News Magazine is all over Burma Crisis 2007, with video links on its homepage. It reports “Panties for Peace” Campaign Wins Wide Support, Liz Hilton, a supporter of the Lanna Action for Burma and a member of the Empower foundation, said that by sending underwear to the men of Burma’s overseas embassies women would be delivering a strong message to the regime.
... thousands of monks were taken away on trucks to where??? The military have continued raiding homes and arresting anyone believed involved in the demonstrations. Monks and others arrested are telling the stories of torture and brutality. People are dying in custody…their bodies quickly cremated. State Peace and Development Council s the official name of the military regime of Burma (also known as Myanmar). It seized power by force instead of taking part in the election of 1990 which resulted in overwhelming support for the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD). The Washington Post reported Saturday Bush Sets New Sanctions Against Burmese Military Junta, President Bush yesterday ratcheted up pressure on the military junta in Burma in response to its violent crackdown on democracy protests, imposing a new round of sanctions and calling on China, India and other regional powers to help force the ruling generals to "stop their vicious persecution." Everybody's trying to hit them where it hurts.
TechCrunch reports, Currently, you can rotate photos on Flickr, but the editing stops there. When the new tools launch, users will be able to edit photos more extensively using the http://www.crunchbase.com/company/picnik">Picnik Flash based tools (see our review here).
... the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy. Life makes you tough: The wussification of American children. SFGate. The experiences we had that today's kids won't, in the name of fear. Posted by Sheila Lennon Old-pictures blog becomes bookIf you're not up for a sports day -- the Patriots at Miami at 1 on CBS or the do-or-die Red Sox finale against Cleveland tonight at 8 on Fox -- and the 70- degree weather of the new Southern New England autumns, here's a bookworm's alternative.
Blog to book or, BibliOdyssey becomes biblio: Before photography, illustrators painstakingly reproduced the natural world; lofty concepts were systemized and drawns; manuscripts were illuminated. A blog that has published many such images from limited-edition books has taken a sampling of it to print: BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet From the blurb, ...Across the world, libraries and institutions are only recently starting to make their collections available online, and the bulk of this amazing material goes unnoted by the casual surfer. BibliOdyssey's mission over the past two years has been to diligently trawl the dustier corners of the Internet and retrieve these materials for our attention. Thanks to the daily efforts of this singular blog, a myriad of long-forgotten imagery has now re-surfaced, from eighteenth-century anatomical and architectural drawing to occult and alchemical engravings and proto-Surrealist depictions of the horrors of industrialization (for example, the half-plant, half-people illustrations of J.J. Grandville). Each of the images is accompanied by commentary from "PK," author and curator of the BibliOdyssey blog. The book also provides details for each image and links to the source website. With a foreword by artist Dinos Chapman, BibliOdyssey is a true cabinet of curiosities and a journey in discovery and delight. Or you could browse the BibliOdyssey blog. The thumbnail images stripped along its right side will take you to interesting spots. (I've spent hours clicking images on this delightful breadcrumb trail.) There's a dropdown labeled Archives that will take you back through earlier pages. A third navigation option is a tagcloud at the bottom of the page, which leads to annotated archives -- tag index at del.icio.us (one of the best uses of the social bookmarking tool I've seen.) There's a blogroll of links to Resource Sites, as well, where more of this "visual anthropology" can be found.
Jules Rupalley, The Miners - Group of miners around well-like shaft in rocky setting [Quirot & Company (active ca. 1851-ca. 1853), lithographer and publisher] It's not all antique. Below is an album cover from a post devoted to the work of modern graphic designer Erik Nitsche.
Posted by Sheila Lennon October 20, 2007Facebook parody makes the GOP candidates your 'friends'The Right-Wing Facebook is a parody that looks like a Facebook page, full of updates on your "friends," the GOP presidential candidates. The disclaimer: Right-Wing Facebook is a satirical take on right-wing presidential candidates and is a project of People For the American Way. This site is a parody of Facebook but is not associated or affiliated with Facebook in any way. It's not inside the real Facebook's walled city, so anyone can see it. It's just another page on the open Web. No, I'm not going to spoil it. Go take a look for yourself. Frequent updates would be an authentic touch. Posted by Sheila Lennon Saturday cowboy: The busted stripper is the Utah police chief's wife
It reads like a dusty end-of-the-road novel. In less than a week, Tripp was driven from the post he'd held most of his adult life -- "on grounds of embarrassment," said the mayor. In the same stories that reported his resignation, Tripp was accused by two of his own officers of a certain indifference to narcotics investigations. He hotly denied this last allegation -- and, upon further examination, it seems to have stemmed mainly from a clash of wills and a difference of opinion about how to police a small, isolated town. Still, the damage was done. There is no photo of Vaughn Tripp -- perhaps he wants no more celebrity -- but he's probably on the wall behind his parents in the photo below. His mother Gertrude, 78, is quoted as saying, "My son has a problem picking wives."
