America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till souls wax fair as earth and air
And music-hearted sea!

America the Beautiful
Words by Katharine Lee Bates, Wellesley 1880. Melody by Samuel Ward, descendant of Rhode Island Governor and Representative to the Continental Congress Samuel Ward.

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare of freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife.
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for halcyon skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the enameled plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till souls wax fair as earth and air
And music-hearted sea!

O beautiful for pilgrims feet,
Whose stem impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till paths be wrought through
wilds of thought
By pilgrim foot and knee!

O beautiful for glory-tale
Of liberating strife
When once and twice,
for man's avail
Men lavished precious life!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till nobler men keep once again
Thy whiter jubilee!

*Cast: Muhammad Ali, Halle Berry, Jon Bon Jovi, Bono (as U2), Wes Borland (as Limp Bizkit), Amy Brenneman, Mike Campbell, Mariah Carey, Jim Carrey Alvin Chea(as Take 6), Adam Clayton (as U2), George Clooney, Cindy Crawford, Sheryl Crow, Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz, John Cusack, Benicio Del Toro, Robert De Niro Cedric Dent(as Take 6), Danny DeVito, Cameron Diaz, Céline Dion, Fred Durst (as Limp Bizkit), Clint Eastwood Howie Epstein, Sally Field, Calista Flockhart, Dennis Franz, Andy Garcia, Whoopi Goldberg, Cuba Gooding Jr., Kelsey Grammer, Tom Hanks, Goldie Hawn, Salma Hayek, Faith Hill, Enrique Iglesias, Mick Jagger, Wyclef Jean, Billy Joel, Jane Kaczmarek, Michael Keaton Alicia Keys/, Joey Kibble(as Take 6), Mark Kibble(as Take 6), Nicole Kidman, Lucy Liu, Martie Maguire (as Dixie Chicks), Natalie Maines(as Dixie Chicks), Dave Matthews, Mike McCready, Reba McEntire, Claude McKnight(as Take 6), Larry Mullen Jr. (as U2), Mike Myers, Willie Nelson, Jack Nicholson, Conan O'Brien, Al Pacino, Sarah Jessica Parker, Rhea Perlman, Tom Petty, Brad Pitt Keith Richards, Julia Roberts, Emily Robison(as Dixie Chicks), Chris Rock, Ray Romano, Kurt Russell, Meg Ryan, Johnny Rzeznik, Richie Sambora, Adam Sandler Paul Shaffer Paul Simon, Will Smith, Jimmy Smits Bruce Springsteen, Sylvester Stallone, Ben Stiller, Sting-, Christine Taylor, The Edge (as U2), David Thomas(as Take 6), Eddie Vedder, Mark Wahlberg, Sela Ward, Don Was, Robin Williams, Stevie Wonder, James Woods, Neil Young.

You may need to turn up the volume -- some early words are inaudible, but the music is not so faint.

TMZ.com is now the hottest Hollywood celebrity gossip website on the planet. So hot, in fact, that when it broke the news of Michael Jackson's death last week, its world exclusive popped up online six minutes before the singer actually died.

For its many critics this was confirmation that the website ... plays fast and loose with the truth.

But for TMZ, the explanation was simple. By the time Jackson was officially declared dead, at 2.26pm Los Angeles time last Thursday, one of the site's sources within the corridors of the UCLA Medical Centre (it has a vast network that blankets the city) had already tipped it off.

Michael Jackson dead was the scoop of a lifetime for any media outlet..

Really?

This is an odd story that seems to ask all the wrong questions and value the trivial, perhaps because the author is Australian and really doesn't get American journalism:

Some rival media outlets so dislike and distrust TMZ that they didn't report Jackson was dead until it had been confirmed by the Los Angeles Times and Associated Press.

Actually, mainstream journalists outside L.A. had probably never heard of TMZ ("A Web site reported it?") They trusted the L.A. Times and AP to confirm the facts, not just pass on the tip of a hospital employee, and official confirmation wasn't forthcoming. The hourlong wait for another source to report Jackson's death independently didn't help, and is partly explained by the fact that he hadn't been pronounced dead when TMZ reported it. It's customary here to inform family members before making a public announcement. (No further information on the unnamed hospital tipster, or on efforts TMZ may have made to confirm the facts, are offered.)

Brook seems surprised -- because both companies are owned by Time Warner -- that CNN wouldn't report "TMZ's claim," or trust its network of paid informers who'll drop a dime to make a buck in the starstruck 30-mile-zone around L.A. that gives TMZ its name. Celebrities are sitting ducks for the serfs who serve and tattle on them. Loosening lips, ethical constraints and loyalties with cash, TMZ is shooting fish in a barrel.

Scooping the coroner really isn't any news organization's finest hour.

Amazing. Neil Young turns this encore into a nearly 8 1/2-minute song on the last date of his two-year world tour. Paul McCartney joins him from the wings in mid-song. After Neil breaks all his guitar strings, he and McCartney finish the tune on a vibraphone.

It's a dark and stormy night at 8 in the morning, torrents of rain, the power flickering, thunder rolling, headlights of the cars on 95 reflecting off the inky road.

