[Next: March 1998 waxing]

Robot Wisdom WebLog for February 1998 (waning)

This Day in Joyce History: In 1904, Synge's Riders to the Sea opened in Dublin.

(Joyce had read it the year before in Paris, and was scornful of its poeticised version of Irish peasant speech. But it's a good, short read.)

He didn't thank Raquel.

I'm installing MkLinux today, with many, many reboots... http://lands.ml.org/mklinux/ (best MkLinux page I've found)

Did Courtney Love kill Kurt Cobain? [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/1998/02/25media.html

A school for game programmers/ designers: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/02/25feature.html

More great goodies from the Progressive Review: http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/indexup.htm

Thus, the flipping of Jim Guy Tucker may be infinitely more important than what Monica Lewinsky did or did not do.

Lupus Yonderboy on a.r.k:

It's perverted lesbian terrorist ballerinas like you that give lesbian terrorist ballerinas a bad name.

New Village Voice: Philanthropists funding pranks, and other cybergossip: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/cyber/9bunn.shtml

A ruling two weeks ago by the Second U.S. Court of Appeals upheld a decision last year to keep Richard Bucci's antiabortion site, at plannedparenthood.com, offline because of the confusion he had caused (the original family planning organization is at plannedparenthood.org).

The Franklin Rex credit-card pc: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/handheld_pc/rev4.html and the PalmPilot, too: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/handheld_pc/rev10.html

Netnews protocol is winning over intranets! http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/discussion/sb4.htm

A glossary of html-log analysis jargon: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/webanalysis2/glossary.html

Clickstream: The path of mouse clicks and keystrokes a visitor makes in navigating through a Web site.

Speech recognition's still not ready for primetime: [multipage] http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/speech/intro.html

. . . neither came close to the 95 percent accuracy rate we'd like to see in a mainstream consumer product. And we found that making corrections or formatting documents can be painstaking.

Though you can be up and running in less than an hour, it may take as long as a month of steady use before you begin to see real results.

Unlike an OCR program, which may produce misspelled words, a speech recognition program will always yield actual words even if they're not the ones you intended-- so a spell-checker is no help during the correcting process.

The things people do to fight spam! http://www.die.net/noise/a/b/d/c/d/index.htm

The Nixon tapes remain controversial: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/025473.htm [temp url]

Of the 3,600 hours of tape Nixon left behind, approximately 2,800 contain non-private material. Of those, 350 have been made public, 1,200 are secret for national security reasons and 1,250 remain to be made public.

A well-written rave by a Newton power-user (and MD): http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-418.html#lnk3

Though my scut list might be huge, it always appears more manageable because I only see relevant items. For example, at home I can exclude all items that can only be taken care of at work. If I'm in a given department at work (say, Radiology), I can focus my list on items I need to accomplish while there, then broaden it to include all work-related items so I can decide which floor or department to visit next.

This day in 1875, Oscar Wilde became a Freemason.

Genetic art coloring book?

More goodies at the Progressive Review daily: http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/indexup.htm

There is apparently no end to the lies that Bill Clinton will tell. According to Reuters he plans this week to officially designate Lake Champlain as one of the Great Lakes so it can compete for $50 million in Great Lakes research funds.

Is duelling the cure for flaming? http://www.pointpro.net/civmag/96-jun/lostarts.htm

The same historian also advocates Roman orgies: http://www.pointpro.net/civmag/current/lostarts.htm

Serve only the best Falernian wine; the vintage of 121 B.C. was particularly esteemed by connoisseurs.

A brief intro to cabbage duelling: http://homepages.enterprise.net/oyster/afp/cabbage/rulefc.html

IBM's patent server is miraculously great, if you need to do any sort of patent research: http://www.patents.ibm.com/ibm.html

GRRR! Salon has added little frames that try to totally screw up direct linking... (I'm not fooled, though.)