The Times caption: Gertrude and Mark Tripp are the parents of ousted Wendover Chief of Police Vaughn Tripp who was fired after his stripper wife was busted selling drugs to an undercover agent. A wall of photographs of the family adorns their living room. The police chief vacancy is advertised at hotjobs: Police Chief: City of Wendover Utah. In the course of pulling threads together, I found the bio of Tripp's counterpart across the border, the West Wendover, Nev., police chief, Ronald Supp. It ends, perfectly, with Ron says, "As a result of that last assignment, it appears that I became one of the many who have either been stranded here or came on a temporary basis and decided to stay."
Last month, SL Weekly, the alternative weekly out of Salt Lake City, 120 miles away, profiled some others stranded or landed here, but on the Utah side: Feature: Crap Shoot Mexican immigrants bet on a better life in Wendover. But is there a better payout for the kids? Wendover can be a tough place. Deepak Sharma found the border town so hard that the 36-year-old set himself on fire one April morning in an apartment on Wendover’s Utah side. The immigrant from India worked as a dealer at the Peppermill Hotel Casino in West Wendover, Nev. Like many immigrants to Wendover, he slept in an apartment on the barren Utah side, then drove the five minutes to his casino job on the more plush Nevada side of the border. Three comments on this story add a great deal to the whole package. Posted by Sheila Lennon October 19, 2007'Clinton, Schumer lose Woodstock museum'; 1.2 million download Radiohead $? album; TV news: Substance works, tooClinton, Schumer lose Woodstock museum may show up as a Jay Leno headline chuckle. Award goes to Bran Tumulty's posting on the Politics on the Hudson blog at the The Journal News/LoHud.com, out of White Plains, N.Y. It's just an earmark. All is not lost. Efforts by Sens. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chuck Schumer to earmark $1 million in federal money for a museum commemorating the 1969 Woodstock music festival were defeated Thursday.
In a functional society, there's support for all the arts and sciences, infants and boomers, hobbies and enjoyment, learning and easy travel and as many bronze monuments as you need. What you value is not inherently more important than what others care about. Vaguely related: Women Lit the Fire That Burned Draft Cards at Women's E-News. Another story from 1969:
As night fell in the capital city on Moratorium Day, 15,000 people carried candles around the Washington monument, led by Coretta Scott King, identified by the press, in the custom of the times, as "Mrs. Martin Luther King."
Last week, Radiohead released their latest album, In Rainbows, for free, asking fans to pay whatever they liked for the full length downloadable work. More: Radiohead's direct-marketing experiment looking successful
Viewers, the study found, are perfectly willing to watch stories on education policy or tax debates - in many cases they'll tune in to those stories but flip away from a segment on a celebrity divorce or a deadly highway pileup. And they'll consistently reward in-depth reporting with higher ratings than more cursory stories, no matter what the topic. Movie of the absurd: Reverend Billy Wants You To Stop Shopping. RU Sirius interviews the star of What Would Jesus Buy?, a new film directed by Rob VanAlkemade and produced by Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock. The film follows Billy and his "Church of Stop Shopping choir" on a trek across America, between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 2005, as our protagonists try to inject a little bit of genuine holiday spirit into the frenzy of the Xmas shopping season. (You know — love thy neighbors, help the needy, give peace a chance...) Posted by Sheila Lennon October 18, 2007Viacom puts 8 years of 'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart' onlineViacom to offer all clips of 'Daily Show' online "...every minute of the show since its 1999 inception." "The site (www.thedailyshow.com) is meant to pull in advertising money from Day One, but it also will be something of a test lab for Viacom and perhaps for rivals looking over its shoulder. Knock yourself out... Stewart has signed a two-year contract extension that keeps him in the anchor chair of his Comedy Central ''faux news'' show through 2010, the network announced Thursday. His contract had been set to expire at the end of 2008. Posted by Sheila Lennon Site helps you stop paper catalogs that follow an online purchaseYou've probably done this, too. Buy something at an online site, and find its paper catalog in your mailbox every couple of months thereafter. Now there's a way to opt out -- a "Do Not Mail" list, essentially. "Catalog Choice is a free service that allows you to decide what gets in your mailbox. Use it to reduce your mailbox clutter, while helping save natural resources." The Times (Deforest your mailbox): The site was developed by three nonprofit environmental groups - the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Ecology Center - to relay requests en masse to specific retailers. Since it was introduced last Wednesday, more than 20,000 people have registered. ...There have been some surprises: The most requests have come from people who wish to stop receiving the catalogs of L. L. Bean, a company built on an image of embracing the great outdoors. I'm surprised more sites don't let you opt out online, when you're making a purchase. Maybe they think you'll forget about them unless they nudge you with visual evidence. My first impulse was to take my growing pile of catalogs and unsubscribe every one of them, but I really do prefer to browse paper seed and plant catalogs. The choices are so numerous, and few sites let you display more than 10 items per page; the result is, quickly, click fatigue. Later: Reader Jim Rizzo emails to suggest, "Check out greendimes.com. It does something similar by stopping direct marketing 'junk' mail." This will cost $15, though. Catalog Choice is free, but more limited: GreenDimes reduces the credit card offers, insurance offers, sweepstakes offers, coupon mailers, charitable solicitations and retail catalogs that your household receives. We can’t reduce magazine subscriptions, bank statements, brokerage statements, school alumni or other similar mailings since these mailings are the result of a personal relationship you have with the company or organization. Jim adds, "Yes, it's not free, but the money goes to a good cause (and I think the kit includes some stuff to make your daily life a little greener)." Check it out if you're being thorough. Its FAQ is here. GreenDimes is a business, and has a blog. Posted by Sheila Lennon Surrealism, Halloween and a... barking spider?
