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iPodNN | Wal-Mart, Apple spar for movie sales:
Wal-Mart is displeased with the prospect of Apple taking a bite out of its movie sale business, reports BusinessWeek. The report says that Apple will launch the 'iTunes Movie Store' as soon as mid-September along with a new iPod. Wal-Mart has reportedly become so concerned for its business that it has threatened not to sell DVDs from companies which agree to sell on iTunes. The prospect of Wal-Mart not selling DVDs for Hollywood executives is a terrifying thought -- currently Wal-Mart accounts for 40 percent of DVD sales, about 17 billion dollars of the market. Earlier this year, Wal-Mart played out this move by initially refusing to sell Disney's "High School Musical" after it popped up on iTunes prior to Wal-Mart getting a chance to sell it.
11:14 AM
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
Albert Einstein
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Salon.com People | Warren Zevon:
At this point, Zevon notices that I'm carrying a book about suicide with me. I tell Zevon I once interviewed the woman who wrote it. "She claims only maniac depressives kill themselves," I say, and then tell Zevon, "I've always believed if things got really bad -- if my shit ever got really fucked up -- I'd kill myself rather than go to a concentration camp or something."
"Do you?" he asks me, raising an eyebrow.
"Yeah," I answer. I polish off a scone.
"I think that's a mistake," Zevon says.
"Why?"
"We don't know enough shit." He says that and the Japanese flute starts really wailing away like the soundtrack to an Akira Kurosawa movie. "We don't know enough to make any decisions. I wouldn't set myself up to make those decisions."
"My wife is into the Eastern shit," I say, pointing at the air as if the flute music was visible.
"And she doesn't agree with you, does she?" Zevon says.
"No," I answer. "The karma of it --"
"No," he says quickly. "It's not just the karma. The Tao says, 'Old men like being old and young men like being young. And good is good, and bad is good too.' As my father used to say in his late 80s, 'It's all good.' But I don't get depressed. I don't know." He raises his teacup. "I'm insane. I'm fucked up. I have problems. But I don't get depressed and I don't get bored."
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Beyond the Beyond - Coup de Text:
Caught up in the melee, ducking from the swinging batons,
Palatino heard his phone ping loudly.
"GET OUT OF THERE. You are in a dangerous place," warned the
text, from a friend who could see that Palatino was about to
be pinned between the crowd and a wall.
An officer grabbed Palatino.
"ID! ID! Now!" the red-faced officer demanded.
A small group of officers closed in around Palatino, whose
eyes were suddenly wide with terror.
Students who saw it quickly typed a text alert to others,
using Palatino's nickname: "Mong is being arrested."
9:50 PM
Sex Drugs and DNA Blog » Blog Archive » Is the Department of Homeland Security serving the public or saving face?:
I recently received a letter from the Department of Homeland Security at work asking us to change the graphics on our website ReallyReady.org. They believe we have infringed on their “intellectual property” because we used logos and graphics that were similar to those used on their site. (That was part of the point we were making) Their complaint was specifically that we were using the grey word “ready” with a green checkmark over it. I am totally serious. That is what they spend their time on. One year after Katrina and they still don’t have a quality emergency preparedness website for the public, but have time to quibble over who used their check mark and the word “ready.”
Today we announced that we have altered the graphics to please the petty bureaucrats and keep people talking about how woefully inadequate and misleading the Department of Homeland Security’s emergency preparedness website ready.gov is and force them to fix it. Our full response can be found HERE.
9:46 PM
Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon:
Readers who have given Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon even a cursory read quickly noted many errors and inconsistencies between the book's story and the official series written by Rowling. The story centers on a struggle between Harry and his classmates at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and a mysterious wizard.
Characters well-known to fans of Rowling's series make an appearance — the Dursleys, Harry's friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, and his archrival Draco Malfoy. In several instances in the book, the master wizard Albus Dumbledore is referred to as "Gandalf" (from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings).
According to translated excerpts, almost the entire book consists of the verbatim text of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, with most (but not all) names changed to those of Harry Potter characters. The only parts of the book that appear to be original writing are the first chapter and the last few paragraphs of the final chapter.
The cover of the book shows Harry riding a centaur (actually an illustration created by Warner Bros. to advertise the first film), which is battling a dragon (which appears to be Maleficent in dragon form from Disney's Sleeping Beauty).
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Monet
Unable to get into the Monet show,
Too many people there, too many cars,
We spent the Sunday morning at Bowl Pond
A mile from the Museum, where no one was,
And walked an hour or so around the rim
Beside five acres of flowering waterlilies
Lifting three feet above their floating pads
Huge yellow flowers heavy on bending stems
In various phases of array and disarray
Of Petals packed, unfolded, opening to show
The meaty orange centers that become,
When the ruined flags fall away, green shower heads
Spilling their wealth of seed at summer's end
Into the filthy water among small fish
Mud-colored and duck moving explorative
Through jungle pathways opened among the fronds
Upon whose surface water drops behave
Like mercury, collecting in heavy silver coins
Instead of bubbles; some few redwinged blackbirds
Whistling above all this once in a while,
The silence else unbroken all about.
Howard Nemerov
4:33 AM
“Very roughly, the drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion; what is left is theater. Drama is immensely durable; after a thousand critical disputes, it is still there, undiminished, ready for the next wranglers. Theater is magical and evanescent; examine it closely and it turns into tricks of lighting, or the grace of a particular gesture, or the tone of a voice—and these are not its substance, but the rubbish that is left when magic has departed. Theater is the response, the echo, which drama awakens within us when we see it on the stage.” Robertson Davies, A Voice from the Attic
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Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet
At this height, Kansas
is just a concept,
a checkerboard design of wheat and corn
no larger than the foldout section
of my neighbor's travel magazine.
At this stage of the journey
I would estimate the distance
between myself and my own feelings
is roughly the same as the mileage
from Seattle to New York,
so I can lean back into the upholstered interval
between Muzak and lunch,
a little bored, a little old and strange.
I remember, as a dreamy
backyard kind of kid,
tilting up my head to watch
those planes engrave the sky
in lines so steady and so straight
they implied the enormous concentration
of good men,
but now my eyes flicker
from the in-flight movie
to the stewardess's pantyline,
then back into my book,
where men throw harpoons at something
much bigger and probably
better than themselves,
wanting to kill it, wanting
to see great clouds of blood erupt
to prove that they exist.