An inspiring story of web activism against 'correctional boarding schools': [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/02/cov_23feature.html

Pursley joined the crusade next. A Web developer who earns her living creating high-end "transactional sites" for Wall Street financial corporations, she noticed an article in Time Magazine in which Parks referred to her "online book." After inspecting it, she immediately offered to upgrade the "Gulag" Web site, clean up the book's ungainly text formatting and register the site with search engines.

A nice DaveNet about XML and 'coopetition': http://www.scripting.com/davenet/98/02/vignetteScriptingNews.html

A female dance critic looks at stripping as dance: [x-rated] http://www.nervemag.com/Kourlas/ballet/

Strippers don't have to worry about their technique. They haven't spent the last twenty years at the School of American Ballet drilling thousands of plies at the barre.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1917, Harriet Shaw Weaver began (anonymously) the donations that would sustain Joyce for the rest of his life.

The right way to merge email with HTML: no-tags markup: http://www.prefab.com/ssl/notagsmarkup.html

A Genetic Art toy for the Mac: http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~dudek/ga.html

A good book review about the social burdens of motherhood: http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/2houppert.shtml

The book's most disturbing essay is about breast-feeding in the 1990s and the bizarre links a court made between nursing a two-year-old and sexual abuse.

And another, moving one about living with talking chimps: http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/scigliano.shtml

Deaf as I was to her language, I knew that this was not an "animal" in the traditional sense-- an animate but unthinking creature-- I'd chowed with. This was a person.

And a third, exhilarating one about the Nixon tapes: http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/berger.shtml

And all this happened before the Watergate caper. In fact, all of this happens by page five in a more than 600-page volume taken from nearly 200 hours of newly released tapes (it also includes a few of the unexpurgated classics, with expletives intact). The pace never lets up: Tricky Dick and his minions commit a felony on nearly every page.

If you haven't explored "Romantically Linked" (the ultimate hypertext!), Warren Beatty is the obvious place to start: http://www.mrshowbiz.com/games/linked/hi/14.html

This Date in Joyce History: In 1921, a New York court found Ulysses obscene

its a wonder Im not an old shrivelled hag before my time living with him so cold never embracing me except sometimes when hes asleep the wrong end of me not knowing I suppose who he has any man thatd kiss a womans bottom . . .

Thought for the day: Already, a billion years back, our genes were adapting us to these same phases of the moon.

Drudge has a hot one about Dan Rather rehearsing Iraq-attack news: http://209.160.96.101/1.htm

I watched for about 15 minutes as they went into very detailed information about the attack. CBS had excellent 3D graphics showing cruise missiles and their routes and targets as well as other various attack methods. CBS also showed LIVE footage of attacks on BAGHDAD which was quite convincing.

A new megalithic monument in Texas is getting flak as satanic, according to this wiccan news page: http://www.witchvox.com/wren/wn_9702.html [via The Atlantic]

Forbes disses the Motley Fool: http://www.forbes.com/asp/redir.asp?/forbes/98/0223/6104146a.htm

The New Scientist has a special feature on pot: [multipage] http://marijuana.newscientist.com/

And some witty attempts to name Schroedinger's cat: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980221/feedback.html

The IMDB's 'movie goofs' section is incredible, eg here for "Speed".

Another honorably depressing issue of The Nation: forfeiture law, prison spending: http://www.thenation.com/issue/980309/0309blum.htm

At the Justice Department, a steady stream of memos exhort its attorneys to redirect their efforts toward "forfeiture production" so as to avoid budget shortfalls.

Who'd'a thunk!?! The hacker's delight pc may be the PalmPilot: http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/10402.html [SN]

The Progressive Review daily keeps on zinging: [highly recommended] http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/indexup.htm

"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth." -- H. L. Mencken

A surprisingly nice page of tech-gossip from ABC news: http://www.abcnews.com/sections/tech/Silicon/silicon11.html [McNN]

And a decent piece on Mayan cave-magic: http://www.abcnews.com/sections/science/DailyNews/maya0217.html

Liquid chocolate, mixed with honey and frothed, was a ceremonial food of rulers.

