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Robot Wisdom WebLog for December 1997

This Day in Joyce History
On this date in 1891, Dante Riordan left the Joyce household after the Xmas fight depicted in Portrait. In ?1893 the fictional Rudy Bloom was born. In 1916, Portrait was published by Huebsch. In 1931, John S. Joyce died. In ?1953 John Kidd was born.

Two of the most readable computer journalists-- John Dvorak and Jerry Pournelle-- are about to launch a Siskel/Ebert-style weekly debate site, using 'wallet' technology to charge a dime a week. You'll be able to buy small amounts of 'scrip' via a 900 number, which sounds smooth enough that I'll probably give it a try. (Dvorak I usually agree with, while Pournelle is a sort of morbidly fascinating Martha-Stewart extreme-hardware spectator-spectacle.) See the announcement in Pournelle's latest Byte column: http://byte.com/art/9801/sec13/art2.htm

Gorillas make gorgeous representational art! http://www.gorilla.org/Art/

Email from Frankie? TV.Com claims Frank Sinatra will sometimes answer friendly email. The Sinatra Family site is endearingly naif: http://www.sinatrafamily.com/

A couple of x-rated essays at Salon:
Susie Bright's very sweet appreciation of the Pam Anderson/ Tommy Lee bootleg sex video: http://www.salonmagazine.com/ent/movies/1997/12/05pamela.html
And an intelligent look at recent evolutions in the economics of online-porn: http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1997/12/cov_01feature.html

And another, about the legal 'solution' to sexplay between teen brothers: http://www.salonmagazine.com/feb97/molested970228.html :

I write to a friend with several children: "If this ever happens in your family, don't tell anyone, don't tell a teacher or a nurse or a counselor. Don't let them into your house. You can handle it alone, as we could have -- but we can't handle this."

Sixties icon Kerry Thornley, intimate of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jim Garrison and Robert Anton Wilson, and author of the Principia Discordia: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tilt/principia/
is in poor health, and fans are encouraged to order a copy of PD straight from the source, autographed on request. For the address, see this great page of links: http://members.aol.com/flatgelat/

The mass media's undeclared war against the Net is nowhere clearer than in their assaults against Ian Goddard's TWA800 website. CNN has baldly falsified a report that Goddard recanted his site as a hoax. And witness this excerpt from "60 Minutes" last February, Leslie Stahl contemplating his webpage: http://www.erols.com/igoddard/rebuttal.htm

STAHL: Shouldn't this be expunged?
GUEST: On what grounds?
STAHL: That it's wrong, that it's inaccurate, it's irresponsible, that it is spreading fear and suspicion of the government; ten thousand reasons.

As arrogant and lazy as they've gotten, Sixty Minutes still gets grudging kudos tonight for finally covering the McLibel fiasco, where McDonald's sued two Britons for a pamphlet critiquing their food and their business practices. Net surfers, of course, have been following it for years at: http://www.mcspotlight.org/

How has the Newt Right so successfully blindsided the progressive Left? A dry-ish analysis in The Nation argues that we don't lack the funds, but we're spending them with self-defeating unfocus: http://www.thenation.com/issue/980112/0112shum.htm

Can anyone say, with confidence, what our economic program is?

The same issue (12 Jan 98) offers a good editorial about poverty, and a sorry story about imported wolves by Alex Cockburn: http://www.thenation.com/

I am having a fear of modern business practices: A fine culture critic named Tom Frank (not to be confused with Troll Mennie) explores Fast Company, the bastard spawn of Wired and Forbes: http://www.tripod.com/work/columns/frank/970421revolution.html
And Coke is buying into hypertext: http://www.nextexit.com/html_gif/cc_press.html

Ana Voog's video xmas card:

Sweden's Crown Princess Victoria (age 20) has been elected Swede of the Year by the evening paper Expressen. Last month it was announced that she's suffering from an eating disorder: http://www.solace.mh.se/~alpha/Victoria/victoria.htm

Garrison Keillor, quoted on newsgroup misc.activism.progressive:

"We're in the clutches of a bunch of folks trying to turn the U.S. into a third world country. Two hundred billionaires, and 260 million poor people. And they haven't done enough damage yet to be beaten."

DejaNews is starting to archive mailing lists, probably responding to competition from Reference.Com: http://www.reference.com/, which offers thousands of searchable mailing list archives along with the usual searchable newsgroup archives. (Has anyone compared their strengths and weaknesses yet?)

Michael Parenti is a GREAT political speaker who's put out a lot of tapes (on the net in RealAudio format, if you can handle that). His newest book, "Blackshirts and Reds", is an attempt to rehabilitate communism. From the preface at http://www.vida.com/parenti/blackshirtsPreface.html:

U.S. leaders have been dedicated above all to making the world safe for global corporate investment and the private profit system. Pursuant of this goal, they have used fascism to protect capitalism, while claiming to be saving democracy from communism.

This site also offers the book's first chapter, documenting the forgotten story of how Mussolini and Hitler were funded by rich capitalists, to crush the labor movement.
And there's a horrendous compilation of the statistics of American misery ("37,000,000 regularly use emotion controlling medical drugs"): http://www.vida.com/parenti/HiddenHolocaust.html
And a nice dismantling of the myth of free speech in the USA: http://www.vida.com/parenti/FreeSpeech.html

The three online chapters of his "Against Empire" give a taut portrait of recent US imperialism, http://www.vida.com/parenti/Imperialism101.html:

In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals and other natural resources. That is why the Europeans went through all the trouble to steal and plunder them. One does not go to poor places for self-enrichment. The Third World is rich. Only its people are poor--and it is because of the pillage they have endured.