Imagine being born and growing up,
rushing through the world for sixty years
at unimaginable speeds.
Imagine a century like a room so large,
a corridor so long
you could travel for a lifetime
and never find the door,
until you had forgotten
that such a thing as doors exist.
Better to be on board the Pequod,
with a mad one-legged captain
living for revenge.
Better to feel the salt wind
spitting in your face,
to hold your sharpened weapon high,
to see the glisten
of the beast beneath the waves.
What a relief it would be
to hear someone in the crew
cry out like a gull,
Oh Captain, Captain!
Where are we going now?
Tony Hoagland
3:14 AM
Democracy Now! | Iraqi Peace Activist Forced to Change T-Shirt Bearing Arabic Script Before Boarding Plane at JFK:
RAED JARRAR: Then I was supposed to take my airplane, my Jet Blue airplane from JFK to Oakland in California last Saturday. So I went to the airport in the morning, and I was prevented to go to my airplane by four officers, because I was wearing this t-shirt that says “We will not be silent” in both Arabic and English. And I was told by one of the officials that wearing a t-shirt with Arabic script in an airport now is like going to a bank with a t-shirt that reads, “I am a robber.”
AMY GOODMAN: That's what the security said to you?
RAED JARRAR: Yeah. I was questioned by four officials from -- I think some of them were from Jet Blue and others were maybe policemen or FBI. I have no idea. I took their names and badge numbers, and I filed a complaint through ACLU against them, because I asked them very directly to let me go to the airplane, because it's my constitutional right as a U.S. taxpayer and resident to wear a t-shirt with Arabic script. And they prevented to let me exercise this right, and they made me cover the script with another t-shirt.
AMY GOODMAN: So they said you could not fly if you wore your t-shirt that said, “We will not be silent”?
RAED JARRAR: Yes. They said that very clearly.
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Bog Face: GORKA!
I'm trying to post pictures from our Moscow trip but Blogger isn't letting me. Also, so far my mom has only sent photos of the "here we are posed in front of this crappy wall in our wedding* finery" variety rather than the "here we are shouting "GORKA! GORKA! while my newly converted Russian Orthodox son 'Kyrill' kisses his bride under St. Basil's cathedral in Red Square" type. Gorka means bitter and it's what you shout at a Russian wedding when you want the couple to make out as in "oh life is so bitter, please sweeten it for all of us by making out." FW and I knew about it from Mayakovsky's play The Bedbug so it was thrilling to actually get to shout it in real life, as thrilling as it was to be a member of a wedding party parading through Red Square and drinking champagne on a gorgoeus and breezy Sunday afternoon.
...
Right now FW and I are going to the Donut House to get our bearings, but I'll try to post some pictures when Blogger is working again and I can get the good ones from my mom. The wedding began at noon and for FW and I ended with a 5 a.m. breakfast of chicken cutlets and cherry juice. In between there was a lot of dancing, endless speeches, a duet by Tania and Carl, a bizarre wedding game in which I was forced to watch a lovely woman with gigantic boobs take off FW's tie with her teeth (I saw my mom taking a picture of that where the hell is that picture?!). Eventually there was a run-in with the face control thug at a Barrikadnaya club who, in the poorly translated version of this evening, prevented FW from entering by saying, "That little boy in the costume is too drunk to come in."His comeback, in the original English, was "I'm not as drunk as I've ever been."
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USC Copyright Compliant letter, annotated by Cory Doctorow:
USC prohibits any infringement of intellectual property rights by any member of the USC community. As an academic institution, USC's purpose is to promote and foster the creation and lawful use of intellectual property.
This is the single most shocking thing I have ever read from a university. The purpose of a university is to promote learning and scholarship. To say otherwise is just jaw-dropping -- if we're to take this at face value, we'd measure USC's success by the number of patents filed and copyrights registered, rather than the caliber and quality of the research and work done by our students and faculty.
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Schneier on Security: What the Terrorists Want:
Imagine for a moment that the British government arrested the 23 suspects without fanfare. Imagine that the TSA and its European counterparts didn't engage in pointless airline-security measures like banning liquids. And imagine that the press didn't write about it endlessly, and that the politicians didn't use the event to remind us all how scared we should be. If we'd reacted that way, then the terrorists would have truly failed.
It's time we calm down and fight terror with antiterror. This does not mean that we simply roll over and accept terrorism. There are things our government can and should do to fight terrorism, most of them involving intelligence and investigation -- and not focusing on specific plots.
But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show's viewership.
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Liberal politics will prove fruitless as long as liberals refuse to multiply.:
But the data on young Americans tell a different story. Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That's a "fertility gap" of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%--explaining, to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.
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dorodango | about:
Hikaru dorodango are balls of mud, molded by hand into perfect spheres, dried, and polished to an unbelievable luster. The process is simple, but the result makes it seem like alchemy.
A traditional pastime among the children of Japan, the exact origin of hikaru dorodango is unknown. The tradition was dying out until taken up by Professor Fumio Kayo, of the Kyoto University of Education, as a means to study the psychology of children's play. In the course of his research, Kayo developed a simple technique for creating dorodango. With the help of Japanese media, Kayo has revived and extended the popular reach of this tradition to the point where it is now an international phenomenon.
12:36 AM
The Rise of Shrinking-Vacation Syndrome - New York Times:
Even before toothpaste could clog an airport security line and a full tank of gas was considered an indulgence, Americans had begun to sour on the traditional summer vacation. But this summer, a number of surveys show that American workers, who already take fewer vacations than people in nearly all industrial nations, have pruned back their leisure days even more.
The Conference Board, a private research group, found that at the start of the summer, 40 percent of consumers had no plans to take a vacation over the next six months — the lowest percentage recorded by the group in 28 years. A survey by the Gallup Organization in May based on telephone interviews with a national sample of 1,003 adults found that 43 percent of respondents had no summer vacation plans.
About 25 percent of American workers in the private sector do not get any paid vacation time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Another 33 percent will take only a seven-day vacation, including a weekend.