Surreal and prolific: Fascinating Worlds of Jacek Yerka at Dark Roasted Blend. More at Yerka's site.
Here are some spooky things to browse on the Web that aren't on everybody's route:
 The Museum of Supernatural History is divided into a number of departments, each of which focuses on a magical, malefic or fantastical area of study. Each haunted antique (hauntique) is a gateway between two worlds. Individuals known as 'sensitives' are the key that can open these gateways. Of course, activating certain artefacts in the collection entails a risk of triggering a catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions. The Haunted Museum: Ghosts of the Prairie's Chronicle of Ghost Research, from the Heyday of Spiritualism to the Modern Era. How the Irish invented Hallowe'en
Posted by Sheila Lennon October 17, 2007'Sheri Martinelli: A Modernist Muse'; Dustin Hoffman at 70; Electronic paper: Not here yetSome days it seems there's nothing new on the Web but operating-system chatter, young men's fantasies and life hacking ("How to wash your hands"), and political outrage. It's wearying, and the tilt toward geek dudes' concerns betrays the promise of the universal Web. The competitive nature of social bookmarking seems not to appeal to people with more substantial interests, and their finds are often not recorded and shared. Worth a look:
No notice was taken by the press of artist-writer Sheri Martinelli’s death in November 1996, unfairly ignoring the significant role she played in the cultural history of our time. A brief overview of her career indicates her range of roles: she was a protégée of Anaïs Nin and is described at length in her infamous Diary; she was the basis for a major character in William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions and then became the muse and (some say) mistress of Ezra Pound (she appears in various guises in the later Cantos); Charlie Parker and the members of the Modern Jazz Quartet hung out at her Greenwich Village apartment; Marlon Brando was an admirer and Rod Steiger collected her art, as did E. E. Cummings; she knew and was admired by all the Beats, Ginsberg was an especially close friend and mentions her in one of his poems, and was herself known in San Francisco in the late 1950s as the Queen of the Beats; H. D. identified with her and wrote about her in End to Torment; Pound wrote the introduction to a book of her paintings, and her art is now in collections throughout the world. She wrote unusual prose and poetry, much of it published in her own ‘zine.... More: I met Sheri Martinelli and the guy she was living with, a Chinese named Gilbert Lee, in Washington, D.C. in 1956 or 1957 when I was 17 years old. Sheri was a red-headed woman of Irish descent (as she never let you forget), maybe about 40 years old, though she claimed to be more like 32....Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli 1960-1967
Dustin Hoffman is 70? Shoot, we're rolling off the edge. Midnight Cowboy was done on a low budget. You gotta have money to pay for a scene that includes a bunch of people on the street in midtown Manhattan. So Jon Voight and I were walking in regular traffic and being filmed by a camera hidden in a van across the street. That's a stolen shot. That was a cab that almost hit us. In my brain, I wanted to say, "We're making a movie here, asshole!" But your brain knows that would ruin the take. So I'm walking here! really means We're shooting a film here! Via Robot Wisdom.
I've been reading for decades about the thin sheet of something -- portable, unobtrusive, flexible and indestructible -- that will let us read the paper wherever. Soon come, for decades. Q: How do you see the future of e-paper? How easy is it to lose? I was afraid so... Posted by Sheila Lennon October 16, 2007Providence Geeks tomorrow, 7 p.m.; Streetpainted river; Gawker's nasty NYC; Pope JP2 'appears' in bonfire?Geeks need women: Providence Geeks' monthly meet is set for 7 p.m. Wednesday. At AS220 as always, but starting later than usual. Details at that Geeks link.
No other form has lent itself so perfectly to capturing the current ethos of young New York, which is overwhelmingly tipped toward anger, envy, and resentment at those who control the culture and apartments. “New York is a city for the rich by the rich, and all of us work at the mercy of rich people and their projects,” says Choire Sicha, Gawker’s top editor (he currently employs a staff of five full-time writers). “If you work at any publication in this town, you work for a millionaire or billionaire. In some ways, that’s functional, and it works as a feudal society. But what’s happened now, related to that, is that culture has dried up and blown away: What's left seems snarky and trashy. Be glad you're elsewhere.
Row, row, row... Hannu's Boatyard Free detailed plans for "One-sheet" (of plywood) and "one and a half sheet" boats. Small boats, of course. I'd rather be in this than in Gawker's NYC.
« Can't Talk; Hyping Part I: First on the Scene, to What End?