We're in the heart of the red zone:

In an editorial Sunday, this newspaper argued that Sanford's resignation could hurt South Carolina and that given the extraordinary importance of the 2010 gubernatorial campaign, the governor should remain in office in order to leave the playing field level for the 2010 Republican primary.

That position, however, was based on two conditions: That Sanford had not abused his office, and that he was willing and capable of putting in the hard work necessary to serve as this state's chief executive officer.

Instead, Sanford has disclosed additional details of his personal life that have damaged his credibility. He has invited further scrutiny into his travel while he has been in office. He has rendered himself incapable of serving the remainder of his term.

The paper's news division has a special section about The Governor's Affair. Three-quarters of respondents to an online poll there now think Sanford should resign.

The State, the McClatchy paper that received the emails between the governor and his lover in December and sent a reporter to meet his plane from Argentina, still owns the story, though. How Mark Sanford's affair blew up lays it all out, with a sidebar of related stories.

The governor's need for public confession continues: New sex revelations fuel calls for resignation.

85 percent of respondents on their poll think Sanford should resign.

We've launched our Flickr2Twitter integration.

Share your Flickr content either via "upload by email" or feature existing Flickr content in your Twitter stream.

If you'd like to Twitter your Flickr then check out the following three FAQs for easy setup and use:

How do I Twitter my Flickr photos?

Can I post to Flickr and Twitter from my mobile?

How do I Twitter from Flickr?

Of course it's only the link to a photo that appears in the tweet.

(Such an arcane, childish language we speak these days.)

Optimizing the sensory characteristics and acceptance of canned cat food: use of a human taste panel.

"18 flavour attributes (sweet, sour/acid, tuna, herbal, spicy, soy, salty, cereal, caramel, chicken, methionine, vegetable, offaly, meaty, burnt flavour, prawn, rancid and bitter) and four texture dimensions (hardness, chewiness, grittiness and viscosity) were generated to describe the sensations elicited by 13 commercial pet food samples."

From the actual abstract of the study ,Optimizing the sensory characteristics and acceptance of canned cat food: use of a human taste panel.

...Meat chunks and gravy/gels differed significantly from each other in both flavour and texture. Cat food products differed in their liking ratings, although no differences were found between homogeneous, MC and GG samples, and eight flavour attributes were correlated with overall liking scores. It is now necessary to determine the usefulness and limits of sensory data gathered from human panels in describing and predicting food acceptance and preference behaviours in cats. For instance, while the sense of taste in cats appears generally similar to that of other mammals, they lack a sweet taste receptor (Li et al., 2006), which may limit the applicability of sweetness ratings obtained from humans....

Bursting soap bubbles at ZuZu Top, nine high-rez photos that illustrate the art in physics.

Buy Vista or a Vista PC Now, Get Windows 7 Free Later

Buy a PC running Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, or Ultimate between June 26th, 2009 and January 31st, 2010 from sponsoring manufacturers and vendors, or buy these editions of Vista separately, and you qualify for a free upgrade to the equivalent Windows 7 edition.

Getting Windows 7 Very Cheap - If You're Fast on the Click

However, if you're not in the market for a new PC, and don't want to buy Vista now to qualify for a free Windows 7 upgrade, you can still get a cool upgrade deal if you use Windows XP or Vista - if you hurry. If you pre-order Windows 7 Home Premium or Professional upgrade editions right now, you can cash in on significant savings:

• Home Premium upgrade $49.99 (down from $119.99)
• Professional upgrade $99.99 (down from $199.99)

If you're currently running Windows Vista Ultimate (like I am) and decide you don't need BitLocker or multilanguage support, you can "upgrade" from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Professional. Note that these savings expire July 11th in the US, and are available from many retailers as well as from Microsoft's online store.

• Amazon
• Best Buy
• CostCo
• Frys
• Office Depot
• Office Max
• Sam's Club
• Staples
• Tiger Direct
• Walmart
• Newegg
• Nebraska Furniture Mart

The really bad news, from IDG:

Users running XP-powered machines, downgraded or not, must do a "clean install" of Windows 7, however, which means that they will have to reinstall all applications, recreate Windows settings and restore data from a backup after the XP-to-Windows 7 upgrade.

But wait... The best Way to Upgrade Windows XP to Windows 7?:

(Besides buying Vista Upgrade... ) The only other way that at least keeps your user profiles and settings: The only thing you have to do is to reinstall your apps. The tool to do this is Windows Easy Transfer for Windows 7 from Microsoft.

Windows Easy Transfer was already available for Vista and got improved for Windows 7. The tool takes your user profiles and settings from your Windows XP and transfers it to your fresh Windows 7 install.

To install all applications again is still some work, but at least you do not have to start entirely from scratch.

More details about the Windows Easy Transfer for Windows 7 can be found here. A step-by-step guide on using the tool can be found here.

Must I switch? A year after Windows XP's death, users keep it alive and kicking

This gives me a headache. There'll be lots more to come on this. Chaos is inevitable.

Noted:
How to get to the top of a forest

Interesting photos of gizmos and temporary walkways used by scientists who study the forest's canopy.