Among many outstanding essays on another site: [GONE MISSING?] http://www.wessman.com/~kennylee/ArchiveARCHIVE/M%20P/MP.html
Parenti spells out explicitly his prescription for healing the USA, and debunks terrorism hype especially against Libya.

Custom spy pix from $300: http://www.digitalglobe.com/company/company.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With the launching of the world's first commercial spy-like satellite, just about anybody with a credit card may soon enjoy an eye in the sky.
EarlyBird 1 was designed to pick out features on the ground as small as 10 feet across from its orbit 295 miles above the earth.
It was successfully launched Wednesday atop a Russian rocket by its builder, EarthWatch Inc., of Longmont, Colo.

Cool new squat!

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Actor Paul Newman is putting profits from his Newman's Own food products to a good cause by donating half a million dollars to a fund to buy up land around his Wesport, Connecticut, home to keep it from becoming golf courses and luxury condos.
"I think the developers are being very shortsighted. Fifty years from now, the people who worked to save this land will be remembered as heroes," Newman said.
Newman and other preservationists hope to buy the threatened land in nearby Easton, Connecticut, for 10 million dollars.

Found more Candi: Tripod.com seems to have great content, but execrable design. Not only does the content get squeezed into a tiny corner of the screen, but your favorite author's essays may be hidden anywhere on the site, with no author index that I can find. So here's one more (belated) piece by Candi Strecker, on the trials of motherhood: http://www.tripod.com/women/feature/columns/motherhood/970827strecker.html

YAY! One of my favorite culture critics-- Candi Strecker-- has found a niche on the Web, at Tripod. Here's her piece on 'career contrarians' who value their time more than money: http://www.tripod.com/work/columns/strecker/970421.html
And another on Martha Stewart as a spectator sport, extreme homemaking: http://www.tripod.com/women/feature/columns/970410martha.html

A year from now, the big movie buzz is going to be about Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut", which looks to be big budget porn with Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. Gossip page: http://www.corona.bc.ca/films/details/eyeswideshut.html

Junk reading list: Carl Hiaasen's "Lucky You" and "Stormy Weather" are poorman's Elmore Leonard ripoffs (gritty and witty crime fiction), pleasant enough on a slow day.

One of my very favorite singers, Mary Coughlan, a smoky Irish blues singer, formerly very obscure, now has a harrowing biographical sketch online at http://www.cnotes.com/cnotes.artists/mary.html, along with all 50 minutes of her new CD in RealAudio format (it plays tolerably well on my snail-slow "28.8" connection, so long as I don't try to surf at the same time).

"...during one point in her set Mary kept the audience transfixed as she sang 'Strange Fruit' without musical accompaniment, If you were to drop a pin you would have been beaten up for it... The greatest, sexiest redhead since Rita Hayworth" -The Times

Having installed RealPlayer, I went back to Ana Voog's multimedia-page http://anavoog.com/ to see her promo clip and hear her music for the first time (I've had a fanpage for months). I couldn't understand her words in a lot of the promo, but it gave a good hint of her style anyway. I predict that if she keeps her webcam on, she'll be a household name in a year.

JM Graetz was present at the creation of the first videogame, Spacewar, and tells it like it was: http://ars-www.uchicago.edu/~eric/lore/spacewar/spacewar.html

At least someone is trying to keep an eye on netnews society: http://www.best.com/~cattekin/archive/brief.html

John Dvorak's columns are always readable, but for some reason I never bothered to bookmark his archivepage before: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak/jdindex.htm
Here's an exciting piece from August, about a neatly-designed, net-based product for cataloging your CD-collection: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak/jd970818.htm
And another on fonts for the Web: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak/jd970825.htm.
And a recent one advocating that sociologists study computer-use: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak/jd971208.htm

The next time you're headed for the library, spend a half-hour with Danny Yee's book reviews first: http://www.anatomy.usyd.edu.au/danny/book-reviews/subjects.html
He has excellent taste, reflected fontwise on his index pages by his recommendations for good and best.

The Nation has a long, appalling, worth-reading-to-the-end piece on prisons for profit: http://www.thenation.com/issue/980105/0105bate.htm :

The Cabot Market Letter compares the company to a "a hotel that's always at 100% occupancy...and booked to the end of the century."

You can retire in six years... ask Pedro, the Farm's permaculturist, how: http://www.thefarm.org/permaculture/index.html

There's a new issue of the Progressive Review, one of the few leftwing sources that's vigorously anti-Clinton: http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/. The lead story this week is Judge Lamberth's condemnation of White House lies about the healthcare taskforce in 1993.
Its editor Sam Smith also offers a nice fantasy of what a real newspaper should be, USA Tomorrow at: http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/usat.htm.

Salon, where I read Camille Paglia: http://www.salonmagazine.com/archives/paglia.html
offers a cute new (though obvious) gif:

I enjoy "Dilbert" (http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/) as much as the next nrrd, but FAIR's Norman Solomon is arguing that it's sneaky capitalist propaganda. See his regular column in the Portland Alliance for May 1997: http://www.teleport.com/~alliance/articles/may97/dilbert.html. (Many of Solomon's other commentaries are archived at DejaNews.)

A thread about gangs on chi.general led me to this reference source on Chicago gangs: http://www.chitown.com/bigshoulders/gnghome.html which offers a ton of details-- names, symbols, alliances-- you never see anywhere else. In the newsgroup discussion, "Tommy the Terrorist" wisely suggests that if gangs have corrupt cops watching out for them, then their territorial boundaries ought to match those cops' precincts' boundaries as well.

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