Deep: A linguist named Robin Allott is exploring the gestural roots of speech, and defending the relationship of sound and meaning: [long] http://www.percep.demon.co.uk/pfol4th.htm

Annals of conspiracy theory (AFP):

Freemasons have often been the target of public speculation because of the secrecy surrounding their organization and reports of bizarre initiation ceremonies. Moves to partially lift the veil of secrecy were finally approved this week [in England] when the Labour government ordered members of the police and judiciary to identify themselves on a voluntary register if they were freemasons, with the threat of compulsion if they did not comply.

AIIIIIEEEE!!!

Bob Dylan has inspired a lot of rumors in his day, but Daily Dish just heard one that takes the cake. Would you believe that Dylan's admittedly brilliant but extremely dark and bitter album, Time Out of Mind, was inspired by his failed relationship with One Million Years B.C. poster girl Raquel Welch?

Yeah, well, we found it hard to swallow, too. But Welch's spokeswoman gave us what sounds like a non-denial denial. "A lot of people have called me about this," she said, choosing her words carefully. "I'll tell you what I've told everybody: Raquel and Bob are friends. Whether or not she inspired those songs, you'll have to call him. Raquel has absolutely no idea who they're about." We guess we wouldn't admit to inspiring a song like "Love Sick" either. But we can't help wondering: Who's Bob gonna thank if the album, as expected, wins a passel of Grammys next week?

("My friend Bob, whadda we need to make our country grow?" I told him, "My friend John, Brigitte Bardot...")

Where better to read up on the anthrax scare than in the Las Vegas Sun? http://www.lasvegassun.com/dossier/crime/bio/ [Feed]

Alt.showbiz.gossip has found a new Joycean genius: (Deja archive)

Ther is on no discutionn boards for the opened house chat of Erkel, my tallent star!!!!

Huha?

I will be strapped herenow into this showbiz centre untill Erkel has been created. [frownon]

Yes I want an Erkel.grouop for my likes.

Uhhuh! Thats; right!

Heeeeheheheheheeeheeheee

Kim

Ticklers provoke chuckling: http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/chal/1998/02/20chal2.html

I'm having a look at Slate before it goes toll, and so far the only thing that's not nauseating is "Egghead" from the editors of Lingua Franca. http://www.slate.com/Egghead/97-10-18/Egghead.asp

The Americans will claim elements 104 (rutherfordium,
after physicist Ernest Rutherford) and 106 (seaborgium,
after nuclear physicist Glen Seaborg); the Russians get element 105 (dubnium,
after the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia); and the Germans 107 to 109 (respectively bohrium,
after Danish quantum physicist Niels Bohr; hassium,
after the German state of Hesse, where it was discovered; and meitnerium,
after German physicist Lise Meitner).

Lingua Franca itself has a great overview of the Jesus Seminar: http://www.linguafranca.com/Archive/manger9502.html

As the academics were speculating that first-century peasants would have been too busy, and too demoralized, to form the crowds around Jesus that the Gospels described, Verhoeven, who had come into contact with real-life peasants while filming a movie about the Crusades in Morocco, intervened. He and his camera crew had drawn nothing but crowds wherever they went, because real-life villagers are always eager to drop what they are doing to view a novelty.

And this nice bit on Kurt Godel's critique of the US Constitution: http://www.linguafranca.com/9802/hyp.html and a logical argument why doomsday is probably coming sooner rather than later: http://www.linguafranca.com/9710/9710hyp.html and a link between Platonism and madness: http://www.linguafranca.com/9711/9711hyp.html

And business takes another look at academia's profit potential: http://www.linguafranca.com/9802/fn.html

Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, designers of a computer program called the Coordinator Workgroup Productivity System, write in Understanding Computers and Cognition that Heidegger's discussion of "thrownness" and "breakdown" provides a crucial design logic that artificial intelligence experts ignore at their peril.