Lost in translation: Is this fiery image Pope John Paul II? This is from "Australia's largest-selling daily, the Herald Sun." ...The fiery figure being hailed as Pope John Paul II making an appearance beyond the grave was spotted during a ceremony in Poland to mark the second anniversary of his death. Fire seems an inappropriate medium for this apparition, considering... There's much more here -- in Italian, but reproducing several news clippings, a photo of the photographer, Gregorz Lukasik, the site of the festival, a map....
Posted by Sheila Lennon October 15, 2007Winemaker Bledsoe picked Brady yesterday; CEOs overpaid, they say; 'Airplane mode' (Say wha'?)
"Tom has established himself as one of the premier guys in the league and has done it for a long time," Bledsoe said. "Tony is, what, just about to go into his 16th game as a starter? The tale was of a Patriots team that came through again, despite a glaring failure to sack (by Rodney Harrison), and just one interception (by a surprised Junior Seau) in a whale of a game that was more of a nail-biter than it looks on paper (48-27 Pats). John Clayton, ESPN: The scary part of the Patriots' 6-0 start is that they really aren't playing their best football. Tackling was a little bit sloppy Sunday. Brady did miss 15 passes. In the third quarter, Patrick Crayton caught an 8-yard touchdown pass from Tony Romo to put the Cowboys ahead 24-21. Bledsoe, by the way, calls his budding winery the "Flying B." We can't wait till next year to see whether the label on his bottles resembles the Flying Elvis on his old helmet.
We are overpaid, say US executives. Financial Times, London. Most US corporate leaders believe chief executives are overpaid and do not provide value for money for their companies, according to a study that will embolden critics of excessive compensation. Reaganomics Finally Trickles Down To Area Man. The Onion, of course.
Weird Al Yankovich's Bob, a palindromic parody.
Posted by Sheila Lennon October 14, 2007Updated: Sad day on the Cowboys blog; Flamingos' flamingo formation; Muslim scholars call for peaceLater: The Dallas News Cowboys blog. After the 48-27 Patriots win. The comments tell all. Choreography? Flamingos form a flamingo, in an aerial photo in this month's National Geographic. How did they get them to do that?
LONDON, Oct 11 (Reuters) - More than 130 Muslim scholars from around the globe called on Thursday for peace and understanding between Islam and Christianity, saying "the very survival of the world itself is perhaps at stake".
There's probably something there that matches your energy level. You might want to peek at the Dallas News Cowboys Blog to see what they're saying about "us." I'll take Brady over Romo. Found: Seven out of eight Dallas News sportswriters pick the Pats. Posted by Sheila Lennon October 12, 2007BIF-3, Day 2: Denise Nemchev, Joseph CoughlinI missed the morning's storytellers on the second day of the Business Innovation Factory’s BIF-3 Collaborative Innovation Summit at Trinity Rep yesterday. You can read about them at the excellent conference blog. Here's the Day 1 post: Bloggers swarm the Business Innovation Factory's Collaborative Innovation Summit And the Mark Cuban - Walter Mossberg interview: BIF-3: Mark Cuban wants to buy Cubs -- and Verizon, to which I just added a bit of video.
Rachel Clarke: Transcripts from First Session Day 2 Brian Jepson: Adam Darowski: BIF-3: Session 5 (Wladawsky-Berger, Christensen, Lane, Levy) Erica Driver: Reinvention Requires A Near-Death Experience Josh Catone: Ellen Levy: Ask the Right Questions Lois Kelly: Finding the words for new concepts Afternoon session:
Denise Nemchev is President of Stanley Bostitch in East Greenwich, which began as Boston Stitchery Company, hence the name. Denise, wielding at different times a stapler, staples and a giant staple gun, is a born comedian with an MIT education. She is here to talk about a nail. In the wake of Katrina and other natural disasters, houses collapsed and nails came under scrutiny. What happens when a nail fails? How to innovate to prevent nail failures? "A nail shears when an earthquake turns your house into a parallelogram. Very difficult to decorate," she quipped. She said Bostitch worked with FEMA, OSHA, Clemson and Brigham Young universities, the insurance idustry and building code officials to understand how a building fails. The result was Hurriquake disaster-resistant nails that withstand winds up to 175 mph and twice the shear force of standard building nails. Its fat head is 25 percent larger than most nails. Popular Science named her nail Innovation of the Year 2006. When BIF makes available the video that was shot of the entire conference, check this one out. She's one funny lady, delivering a masterful riff about a... nail. And she's president of this venerable company. Also blogged by: Rachel Clarke: BIF and Denise Nemchev