“The idea of somebody going away for two weeks is really becoming a thing of the past,” said Mike Pina, a spokesman for AAA, which has nearly 50 million members in North America. “It’s kind of sad, really, that people can’t seem to leave their jobs anymore.”
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tiny nibbles - violet blue:
Snakes on a Plane opens today (friday) -- I shall now brag that I am going to a private screening in a rented movie theater with an open bar to see it. w00t! I have no date for this event -- I have a date with the motherfucking snakes! I will take photos until alcohol impairs my motor functions, and then I will take video. Why? Because it is *the* gift that keeps on giving. Bad movies on contrived premises, heckling, whiskey and beer and possible weeping/model plane glue huffing will be the order of the day. It will be friday night and I will film anyone who gives me a titty flash. Chances are high that the crazy tit flasher will be myself, in which case I will film it, upload it in a reckless drunken stupor while screaming "snaaakes" at my Apple cinema display until my gay downstairs neighbors flee for the 'quiet' neighborhood leather bars, and then I'll feel betrayed and hurt and angry at myself in the morning (AGAIN), at which point I will email the link to all my friends who are so tired of seeing my boobies they could probably draw them in their sleep. That's my big friday night plan.
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Wal-Mart Image-Builder Resigns - New York Times:
In the interview, published yesterday in The Los Angeles Sentinel, a weekly, Mr. Young said that Wal-Mart “should” displace mom-and-pop stores in urban neighborhoods.
“You see those are the people who have been overcharging us,” he said of the owners of the small stores, “and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs.”
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Salon.com Books | Rent-a-coup:
"As it is a very lucrative game, we should expect bad behavior; disloyalty; rampant individual greed; irrational behavior (kids in toyshop style); back-stabbing; bum-fucking, and similar ungentlemanly activities." So reads a cautionary note in the prospectus for what's known as the "Wonga Coup." In March 2004, a group of men with a hired army of about 70 mercenary soldiers set out to topple the government of the tiny West African nation of Equatorial Guinea and install a new one. Ostensibly led by a political opposition leader but actually controlled by the white mercenary officers, this new regime would plunder the recently discovered oil wealth of Equatorial Guinea, enriching the coup's architects by billions of dollars.
The Wonga Coup never came off, but not because of the kind of double-crossing anticipated in that early planning document. Adam Roberts, a correspondent for the Economist magazine and a journalist steeped in the skulduggery of modern Africa, describes just how this "improbable escapade" was born and ruined in his new book, "The Wonga Coup." One of the strangest aspects of the story is that the Wonga Coup nearly replicated an earlier failed attempt to take over Equatorial Guinea in 1973. And that coup had since been fictionalized in a bestselling book, popular with the mercenary crowd, by Frederick Forsyth, "The Dogs of War." A case of life imitating art imitating life? The truth is even more bizarrely convoluted: Roberts has found evidence that Forsyth himself financed the 1973 coup. (And Forsyth has more or less admitted as much.)
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Boing Boing: Federal court bans Bush's warrantless spying on Americans:
The ACLU and others have just won a gigantic victory in a federal court, getting the Bush administration's program of warrentless wiretapping of Americans ruled unconstitutional.
The defendants "are permanently enjoined from directly or indirectly utilizing the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP) in any way, including, but not limited to, conducting warrantless wiretaps of telephone and Internet communications, in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Title III," she wrote.
She further declared that the program "violates the separation of powers doctrine, the Administrative Procedures Act, the First and Fourth amendments to the United States Constitution, the FISA and Title III."
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A New Film Documents One Town’s Automotive Version of Graffiti - New York Times:
STONINGTON, Me., Aug. 12 — Deer Isle and the town of Stonington, at its southern tip, have long served as both muse and home for storied American artists. William and Emily Muir are the stuff of local legend for their work in a variety of mediums, and Stephen Pace has spent time depicting both the idyll and industry of life here.
Mr. Steed’s film, “Tire Tracks,” memorializes the work of so-called burners like Mark Brophy, above, who literally leave their marks, some very elaborate, all over Deer Isle, where Stonington is situated.
Visitors to the island in recent seasons may have noticed that a new artist is making his mark as well: Chuggy, a k a Chuck Proper. That mark usually involves a long strip of angry-looking scalded rubber, which can be seen on many of the island’s twisting roads.
For years, those marks and similar ones have left some locals scratching their heads and visitors anxiously clenching the wheel. It turns out that they are a kind of rural car- and truck-made graffiti — a byproduct of a longtime island ritual that gives this central Maine town character and provides some rugged contrast to the pastoral life here.
And while the work of Chuggy and the native tribe of so-called burners may never hang in one of the dozens of galleries in and near Stonington, their handiwork is being memorialized in “Tire Tracks,” a 40-minute documentary.
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Never Check Your Email First Or Last at LifeDev:
I used to have this routine where I would check my email, go to bed, wake up, eat breakfast, and check my email again. I used to believe that this was the way to do things; by making sure I didn’t miss anything throughout the night. I figured that if I wanted to be productive during the day, I’d have to clear out the inbox first. And if I didn’t clear out the inbox at night, I’d be left with even more email to check in the morning. What started out seemingly as a great plan to control my email and become more productive, quickly turned into making my life more cluttered, unscheduled and less productive.
9:30 AM
Wired News: Secrets of the Pirate Bay:
Founder Gottfrid Svartholm was working as a programmer for a security consultancy on a one-year assignment in Mexico City, when he volunteered to help a Swedish file-sharing advocacy group called Piratbyran set up its own BitTorrent tracker. Svartholm's spare bit of caseless hardware wasn't meant to be extraordinary -- it was just meant to be a specifically Swedish site.
He chose the name Pirate Bay to make clear what the site was there for: no shame, no subtlety. These people were pirates. They believed the existing copyright regime was a broken artifact of a pre-digital age, the gristle of a rotting business model that poisoned culture and creativity. The Pirate Bay didn't respect intellectual property law, and they'd say it publicly.