And a fantastic resource critiquing the best academic books in a huge range of fields: http://www.linguafranca.com/Special/practicebooks.html

This Day in Joyce History: In 1932, following the death of his father and birth of his grandson, Joyce wrote:

'Ecce Puer'

Of the dark past
A child is born;
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.

Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Unclose his eyes!

Young life is breathed
On the glass;
The world that was not
Comes to pass.

A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!

Another good reverse telephone lookup: http://www.anywho.com:81/telq.html [DP]

Feed offers an optimistic scenario for tv journalism: http://www.feedmag.com/html/filter/98.02griscom/98.02griscom_master.html

This all adds up to a tantalizing new possibility for TV journalism: the creation of a formal political platform on television, a CSPAN for international figureheads -- world leaders, scholars, artists -- to square off in ongoing political and cultural discussion.

Feed also links to this archived piece, about Arafat on MTV: http://www.feedmag.com/95.12_filter.html [needs wide window]

Arafat himself beamed throughout the interview, waxing nostalgic about his "swinging bachelor" days and confessing his love for American cartoons.

Spooky floating words from a Java demo of a 'Thinkmap' Visual Thesaurus: http://www.plumbdesign.com/thesaurus/help.html

Pretty pictures: the Atlas of Cyberspace includes this page of conceptual-mapping experiments: http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/info_maps.html [AW]

On this date in 1895, the marquess of Queensbury provoked Oscar Wilde.

A good a.r.k thread about cat bowling

Yow! Linux ported to the PalmPilot! http://ryeham.ee.ryerson.ca/uClinux/ [OS]

The pot-smoking snowboarder hullaballoo reminds me of the Dock Ellis LSD no-hitter scandal: http://www.paranoia.com/drugs/psychedelics/lsd/no.hitter

(Why d'ya think they call it "Ellis, D"?)

Spy magazine is dead. Long live Spy magazine... [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/1998/02/18media.html

Thanks to the toy-porn of Wired and Fast Company, after all, the Palm Pilot digital assistant may be the Steven Seagal of our day.

A juicy rumor that Jobs has kicked out the impending Apple CEO: http://www.macosrumors.com/ [date-linked item] [i got a cute Snoot banner ad, too]

Snoot has a pretty funny 'Infinite Book of Knowledge' text-generator: http://www.snoot.com/factory/knowledge.shtml

In the March Scientific American there's a piece on computer animation of human forms, with many (unspectacular) bulky demos: http://www.sciam.com/1998/0398issue/0398hodgins.html

This Day in Ulysses: "Just say in the most natural tone: when I was in Paris; boul' Mich', I used to. Yes, used to carry punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder somewhere. Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904 the prisoner was seen by two witnesses." (U3.181)

The "Columbia Journalism Review" has put more of its latest issue online, including this piece suggesting that South American journalists could teach the US press a thing or two about following money trails: http://www.cjr.org/html/98-01-02-money.html

"It worries me because it suggests that other institutions that regulate power in a democracy are not functioning," he says. "The press has become the investigator, the prosecutor, and the judge in order to fill the power vacuum. That's a very dangerous role for the press to play."

Susie Bright xxx-plains that interns always expect sex: http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/brig/1998/02/nc_13brig2.html

Brava! In Entertainment Weekly, Betty White shows the courage of her convictions:

"I turned down the part of Helen Hunt's mother in 'As Good as It Gets'-- which was a tough decision-- because in the first scene they throw the little dog down the garbage chute. But [director] Jim Brooks said, "Betty, I wrote the thing with you in mind! The dog is fine. The dog is kind of the star of the picture." But I can't be part of that because every kook in the world, if there's a dog that bothers them in the building, will think, "Hey, there's a good idea." It broke my heart to say no, but there are other ways to get laughs than to throw a dog down a garbage chute."