Joseph F. Coughlin is director of the Age Lab, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Coughlin thinks advertising is not being disruptive and is not changing. Baby boomers are more active and are living longer and are the greatest chunk of the population, but they're not advertising to us. "None of you admit that you're aging," he said So the auto industry, even if they want to build an old man's car, couldn't sell it: No one would buy one. Mossberg, who is 60, interjects, "I just want them to advertise intelligently to me." (At that moment I thought of Dennis Hopper, onetime wildman turned golfer and Bush Republican , who makes me want to throw a shoe at the TV when he comes on to advertise Coughlin told a strange story about a product for people called a Personal Advisor: Swipe a bar code and it reads a product's ingredients and tells you to buy something besides the Ritz crackers. It's mounted on shopping carts in Germany. (I think I found this on the web: it's called the "advisor for nutrition and intelligent shopping," No barcodes, it uses RDID tags and a precoded list of product ingredients. I wouldn't buy this. I don't need my shopping cart nagging me when I reach for the cookies. It also seems to be a stalking horse for shopping cart tech I really don't want, such as ads as I cruise the aisles.) An interesting statistic: Just 9 percent of retired couples move to Florida. Then they move back "home" when one of them gets sick. This came on the heels of learning that 90 percent of 50-year-olds want to retire, and 95 percent of 55-year-olds. But they actually want to keep working, just at something else. The best news he had was that they're trying to eliminate the nursing home, keep you in your own house. He sees it as inventing "Longevity 3.0." Longevity 1.0 was pure luck -- humans who avoided predators and bad water survived. I think marketers can predict what Dennis Hopper's old age will be like, and target him. I don't think you can predict mine, though. At least I hope not. Also blogged by: Rachel Clarke: BIF and Joseph Coughlin by Walt Mossberg Overviews: Steve Hardy: Day 2 at BIF-3. How innovators think: asking new questions Final storyteller: Mark Cuban Posted by Sheila Lennon Al Gore shares Nobel Peace Prize with UN climate change panel
India's Rajendra Pachauri, 67, is chairman of the IPCC, which was set up by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Program in 1988. The group has about 2,500 scientists whose mandate is to assess ``scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of climate change.'' -- Bloomberg More: Nobel prize.org Posted by Sheila Lennon BIF-3: Mark Cuban wants to buy Cubs -- and Verizon
The billionaire entrepreneur says he's been practicing his waltz and has lost 27 lbs. After that, Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walter Mossberg got to ask him some questions at the second day of the Business Innovation Factory summit. Here's a bit of video I shot, just to give you a sense of the conversation (25.49 seconds, 12 mb mpeg file).
Why would you want to buy the Cubs? It's not a sure thing yet, add Cuban, who does own the Dallas Mavericks. "All I've been able to do is say I'm interested and go through the qualification process and we'll go on from there." On the early days: Mossberg said, "You were one of the great innovators, coming up with a great idea -- video -- and selling it for a bunch of money. (Broadcast.com) These folks are interested in how." Cuban: "I look at myself as a consumer. When I started Micro Solutions in 1982, I was selling PCs... the success factor was understanding the application of tech to business. "In 1983 I got in touch with Novell Shared Data systems, and said at some point we're going to want to link all these PCs together. The rest is history." Is video on the Web a destination or just a data type? On broadband: Cuban said: "Public companies want a return. Innovation has stagnated because of (the demand for) earnings per share. You're going to see more companies go private that need to make significant investments in order to compete. "...to me the flinch point is 100 megabytes throughput to the home. Verizon, or anybody who uses fiber can do it. "...If I could buy one company, it would be Verizon." On HDTV: "There are more hi-def channels but not a lot of hi-def content. Seventy percent of men will turn to high-def channels no matter what's on." (Mossberg added he'll watch shows on hi-def he doesn't even like.) 3-D is coming back in a big way. More than 1,000 theaters will be 3-D enabled in the next few months. "No more paper glasses." On Google's future:"Google is completely dependent on that PC. That's a bet I'm not willing to make." On the digital future: "The greatest opportunity is a new operating system." After which he listed the flaws of all the current ones. The takeaway: "Sweat equity overcomes the need for capital every time." Also blogged by Rachel Clarke: BIF and Mark Cuban by Walt Mossberg Brian Jepson: Mark Cuban and Walt Mossberg close out BIF-3 Posted by Sheila Lennon October 11, 2007Nobel Prize for Doris Lessing; Call a customer-service human; Russian Viagra spammer murdered...Feminist voice: British author Doris Lessing has been awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. I first read Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook in high school. It wasn't easy to get into, but once in, I loved it.
The old cliché "You're not paranoid if they really are out to get you" turns out to apply quite nicely to the world of P2P file-sharing. A trio of intrepid researchers from the University of California-Riverside decided to see just how often a P2P user might be tracked by content owners. Their startling conclusion: "naive" users will exchange data with such "fake users" 100 percent of the time. Related: Madonna dumps label in $134m deal; Nine Inch Nails is now label-free.
Alexey Tolstokozhev (btw, in Russian his name means 'Thick Skin'), a Russian spammer, found murdered in his luxury house near Moscow. He has been shot several times with one bullet stuck in his head. According to authorities, this last head shot is a clear mark of russian hit men (known as "killers" in Russia). Silly Web: The Children’s Hour, Part 2: Can Facebook Apps Grow Up? WSJ blogger Kara Swisher. Interesting debate in the comments, too.