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"There were other (U.S.) government agencies who would come into the prison and handle prisoners. I can't say which agencies, but you can probably guess. One night, this Black Hawk landed at about 4 a.m., and a couple guys came in with a prisoner and took him to tier 1, put sheets up so that nobody could see, and spent the rest of the night in there. They told us to stay away, so we did. Then a couple hours later, they came back out. They were like, "The prisoner is dead." They asked for ice to pack him, and then they said, "You guys clean this up. We weren't here. Have a good day.' Got back on the bird and took off, left the dead body right there. Those guys can come in and kill a guy, and there's nothing you can do. There's no record of them. They were never there. They don't exist."
- Joe Darby, the soldier who blew the whistle on Abu Ghraib, in this month's GQ.
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Elusive Proof, Elusive Prover: A New Mathematical Mystery - New York Times:
Three years ago, a Russian mathematician by the name of Grigory Perelman, a k a Grisha, in St. Petersburg, announced that he had solved a famous and intractable mathematical problem, known as the Poincaré conjecture, about the nature of space.
After posting a few short papers on the Internet and making a whirlwind lecture tour of the United States, Dr. Perelman disappeared back into the Russian woods in the spring of 2003, leaving the world’s mathematicians to pick up the pieces and decide if he was right.
Now they say they have finished his work, and the evidence is circulating among scholars in the form of three book-length papers with about 1,000 pages of dense mathematics and prose between them.
As a result there is a growing feeling, a cautious optimism that they have finally achieved a landmark not just of mathematics, but of human thought.
9:03 AM
Don't miss...
L I A R
Tuesday, August 15 @ 8 PM sharp
(doors open 7:30)
The P.I.T.
154 West 29th Street
between 6th and 7th Ave
6:15 PM
Did Humans Evolve? Not Us, Say Americans - New York Times:
In surveys conducted in 2005, people in the United States and 32 European countries were asked whether to respond “true,” “false” or “not sure” to this statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.” The same question was posed to Japanese adults in 2001.
The United States had the second-highest percentage of adults who said the statement was false and the second-lowest percentage who said the statement was true, researchers reported in the current issue of Science.
Only adults in Turkey expressed more doubts on evolution.
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Andy Dick Goes on Face Licking Spree:
According to the horrified folks over at Page Six, comedian Andy Dick really outdid himself at the celebrity roast for William Shatner (which, considering his past shenanigans, is saying A LOT). Dick showed up at the roast dressed as Spock and after downing a couple of cranberry vodkas, spied ’70s icon Farrah Fawcett and said, “I’m going to [bleep] the [bleep] out of her. Put that in Page 6, 7 and 8, that’s how big my [bleep] is.” He then licked the faces of Fawcett, Carrie Fisher, Patton Oswald and Star Trek alum Nichelle Nichols. Then he escorted Post reporter back to his dressing room where he peed in front of her, offered her cocaine, tried to kiss her and finally ended up biting her.
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The space is funky and intimate; the artists are talented and hungry; the audience is open and eager; media and metaphors are mixed with reckless abandon.
The Culture Project invites you to the third installation of UnfinishedWorks,
a monthly salon championing emerging artists across media.
Monday, August 14th
doors @ 6:30pm
The Culture Project: 45 Bleecker Street @ Lafayette
suggested donation $5 (free beer!)
RSVP to boxoffice@cultureproject.org
Tonight, UnfinishedAdvisors Olivia Greer and Matthew Siegle present the work of:
Li Yun Alvarado, poet & writer
Jerome Covington Chamber Ensemble
Mike Daisey, master storyteller
The Huntingtans
UnfinishedWorks is an artistic home that opens doors creatively and professionally to artists; a monthly event that audiences love because they know that they will see exciting work every time, regardless of whether they’ve heard of the presenters; a network of artists across media and of varying levels of experience.
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You do a commercial, you're off the artistic roll call forever. Everything you say is suspect, and every word that comes out of your mouth is now like a turd falling into my drink.
-- Bill Hicks
I have never seen Jaws 4, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built me and it is terrific.
-- Michael Caine
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FT.com / Comment & analysis / Columnists - A closed mind about an open world:
Studying intellectual property and the internet has convinced me that we have another cognitive bias. Call it the openness aversion. We are likely to undervalue the importance, viability and productive power of open systems, open networks and non-proprietary production. Test yourself on the following questions. In each case, it is 1991 and I have removed from you all knowledge of the past 15 years.
You have to design a global computer network. One group of scientists describes a system that is fundamentally open – open protocols and systems so anyone could connect to it and offer information or products to the world. Another group – scholars, businessmen, bureaucrats – points out the problems. Anyone could connect to it. They could do anything. There would be porn, piracy, viruses and spam. Terrorists could put up videos glorifying themselves. Your activist neighbour could compete with The New York Times in documenting the Iraq war. Better to have a well-managed system, in which official approval is required to put up a site; where only a few actions are permitted; where most of us are merely recipients of information; where spam, viruses, piracy (and innovation and anonymous speech) are impossible. Which would you have picked?
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Andrew Sullivan: Minorities and Prejudice:
In DC, as gentrification intensifies, my own inner-city neighborhood has become noticeably less friendly. I've lived on the same street corner as a major drug gang for fourteen years. They usually leave me alone, but in the last year or so, the mutterings of "faggot" as I walk my dogs each day have grown more common. Older African-American teens drag kids away from any interaction with me and the beagles. At a recent neighborhood meeating, one resident told the assembled throng (I heard this from someone who lives in my building) declared: "We don't want any more white people here." I was sitting on a bus a couple years' back and heard two black men talk about the problem with "faggots" in their neighborhood. "I can smell 'em," one said to the other, and cast a sideways look in my direction. Local black pastors have recently given sermons denouncing "faggots" in exactly that language, and remain in the mayor's good graces. I should add: I couldn't care less about the "faggot" remarks. Yes, they grate, and my other half finds them more distressing. As long as they don't touch me, they're welcome to their prejudice. It's their loss, not mine. It's just a shame that, once again, insecure male heterosexuals find the need to bolster their own fragile self-esteem by denigrating fags. One day, they'll grow up and be, well, men.
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The project documents every instance of the phrase "is the new" encountered from various sources in 2005. It is intended to map the iterations of a peculiarly common marketing and literary device. Link
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New York Hack: Just a regular night:
I got stuck behind a few cars at the red light, and this guy decided that it was a good time to put his car in park and get out so he could yell at me some more through my closed passenger side window. I just kept smiling at him until I saw him reel back and punch the window. It didn't break, but it definitely got my attention. Now I was a little nervous.