Sunday Journal: A fired reporter spirals into the unknown. St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. She tumbled into crack.

Sneak Peek: The Book Of Genesis -- Illustrated By Robert Crumb. See some of it at ComicShop. (The New Yorker publishes the first three chapters, but the online version requires a subscription.)

'60s alt-comics illustrator Robert Crumb tackles the Bible this time.

Crumb discusses the work in a 2005 interview (R. Crumb Speaks) with Robert Hughes, longtime art critic at Time magazine who offered commentary for the 1994 film Crumb, calling him "the American Brueghel."

HUGHES: Is God going to look like Mr. Natural?

CRUMB: Nah. He has a white beard but he actually ended up looking more like my father. He has a very masculine face like my father. My problem was, how am I going to draw God? Should I just draw him as a light in the sky that has dialogue balloons coming out from it? Then I had this dream. God came to me in this dream, only for a split second, but I saw very clearly what he looked like. And I thought, ok, there it is, I've got God.

HUGHES: And what did she look like?

CRUMB: I went through that whole thing too; maybe I'll draw God as a black woman. But if you actually read the Old Testament he's just an old, cranky Jewish patriarch. It's a lot of fun doing Genesis, actually. It's very visual. It's lurid. Full of all kinds of crazy, weird things that will really surprise people.

Amazon is offering the $500 slipcase edition, which includes a signed print and is limited to 250 copies, at a pre-order price of $315. Basic hardcover is $16.47 there. Publication date is Oct. 19.

Background: In the beginning. Prague Post interviewed Crumb earlier this month at the Prague Writers' Festival.

Once, Twice I succeeded. A lot depends on the arrangement of dark dots you're dealt at the start. Here's one way:

This seems to be the iconic image.

via VVORK, which also finds two more:

Michael Jackson White, 1997-1999 by Paul McCarthy

Harm Van Den Dorpel

The art muffles the raw weird that becomes apparent when you try to follow this on a story level.

This twitter post, from @KNX1070 four minutes ago, says Michael Jackson is dead. Google News' latest, from Fox, says he's being rushed to the hospital. Here's the latest Google search, as of 3:42pm Pacific:

Oh, but there's a backstory. I was right in the thick of it. Here's what I wrote in comments at Doc's:

June 25, 2009 at 7:03 pm Sheila Lennon

Doc, I just left the newsroom, and the problem was confirmation. TMZ.com said he was dead, but the family was arriving at his bedside and no one at the hospital would confirm his condition, any condition.

Some news orgs went with, "Report: Michael Jackson dies," quoting TMZ's unknown source, but most of us just made pages/modules/blog posts and waited for the green light to upload them.

Nobody wants to have to retract a death announcement, and what difference does it make if you wait to make sure it's really true. (In the old days, "UPI gets it first, AP gets it right" was a truism.)

Finally, AP got somebody knowledgeable but unauthorized -- (the source is known but not named) -- to confirm, and we all uploaded.

and

June 25, 2009 at 7:17 pm Sheila Lennon
Afterthought: One source is not enough.

Maybe TMZ has people all over Hollywood who know to call them. But hoaxsters or exaggeraters could call, too. I watched Twitter atwitter, but all over TMZ, if it was linked at all.

Finally, AP seems to have gotten a hospital or family insider to confirm. The AP editors know the name of that source and called it credible, even if they agreed not to name the source, lest he/she be fired for telling the rest of us what was really happening.

Nobody would confirm he was dead.

Andrea heard it first. I immediately went to the L.A. Times and TMZ. Both had that Jackson had been taken to the hospital (UCLA Medical Center). Then TMZ switched to "Michael Jackson dies."

In the newsroom, I told people it had happened, who was reporting it and how. I told them TMZ (who?) had had the video of Patriots QB Tom Brady in a walking cast before the 2008 Super Bowl.

Several news orgs blogged the early report of his hospitalization, noting they were trying to confirm.

There was no discussion. We discussed some logistics -- what sort of Breaking News widget to use -- but we waited. I thought TMZ's source was real and right, but that's just a hunch. Lots of twitterers had the same hunch. But the mental discipline of journalism says it's better to be slow than be wrong.

"It sounds like it's true" just isn't good enough.

AP's email that the hospital was about to have a newser (news conference) was the signal. Donna had everything ready when "Michael Jackson dies" finally moved.

(Friday updates: Romenesko -- the "inside media" blog at Poynter Institute -- gathers links on the sourcing issue.

Via MeFi, Australian TV ran with the later-denied death tweets yesterday about actor Jeff Goldblum, complete with tribute video. A commenter: "As an Aussie I hang my head in shame at Channel Nine broadcasting Goldblum's death as fact. Channel Seven broke MJ's death by one of their correspondents reading it off his Twitter feed.")

RIP, Michael. You and Farrah Fawcett together at the Pearly Gates is a mind-boggling image.

#michaeljackson on Twitter.

The Official Michael Jackson Youtube Channel

My favorite, of a dune field in Saudi Arabia from space that looks like textile design:

Vaguely related: A very trippy animated moon, an APOD from 2005: "This time-lapse sequence shows what our Moon looks like during a lunation, a complete lunar cycle."