AP reported last month, In 2009 (Indianapolis-based Clarian Health ) will start reducing pay for employees in its health plan by $10 per paycheck if their BMI — a measurement of body fat through a height and weight ratio — is in the obese range of more than 29.9. The deduction will be $5 per check if they don’t meet required cholesterol, blood pressure or blood glucose measurements. Workers will be required to complete an annual health risk assessment and can appeal to have their fees dropped if they show improvement. There's no correlation to actual use of the medical system that results in bills to the insurer, these are just sin taxes they can get away with. Even if you're perfectly healthy and only cost the insurer an annual checkup, your rates rise. Skiers, motorcycle owners and those who live in rough neighborhoods may be next. Via Romenesko, where a commenter reports, "USA TODAY has done this for the past couple of years or so, and I assume other Gannett properties take the same action." Posted by Sheila Lennon Bloggers swarm the Business Innovation Factory's Collaborative Innovation Summit
I asked a few people afterwards at a packed reception at Gracie's for their reaction to the storytellers and the day.
"I'm a technologist, but this is not about the technology. It's about communication enabled by the technology."
"I'm not sure how (these ideas) will translate, but they don't have to."
"...How vulnerable innovators are... The architect was great."
Like many of those quoted above, I feel fertilized. Something nonlinear happened there. It didn't require networking, although lots of that went on in the short breaks between clumps of 15-minute presentations. It was something like art -- when the work acts as a trigger that opens something in the observer; something like the Web itself, which makes what one of us knows available to all as common knowledge; and something else, an evolution that spreads intelligence like a virus and explains why discoveries can be made nearly simultaneously and independently by innovators a world apart and unaware of each other's work.
Saul Kaplan, now executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, was the driving force behind its founding when he was EDC's business development director. BIF charges hefty fees to businesses for membership. Yet there was very little emphasis from most of the speakers today on money and business, and almost no technology language or jargon spoken. The focus was on the process and experience of innovation.
In a comedy of errors, I was saving my raw posts periodically, as I would on my own blog. But saving "unpublished" looks like "to be edited" on projo.com's news blog. Sometimes only what I had made coherent was published. This miscommunication was my fault for not thinking to put a "Do not publish" note on top of partial posts. I had trouble getting on the network, and consequently missed taking photos of some of the first presenters. Fortunately, blogger heaven up there in the top rows on the right was full of people doing the diligent thing. The Blogjam of invited bloggers, some publishing on their own blogs, together covered far more than my bits, which perhaps served only to introduce this concept to a mainstream audience reading the daily news stream. Rachel Clarke, sitting to my left, was a stenographic whiz. Providence Geeks co-founder Jack Templin, sitting on the other side of her, and I shared our awe of her efficiency. ("Lots of practice," she told me.) Rachel's bulleted quotes at License to Roam are a play-by-play of each presentation. As more posts come in this evening, these are the more considered, reflective ones. I'm going to try to pull some of the hive's work together below. This was a grueling process, and some storytellers fell victim to blogging fatigue by virtue of their placement in the program. No slight is intended to those whose presentations coincided with our exhaustion.
Blogged by: Rachel Clarke: BIF and Dean Esserman Brian Jepson: Dean Esserman: Connecting Police with the Community Lois Kelly: Beyond 911: innovating police forces, bringing back neighborhood beats Jeff De Cagna: Podcast interview with Colonel Dean Esserman, chief of Providence Police Department (6:35)
Blogged by: Rachel Clarke: BIF and Matt Cottam Brian Jepson: Matt Cottam: An Actor Prepares
Blogged by: Rachel Clarke: BIF and Euan Semple Erica Driver: Lessons in Enterprise Web 2.0 Adoption From The BBC
Jason Fried and Walter Mossberg Blogged by: Rachel Clarke: BIF and Jason Fried by Walt Mossman Lois Kelly: Walter Mossberg and Jason Fried: Why are we stuck with bloated software crap like Outlook? Josh Catone: BIF -3: Jason Fried - Software Should Be Opinionated Jeff De Cagna: Podcast interview with Jason Fried of 37signals (9:14) Sheila Lennon: BIF-3: WSJ's Walter Mossberg
Blogged by: Rachel Clarke: BIF and Jay Cohen
Blogged by: Brian Jepson: Chris Benedict : Getting More for the Planet within Budget
Blogged by: Sheila Lennon: BIF photos: 'Green architect'; 'Feed' 'zine founder
Blogged by: Rachel Clarke: BIF and Steven Johnson Brian Jepson: Steven Johnson : The Ghost Map
Mavericks at Work: Bill Taylor, author of Mavericks at Work Dan Heath, author of Made to Stick Dave Balter, founder and CEO, BzzAgent, Inc. (word-of-mouth marketing firm) Paul English, Founder, the gethuman database (direct lines to companies' customer service people), Co-Founder & CTO, Kayak.com (comparative travel search) Blogged by: Rachel Clarke: BIF and Mavericks at Work Josh Catone: BIF -3: Dan Heath - Think Inside the Box Brian Jepson: Dan Heath: Thinking Inside the Box
Blogged by: Rachel Clarke: BIF and Matt Mason Brian Jepson: Matt Mason : Don't Tase' Me, Guys (Mason slipped that way new meme into his story, to appreciative giggles from the audience.) Sheila Lennon: BIF -3: Pirates as innovators
Blogged by: Rachel Clarke: BIF and Juan Fernando Santos
Blogged by: Sheila Lennon: BIF-3: Mossberg interviews Richard Saul Wurman
Steve Hardy: BIF-3 - Wednesday Lois Kelly: BIF3 Collaborative Innovation Notable Quotes Erica Driver: Serendipity: A Critical Innovation Success Factor Isabel Walcott Hilborn: Notes from BIF-3 Isabel Walcott Hilborn: Bif -3 Afternoon Session Notes
Posted by Sheila Lennon October 10, 2007I'm live-blogging BIF-3Surrounded by people blogging at the Business Innovation Factory conference blog -- there's also a social network Profiles of speakers are here. I'm live blogging it at the projo newsblog, will backfill here later. Posted by Sheila Lennon October 9, 2007The colors of Oz
 ColourLovers is always fun -- (colors come with code for your Web pages, but its palettes also work if you're painting your kitchen and looking for color combos. The little on-line viewing link that leads to the original edition is a true bonus treasure. Reading the original tale, you plunge right into how bleak orphan Dorothy's life really was.