I wasn't sure if he was gonna try to get in the cab through the back or what, so I figured it was the most prudent thing to do to lock all the doors. The light was still red and no one was moving so I had no escape. After he punched the window, he began reaching into the front of his pants.
This was when I really started to get scared as I thought he might be reaching for a gun. I already had the camera out and managed to take a shaky picture, thinking, "Fuck. Okay, I guess this is really it," but then I saw that, instead of a gun, he pulled out his dick. Unfortunately, my camera didn't capture it in all its shriveled glory.
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Crispin Glover - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
In 1989, during a hiatus from films, Glover released an album called The Big Problem ≠ The Solution. The Solution = Let It Be (1989) through Restless Records. The album features Clowny Clown Clown (which has its own music video), a cover of Lee Hazlewood's "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'," a cover of Charles Manson's "Never Say Never To Always," several original songs, and readings from his art books Rat Catching and Oak-Mot (Glover modified old books by adding or deleting pictures, text, and drawings). He included his home phone number with copies of the album, encouraging listeners to phone when they had "solved" his puzzle. Glover later commented that he was surprised how many people figured it out.
The music itself is similar to outsider music, with seemingly absurd, dream-like lyrics.
In 2003, he recorded a version of the Michael Jackson classic "Ben" to coincide with the release of the film Willard. In the eccentric music video for the song, he sings to a rat named Ben, it can be seen on the DVD of the film.
There have also been at least three songs written about him, titled "Crispin Glover," one by a New Jersey-based band Children In Adult Jails, the band Scarling., as well as Wesley Willis. The Colorado band Warlock Pinchers also released a song entitled "Where the hell is Crispin Glover?".
3:27 AM
1:17 PM
Sharpest Manmade thing—closeup of a tungsten needle. Each dot is an individual atom.
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10:28 PM
Blarney Rubble:
The two cops are eventually rescued by a rogue marine named Dave Karnes. Karnes isn't just any first responder—in fact, he's retired from the service. But he's been called by God to pull on his camo and descend on Ground Zero without credentials or safety equipment. (His revelation comes in a pew at Pentecost—religious viewers are expected to overlook the fact that Pentecost occurs in the spring.) This footman of the apocalypse, played with hokey gravitas by Michael Shannon, tends to say things like, "I don't know if you guys know yet, but this country's at war." (Did God tell you that, buddy?) Better yet: "Looks like God made a curtain with the smoke, shielding us from what we're not yet ready to see." (Is that like when Oliver Stone fades to black five times in one movie?) But my single biggest complaint about World Trade Center is the way it uses the Karnes character to link 9/11 with the war in Iraq. After all the drama is over, Karnes swells with righteous anger. "Gonna need some good men out there. To avenge this," he announces gruffly, his pronouns damning in their lack of specificity. Then, immediately before the credits roll, Karnes gets his own title card: "DAVE KARNES RE-ENLISTED IN THE MARINES AND SERVED TWO TOURS OF DUTY IN IRAQ." The truth is sloppy, I'm sure, but this kind of causal carelessness is absolutely unforgivable, especially when so many Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein had some hand in 9/11.
1:09 PM
12:01 PM
11:57 AM
11:56 PM
Yes, Condi, You're a Student of History:
Three weeks ago, as the Israel-Lebanon war was heating up and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was making the first of her halfhearted diplomatic trips to the region, she said the following to reporters on the plane ride:
I'm a student of history, so perhaps I have a little more patience with enormous change in the international system. It's a big shifting of tectonic plates, and I don't expect it to happen in a few days or even in a year.
I missed this remark when it was first reported. (I saw it reprised in the middle of an excellent article about the pitfalls of President Bush's democracy-spreading policy in this Tuesday's Wall Street Journal.) Still, the statement is worth a close look now, because it reflects with glaring clarity something horrifying about this administration's leaders: the wide-elbowed indifference with which they stomp around the globe, their shrugged inattention to the consequences of their actions.
Rice was explaining why the Bush administration wasn't moving more quickly to stop the fighting that had already begun to kill hundreds of people and to destabilize the region. She had recently commented that the mayhem marked "the birth pangs of a new Middle East," and now she was noting that birth pangs—or, in her new metaphor, tectonic shifts—take a while to play out.
Someone might have asked how long it does take to go through "a big shifting of tectonic plates." If not "in a few days or even in a year," then what—in a year and a half, five years, a decade, a century? And does the United States—the one power that could impose a cease-fire if its president so desired—really have to wait until the earthquake dies down before stepping into the fray?
8:54 PM
8:46 PM
Dirge Without Music
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
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5:14 PM
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear ... To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. Every one will be sensible of this, who considers how greatly night adds to our dread, in all cases of danger, and how much the notions of ghosts and goblins, of which none can form clear ideas, affect minds which give credit to the popular tales concerning such sorts of beings. Those despotic governments, which are founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye."
—Edmund Burke, "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.
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2:25 AM
2:22 AM
Tonight I'm hosting the Moth StorySLAM at the Nuroyican Poets Cafe, where anyone and everyone can put their name in the hat to tell a five minute story. The theme is BURNED, which can be taken literally, metaphorically or existentially—your choice. Details
3:00 PM
2:59 PM
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2:58 PM
Final heads-up: I'm performing with One Ring Zero, Clay McLeod Chapman, Amy Sohn and Ned Vizzini at the Spiegletent at the South Street Seaport tonight, which is a magnificent 1920's tent of velvet, wood and mirrors that tours the world. Details
2:48 PM
2:46 PM
Boing Boing: Only traitors try to make us afraid of terrorists:
In this mind-blowing, exhaustively researched Cato institute paper by Ohio State University's John Mueller, the case against being afraid of terrorism is laid out in irrefutable logic, backed with credible, documented statistics about terrorism's risks. From the number of fatalities produced by terrorism to the trends in terrorism death to the fact that no one has ever died from a military biological agent to the fact that poison gas and dirty bombs in the field do only minor damage -- this paper is the most reassuring and infuriating piece of analysis I've read since September 11th, 2001.
The bottom line is, terrorism doesn't kill many people. Even in Israel, you're four times more likely to die in a car wreck than as a result of a terrorist attack. In the USA, you need to be more worried about lightning strike than terrorism. The point of terrorism is to create terror, and by cynically convincing us that our very countries are at risk from terrorism, our politicians have delivered utter victory to the terrorists: we are terrified.
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8:19 AM
David Byrne Journal: 8.2.06: American Madrassas:
Saw a screening of a documentary called Jesus Camp. It focuses on a woman preacher (Becky Fischer) who indoctrinates children in a summer camp in North Dakota. Right wing political agendas and slogans are mixed with born again rituals that end with most of the kids in tears. Jesus CampTears of release and joy, they would claim — the children are not physically abused. The kids are around 9 or 10 years old, recruited from various churches, and are pliant willing receptacles. They are instructed that evolution is being forced upon us by evil Godless secular humanists, that abortion must be stopped at all costs, that we must form an “army” to defeat the Godless influences, that we must band together to insure that the right judges and politicians get into the courts and office and that global warming is a lie. (This last one is a puzzle — how did accepting the evidence for climate change and global warming become anti-Jesus? Did someone simply conflate all corporate agendas with Jesus and God and these folks accept that? Would Jesus drive an SUV? Is every conclusion responsible scientists make now suspect?)
There were some perfect sound bites — at one point Pastor Fischer instructs the little ones that they should be willing to die for Christ, and the little ones obediently agree. She may even use the word martyr, which has a shocking echo in the Middle East. I can see future suicide bombers for Jesus — the next step will be learning to fly planes into buildings. Of course, the grownups would say, “Oh no, we’re not like them” — but they admit that the principal difference is simply that “We’re right.”
8:19 AM
8:18 AM
Summer of Goodbyes...
Residents of Baghdad are systematically being pushed out of the city. Some families are waking up to find a Klashnikov bullet and a letter in an envelope with the words “Leave your area or else.” The culprits behind these attacks and threats are Sadr’s followers- Mahdi Army. It’s general knowledge, although no one dares say it out loud. In the last month we’ve had two different families staying with us in our house, after having to leave their neighborhoods due to death threats and attacks. It’s not just Sunnis- it’s Shia, Arabs, Kurds- most of the middle-class areas are being targeted by militias.
Other areas are being overrun by armed Islamists. The Americans have absolutely no control in these areas. Or maybe they simply don’t want to control the areas because when there’s a clash between Sadr’s militia and another militia in a residential neighborhood, they surround the area and watch things happen.
Since the beginning of July, the men in our area have been patrolling the streets. Some of them patrol the rooftops and others sit quietly by the homemade road blocks we have on the major roads leading into the area. You cannot in any way rely on Americans or the government. You can only hope your family and friends will remain alive- not safe, not secure- just alive. That’s good enough.
For me, June marked the first month I don’t dare leave the house without a hijab, or headscarf. I don’t wear a hijab usually, but it’s no longer possible to drive around Baghdad without one. It’s just not a good idea. (Take note that when I say ‘drive’ I actually mean ‘sit in the back seat of the car’- I haven’t driven for the longest time.) Going around bare-headed in a car or in the street also puts the family members with you in danger. You risk hearing something you don’t want to hear and then the father or the brother or cousin or uncle can’t just sit by and let it happen. I haven’t driven for the longest time. If you’re a female, you risk being attacked.
I look at my older clothes- the jeans and t-shirts and colorful skirts- and it’s like I’m studying a wardrobe from another country, another lifetime. There was a time, a couple of years ago, when you could more or less wear what you wanted if you weren’t going to a public place. If you were going to a friends or relatives house, you could wear trousers and a shirt, or jeans, something you wouldn’t ordinarily wear. We don’t do that anymore because there’s always that risk of getting stopped in the car and checked by one militia or another.
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12:45 AM
12:41 AM
Decimation (Roman Army) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
A cohort selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten; each group cast lots, and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning or clubbing. The remaining soldiers were given rations of barley instead of wheat and forced to sleep outside of the Roman encampment.
12:40 AM
“You've got to know your limitations. I don't know what your limitations are. I found out what mine were when I was twelve. I found out that there weren't too many limitations, if I did it my way."Johnny Cash
12:02 AM
'Baby, Give Me a Kiss' - Los Angeles Times:
Joe Francis, the founder of the "Girls Gone Wild" empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He's pushing himself against me, shouting: "This is what they did to me in Panama City!"
It's after 3 a.m. and we're in a parking lot on the outskirts of Chicago. Electronic music is buzzing from the nightclub across the street, mixing easily with the laughter of the guys who are watching this, this me-pinned-and-helpless thing.
Francis isn't laughing.
He has turned on me, and I don't know why. He's going on and on about Panama City Beach, the spring break spot in northern Florida where Bay County sheriff's deputies arrested him three years ago on charges of racketeering, drug trafficking and promoting the sexual performance of a child. As he yells, I wonder if this is a flashback, or if he's punishing me for being the only blond in sight who's not wearing a thong. This much is certain: He's got at least 80 pounds on me and I'm thinking he's about to break my left arm. My eyes start to stream tears.
This is not what I anticipated when I signed up for a tour of Joe Francis' world. I've been with him nonstop since early afternoon, listening as he teases employees, flying on his private jet, eating fast food and watching young women hurl themselves against his 6-foot-2-inch frame, declaring, "We want to go wild!"
3:27 PM
1:25 PM
1:24 PM
I'm performing in a number of different events over the next two weeks, from vaudeville tents to lying contests to brand new monologues, and thought I would drop a line about what's what.