Posted by Sheila Lennon October 8, 2007Better Halloween links; Springsteen freebie; Nikon microphoto contest winnersUsing one holiday to prepare for the next? Me too...
Nathan Wesling carves nice toothy pumpkins.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band launched their 2007 tour Tuesday night in Hartford. Here's how the Courant reviewed it: Springsteen Makes Old New, New Old.
I do like this image of a dragonfly turned into a kaleidoscopic image by Dr. Jeffrey Bowen of Bridgewater State College. Here are all the winners back to 1977. Posted by Sheila Lennon October 7, 2007Weekend links: Brady baby; Ron Wood's autobiography; Dolphin birth; Larry Craig to Idaho Hall of Fame; Food section links
TMZ.com has Tom Brady's tyke's birth certificate -- Aug. 22, 2007 at 11:46 a.m. -- which confirms he bears his mama's last name and contains one bit of news: Bridget's birthdate is April 28, 1971, not the Sept. 21,1970 date floating around on movie and horoscope sites. She's younger than that.
Also:
This is a bully used to getting away with it. Craig was talking the talk. Straight talk on "tearooms" in the Trib.
Here's one of the sources I use for the new Football Food & Spirits blog: Newspaper Food Sections and Columns Online - By State. Perennials: "My sense of collegiality with those of similar sensibilities coupled with the voice I find in producing this collage have acted as a great anodyne for megrims, funks and other assorted black dogs of a chemical, tempermental and/or situational variety." .. and Jorn Barger counts down to 10 years. Posted by Sheila Lennon October 5, 2007Cats for Peace; Live Lucinda 07, Clapton '73; Addictive online games: Wink, MindscapeLong weekend after a long slog, thanks to Columbus. Nothing heavy here, on the surface anyway.
Eric Clapton
I like to put my brain in neutral and let my subconscious chew on things. Certain online games are great for this. They're never role-playing, multiplayer or violent games. The 10-year-old and I bonded on games.
Without doubt, my favorite part of Wink: The Game is the emphasis on stealth over brute force. Wink is not exactly a tough guy: his most useful skill is the ability to vanish into the shadows and, whenever one of the hooded, glowy-eyed baddies passes by, creep up from behind and knock the enemy out. This game is a brilliantly conceived and executed platformer of the highest level. It's a testament to the level design that I somehow never got lost, even though at a few points I was literally free-falling through tunnels with the screen turning and tilting at each intersection.
Posted by Sheila Lennon October 4, 2007Updated: Larry Craig won't quit Senate, explores appealThe day after: Popkey: Is worst over for Craig? Maybe, if ethics hearings aren't public. By Dan Popkey, is the Idaho Statesman's investigative reporter. Updated 4:17 p.m. Craig issued the following statement in reaction to Thursday's ruling allowing the guilty plea to stand: "I am extremely disappointed with the ruling issued today. I am innocent of the charges against me. I continue to work with my legal team to explore my additional legal options. This comes from an updated version of this story: The Idaho Statesman: Judge denies Craig's request to withdraw guilty plea, says claim was 'illogical': WASHINGTON — A judge in Minnesota has turned down U.S. Sen. Larry Craig’s effort to withdraw his Aug. 1 guilty plea, saying that his claim that he didn’t know what he was doing when he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct was “illogical.” There's no word yet on whether Sen. Craig will appeal, resign from the Senate now (he let his original resignation date of Sept. 30 pass while he waited for this ruling) or do nothing. The GOP has threatened a Senate ethics hearing. Posted by Sheila Lennon '365 Cheeses' is a guide you can take to the storeKirk Samuels bills 365 Cheeses as a "yearlong course in cheese." He was educating himself, one day at a time. The results of his research -- each with a photo -- are sorted here all sorts of ways -- alphabetically, by country or state of origin, by type (even "stinky cheeses"). Or you can see them all, chronologically, on one long, long page. Here lie surprises: "Port Salut is what I call a breakfast cheese." More surprises: Cheeses named Midnight Moon and Naked Goat and Lamb Chopper. Mountains of packaged cheese wedges and rounds in the markets are bewildering. I'm going to browse this for cheeses I might like to try, make a list and take it shopping. Top of my list:
Posted by Sheila Lennon October 3, 2007Games competition: This entry is a ball
Factory Balls. is a fresh visual logic puzzle -- you're masking and striping balls, figuring out the precise order in which to dip the ball into colors to make the right patterns. It's an entry in Jay is Games' Casual Game Competition, a game a day rolling out now. The theme of this year's contest is "ball physics." Posted by Sheila Lennon Flying bat graphics win award for Brown scientists; CT scan, nature tie for top photo prizeAmong the top winners of the 2007 Visualization Challenge Winners, the fifth annual, sponsored by the journal Science and the National Science Foundation, are a group of scientists from Brown, for turning the flight of a bat into elegant graphics.
INFORMATIONAL GRAPHICS: FIRST PLACE Kenneth S. Breuer Here's the Bat Flight Research page of engineer Kenneth Breuer and biologist Sharon Swartz. Two very different entries tied for the top photography award, one using technology to illuminate what's hidden, another using fingers and stones to reveal what's usually curled.
What Lies Behind Our Nose? Kai-hung Fung A computed tomography (CT) scan from a 33-year-old Chinese woman being examined for thyroid disease provided the raw data for Fung's rendering. He stacked together 182 thin CT "slices" to create a 3D image looking upward at the sinuses from underneath the head.
Irish Moss, Chondrus Crispus Andrea Ottesen The slimy, glistening mass of seaweed washed up on a sandy beach seems light-years distant from this feathery, dendritic image of Irish moss (Chondrus crispus) created by Andrea Ottesen, a botanist and molecular ecologist at the University of Maryland, College Park. "If you pull Chondrus out of the ocean, it's folded on itself--really curled up," she says. It wasn't until after she had "pressed every one of those little ends down with sea stones" and left it to dry for 2 days that the seaweed's beautiful, simple shape was revealed. Via BoingBoing Posted by Sheila Lennon Jon Stewart: confronts NBC's Chris Matthews: New book is "a recipe for sadness"Chris Matthews of NBC and MSNBC went on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to plug his new book, Life's a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation, and Success. Stewart hates the book. He calls it "a recipe for sadness....This strikes me as artifice. If you live this book, your life will be strategy. And if your life is strategy you'll be unhappy." When Stewart compares the book to Machiavelli's The Prince, Matthews beams, saying, "This is better." Matthews is astonished at Stewart's vehemence. "This is a book interview from hell. This is the worst interview I've ever had in my life..." Amazing to watch Stewart call Matthews out for lack of substance. Here's the five+-minute clip. Posted by Sheila Lennon October 2, 2007Apartment at the Mall: Website with video, photos and an artist's apology
PROVIDENCE — Eight artists snuck into the depths of Providence Place mall and built a secret studio apartment in which they stayed, on and off, for nearly four years until mall security finally caught their leader last week... In contrast to Boston's fear of what it doesn't understand (Cops to Flashy Things: Stay Out of Boston!), Providence seems to have gotten relatively sophisticated about performance art since Barnaby Evans turned burning braziers on the downtown rivers into WaterFire -- conceptual art that made Providence hotter for tourists and conventioneers. Several commenters in an anonymous online survey did leap to thinking if artists can lurk, so can terrorists. (And bogeymen. Anywhere. Eeeek!) Art is supposed to make you see in new ways. Whether what you see delights you or terrifies you probably depends on what you bring to it.
Posted by Sheila Lennon American RuinsI'm still traveling... American Ruins Photo Gallery by Chuck Hutchison "This is a gallery of houses, barns, automobiles and businesses that have become the ruins on the landscape of America." Posted by Sheila Lennon October 1, 2007Pumpkin faces; Convert anything; Making Dylan's 'Blonde on Blonde'; Craig deadline passes; Tattooed LamborghiniI'm on the road today, so just a few links.
Try this at home: Pumpkin Faces, inspiration from last year. At Planck's Constant.
... The strangest Nashville recording dates were the second and third. The second began at six in the evening and did not end until five-thirty the next morning, but Dylan played only for the final ninety minutes, and on only one song: “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” He would later call it a piece of religious carnival music, which makes sense given its melodic echoes of Johann Sebastian Bach, especially the chorale “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Unlike “Visions of Johanna,” though, this epic needed work, and Dylan toiled over the lyrics for hours. The level of efficiency was military: Hurry up and wait.
Looks like a handy tool, worth a bookmark.
Deadline passes; Craig still in office Idaho Statesman Sen. Larry Craig's original deadline to resign Sept. 30 came and went Sunday with the Idaho Republican still in office. GOP Is Ready to Roll Out the Klieg Lights for Craig Washington Post Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho is a tough guy to run out of town.
Posted by Sheila Lennon |
Red Sox outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury stole second base in the bottom of the fourth inning, of last night's second Sox World Series game at Fenway, so you get a free "crunchy seasoned beef taco" Tuesday between 2 and 5 p.m.. (And the Sox won, 2-1 , to boot.) 
The stripper -- Sylvia, at right -- is the police chief's wife. 
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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