First up, I'm performing with One Ring Zero, Clay McLeod Chapman, Amy Sohn and Ned Vizzini at the Spiegletent at the South Street Seaport this Monday, which is a magnificent 1920's tent of velvet, wood and mirrors that tours the world—it's in New York just for the month of August. Details
This Tuesday I'm hosting the Moth StorySLAM at the Nuroyican Poets Cafe, where anyone and everyone can put their name in the hat to tell a five minute story. The theme is BURNED, which can be taken literally, metaphorically or existentially—your choice. Details
I'm very excited about Monday, August 14th, when I'll be performing at the Culture Project's series Unfinished Works, performing part of a new monologue that will debut this October—
TRUTH
{the heart is a million little pieces above all things}
I rarely show works in progress, so come on down if you want to see what I've been cooking. Doors open at 6:30, show is at 7 and there is free beer and wine. Details
Finally, on Tuesday, August 15th I'm doing a quick and dirty evening at the People's Improv Theatre called Liar—four storytellers tell short stories, but only three are true and one is bullshit. Prizes to those who can pick the brass ring! Details
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11:17 AM
Naming for Love
These are the proper names:
Limestone, tufa, coral rag,
Clint, beer stone, braystone,
Porphyry, gneiss, rhyolite,
Ironstone, cairngorm, circle stone,
Blue stone, chalk, box stone,
Sarsen, magnesia, brownstone,
Flint, aventurnine,
Soapstone, alabaster, basalt,
Slate, quartzite, ashlar,
Clunch, cob, gault, grit,
Buhrstone, dolomite,
Flagstone, freestone, sandstone,
Marble, shale, gabbro, clay,
Adamant, gravel, traprock,
And of course brimstone.
Some of the names are shapes:
Crag, scarp, moraine, esker,
Alp, hogback, ledge, tor,
Cliff, boulder, crater,
Gorge, and bedrock.
Some denote uses:
Keystone, capstone,
Hearthstone, whetstone,
And gravestone.
For women a painful stone called
Wombstone, which doctors say is
"A calculus formed in the uterus."
Gallstone and kidneystone hurt everyone.
Millstone is our blessing.
I will not say the names
Of the misnamed precious stones.
But a lovely name is gold,
A product of stone.
Underwards is magma;
May all who read this live long.
Hayden Carruth
3:19 AM
12:24 PM
Is Windows Vista Ready?:
I like the way the Start Menu complains about no email application being set as the default every time I use the Search Box. I also like the way my machines jump to the logon screen every ten minutes despite the fact that I've configured Power Management not to do that. I especially like the way I can't delete certain items from the desktop (randomly, it seems, like a game) unless I either reboot my machine or manually crash Explorer.exe. But my favorite Windows Vista behavior--and believe you me, this was a tough contest--has to be the weird COM object errors I get while cutting and pasting between Paint and Word 2007. (And yes, frankly, this could be an Office 2007 bug. But let's face it, Office 2007 and Vista are "Better Together" as Microsoft likes to point out.)
Let's recap. Paul uses Vista every day as his only OS on each of his desktop and notebook machines. Paul has begun screaming a lot and it's not because he's taken up an anger management form of yoga. (That's what Kabbalah really is, right?) Why is Paul now referring to himself in the third person? I can't remember.
4:58 PM
4:58 PM
The Hungry Cabbie Eats The Outer Boroughs: Peter Luger's Bacon:
Sorry Rabbi Kahn, but I'm with Vincent Vega on this one. And when I’ve got that deliciously sinful hankering for bacon, I head straight to Peter Luger’s Steakhouse. I wish I could order their bacon along with a nice, fat porterhouse, but cab drivers don’t make as much money as they used to thanks to the price of gasoline. So I crossed the Williamsburg Bridge yesterday afternoon with my friend Matthew to order the $8.50 burger that they serve at lunch. But I was really there for the bacon.
4:23 PM
12:11 PM
Logotopia, and the Little Twisted Nerve: On the Death of my Grandmother:
My grandmother died last week.
And for the record she did not pass away, pass on, cross over, or expire like a magazine subscription and she was not, god forbid, born into eternity. Like the sensible intelligent woman she was, she died. I had thought that I should eulogize her in some way, and I've been trying to think all week (away from a reliable computer) of what I would say. My perspective of her is somewhat narrow. People ask "Were you close?", and I don't really have a solid yes or no for that. As far back as I can remember, when Christmas would roll around, I would spend the weekend before at her house making candy for family and friends. That was my Christmas, even moreso than gifts and trees and Santa Claus. In that time she never judged or disparaged me, but accepted whatever I was wearing, wherever I was pierced, what color my hair was, and what I was doing with my life. Apart from Christmas though, I never saw her. I didn't call her or come visit. She rarely told me stories about her life, and looking back I realize I didn't know much about her apart from my candy-making relationship with her and that I liked her. So were we close? I guess you can judge that for yourself.
12:04 PM
12:04 PM
Five Things All Sane People Agree On About Blogs And Mainstream Journalism (So Can We Stop Talking About Them Now?):
So let me propose a slightly more blunt approach. Does anyone disagree with the following concepts:
1. Mainstream, top-down, professional journalism will continue to play a vital role in covering news events, and in shaping our interpretation of those events, as it should.
2. Bloggers will grow increasingly adept at covering certain kinds of news events, but not all. They will play an increasingly important role in the interpretation of all kinds of news.
3. The majority of bloggers won't be concerned with traditional news at all.
4. Professional, edited journalism will have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than blogging; examples of sloppy, offensive, factually incorrect, or tedious writing will be abundant in the blogosphere. But diamonds in that rough will be abundant as well.
5. Blogs -- like all modes of contemporary media -- are not historically unique; they draw upon and resemble a number of past traditions and forms, depending on their focus.
So here's my proposal: if you're writing an article or a blog post about this issue, and your argument revolves around one or more of these points -- and doesn't add anything else of substance -- STOP WRITING. Pick a new topic. Move on. There's nothing to see here.
11:51 AM
11:47 AM
Apple's Copy Protection Isn't Just Bad For Consumers, It's Bad For Business:
That obvious restriction: No one but Apple is allowed to make players for iTunes Music Store songs, and no one but Apple can sell you proprietary file-format music that will play on the iPod.
In some respects, that's not too different from other proprietary platforms, of course. No one but Microsoft makes Word. But there's a huge difference between Word and iTunes: Word is protected only by market forces, while iTunes enjoys the protection of a corrupt law that gives Apple the right to exclude competitors from the market.
iTunes is protected by the anti-circumvention provisions in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), itself a law passed to comply with the 1996 UN World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) "Internet Treaties." The DMCA makes it a crime to circumvent "effective means of access control." That means that breaking the locks off a digital work is illegal, even if you're breaking the lock to accomplish a legal end.
9:36 PM
8:33 PM
Short Stories - The Whore of Mensa:
For three bills, you got the works: A thin Jewish brunette would pretend to pick you up at the Museum of Modern Art, let you read her master's, get you involved in a screaming quarrel at Elaine's over Freud's conception of women, and then fake a suicide of your choosing - the perfect evening, for some guys. Nice racket. Great town, New York.
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6:56 PM
alongthoselines: Living Proof:
Brian's friend, we'll call her Sarah, was taking care of her friend's dog while she was away in the Bahamas. So Sarah went over to the apartment one afternoon to check on the dog. When she got to the apartment, she couldn't find the dog. She looked everywhere: she couldn't find the dog; she couldn’t find the dog; she couldn't find the dog. Finally, she found the dog. The dog was lying underneath the bed, dead.
Sarah didn't know what to do. She called a company in New York that specializes in freezing pets for up to two weeks after death. Sarah decided to take the dog to the repository until the owner came back from the Bahamas. This proved to be problematic: how is she going to get the dog uptown to the freezing company? The dog was apparently very big and heavy, dead weight. So Sarah put the dog in a suitcase, on wheels, and dragged it to the train station.
3:54 PM
alongthoselines: Living Proof (Revisited):
Weeks upon weeks ago, I recorded a nugget about a house sitter who tries to dispose of a dead dog, only to have her plans thwarted by a thief. To this day, that entry continues to be the crowning achievement of this blahg. In it, an urban myth is (unintentionally) perpetuated because, at the time, I (naively) believed that I was unearthing an original, groundbreaking story.
3:51 PM
3:37 PM
Jennifer Tilly - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
On June 27, 2005, Tilly won a World Series of Poker bracelet (and $158,625) in the Ladies' No-Limit Texas Hold 'Em event, outlasting 600 other players. This was especially astounding because it was not a celebrity open, and she is the first celebrity to win a World Series of Poker event. She followed up this accomplishment on September 1, 2005 by also winning the third World Poker Tour Ladies Invitational Tournament held at the Bicycle Casino in Los Angeles.
In a television interview, Tilly stated that at this point in her career she is more interested in pursuing poker than acting.
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12:14 PM
Quick aside to folks on RSS—I have a number of events coming up in NYC, so you may want to take a look here, or head to the main site just to see what's happening in August.
11:59 AM
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5:36 PM
Woz to Drive Hydrogen Hummer to South Pole:
Woz explained that he was participating in an expedition planned for December 2007 in which a group will drive Hummers running on hydrogen powered fuel cells from McMurdo Station to the South Pole. Woz said his particular vehicle would be co-piloted by Buzz Aldrin, who walked on the moon in 1969. The expedition is to be filmed in 3D for the director James Cameorn.
4:30 PM
Children arrested, DNA tested, interrogated and locked up... for playing in a tree | the Daily Mail:
The afternoon adventure turned into a frightening ordeal for Sam Cannon, Amy Higgins and Katy Smith after they climbed into the 20ft tree - then found themselves hauled into a police station and locked in cells for up to two hours.
Their shoes were removed and mugshots, DNA samples and mouth swabs were taken.
Officers told the children they had been seen damaging the tree which is in a wooded area of public land near their homes.
Questioned by police, the scared friends admitted they had broken some loose branches because they had wanted to build a tree house, but said they did not realise what they had done was wrong.
Officers considered charging the children with criminal damage but eventually decided a reprimand - the equivalent of a caution for juveniles - was sufficient.
Although the reprimand does not amount to court action and the children do not have a criminal record, their details will be kept on file for up to five years.
3:32 PM
2:51 PM
Internet '96:
I decided to peruse the Wayback Machine's earliest archives to see what the internet looked like in 1996, when I was 14 and evidently had much less free time than I do now. Much to my chagrin, few websites from these early years have been successfully archived, and many of the best preserved ones were created by fast food and soft drink corporations because they were some of the earliest adapters of the internet. They viewed the medium as a chance for inexpensive advertising and invested dozens upon dozens of dollars into it. The results are tremendously humiliating.
In their defense, the technology was different in 1996. Although Internet Explorer 3.0 could run Java applets and inline media, Netscape Navigator could not, and in any case nobody felt comfortable doing anything more complicated than making a few animated GIFs. Additionally, very few web designers had even the most rudimentary of aesthetic sensibilities, and nearly half of them were clinically retarded. The internet in 1996 looks like it had been created in its entirety by a panel of 13-year-olds with Geocities accounts who had about half an hour to spare each night before bedtime.
1:17 PM
BREITBART.COM - Sparks fly as ExxonMobil profit tops 10 billion dollars:
Total revenues in the three months rose 11.8 percent from the same quarter of 2005 to 99 billion dollars.
In Congress, Democratic lawmakers said the sky-high profits reflected misplaced policies by the adminstration of George W. Bush.
"Americans are paying near-record gas prices, oil companies are reaping billions in profits, but the response from the Oil Men in the White House and the Republicans in Congress has been billions for Big Oil and a backhand to the American people," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said Thursday.
9:51 AM
9:46 AM
MrBellersNeighborhood - Monthly Nut by James Braly:
I am sitting at my desk in my coop one day on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, paying my monthly expenses: coop mortgage; coop maintenance; coop insurance; four other kinds of insurance--health, for four people (I’ve got a stay-at-home wife and two kids); life, in case I die on them; disability, in case I collapse; and car, in case I abandon them; along with the home phone; office phone; cell phone; wife’s phone; credit card; wife’s card; and on and on: three inches of sedimentary expenses, that have accumulated layer by inexorable layer, into a crushing stack of bills. And when I do the math: one month of income minus one month of expenses, I get a figure of minus-one-month of income. I just spent twice as much as I earned. Turning the black numbers on my computer screen’s financial software red. Leading me to transfer enough savings over to my checking account to balance it and turn the red numbers back to black. Which leaves me, at my current fixed rate of spending, with about three more months of savings to go before both accounts are red. Financial ruin. A conclusion that leads me, as it did the last time I reached this conclusion—last month--to hyperventilate. To not be able to breathe. To start dying. Because, I can’t go on living like this. I can’t afford to be me.
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