I've started depending on a webtool called "WebWatcher" that peeks very quickly, many times a day, at dozens of news-sites, to see if they've been updated. On the assumption that most people aren't doing this, I'll try to report infrequent updates here, using the Frontier glossary function for compactness. Eg:

The weekly Village Voice has a juicy new issue, including a brainy rave for a film of "Mrs Dalloway": http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/film/8taubin.shtml

Vanessa Redgrave, who is so absolute an incarnation of Mrs. Dalloway (although she has neither a ''narrow pea-stick figure'' nor a ''little face beaked like a bird'') that it seems, impossible as it is, that she was Woolf's inspiration.

Serious research on LSD continues: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/film/8taubin.shtml

Since the 1960s, acid has been simultaneously demonized and trivialized by the culture. Today, if you want to work with this substance, you are seen not only as a monster, but also as a flake.

. . . today's typical dose of blotter acid ranges from 20 to 80 micrograms, way down from the whopping 100 to 200 micrograms of a typical 1960s dose.

A critique of market research: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/columns/8mclaren.shtml

In their book, Street Trends: How Today's Alternative Youth Cultures Are Creating Tomorrow's Mainstream Markets, consultants Janine Lopiano-Misdom and Joanne De Luca seem determined to erase the boundaries between researcher and researchee.

How Tom Tomorrow got busted from US News (I hadn't realized they'd even dared to try him!): http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/columns/8ledbetter.shtml
(Don't forget to click on the splendid 'revenge strip' thumbnail:) http://www.villagevoice.com/images/weekly/8ledbetter.gif
(And Salon still offers him regularly.)

More nifty news bits from the Progressive Review daily: http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/indexup.htm

According to a chart prepared by Universal Economics of Newport News, VA, since last fall WJ Clinton's popularity has precisely matched the rise and fall of the S&P 500.

The Nerve forum has been duller: http://www.nervemag.com/voicebox/WomenOnSex/Dodson_Question5.html

And when two people spend a lot of time together and fall in love, they become one; the problem is, Which one?

Patrick O'Brian has written eighteen brilliant volumes of the 18th C. naval adventures of Jack Aubrey. They've inspired a fan-presence on the Web, inventoried here, that in ways surpasses Joyce's: http://www.io.com/~gibbonsb/pob/

PO'B on the origins of the series: http://web.wwnorton.com/pob/vol1i.htm#author

Since what I wanted to write was a book for readers of no particular age (after all one can delight in David Copperfield or Kidnapped at twelve or seventy-two) all I had to do was put a boy, an ingenious youth from Connemara, aboard the commodore's ship as a midshipman and raise the anchor. I was fortunate enough to have great material, and I wrote the book in about six weeks (or was it less?) laughing most of the time.

If you haven't seen the recent censored Doonesburys, they start here: http://www2.uclick.com/client/new/db/1998/02/10/ but my fave is this: http://www2.uclick.com/client/new/db/1998/02/13/

A rather opaque archive of controversial past Doonesburys: http://www.uexpress.com/ups/comics/db/html/controversial/index.html

Trudeau's FAQ of Doonesbury trivia: [multipage] http://www.doonesbury.com/faqs/prevq.htm

This Day in Joyce History: In 1894, the last of Jack Joyce's Cork properties were sold. In 1909, Mary E Cleary ("Emma Clery") married.

I been wanting one of these for my Mac: the Post Facto Audio Recorder spools the last five minutes in RAM until you hit 'save': http://www.aix.de/global/pfau.html (Win95 only)

An inspiring case of Frontier addiction: http://guzdial.cc.gatech.edu/journals/frontier.html [DP]

Frontier, on the other hand, I startup with my machine and I use it constantly: For dealing with student mail, for dealing with grades and assignment turn-ins, for posting websites, for writing papers and proposals, etc.

[DP] will mean this URL was cribbed from the 'Digital Prairie' weblog. See the 'more logs' shorttake, above, for the key.

Paglia outdoes herself: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/pagl/1998/02/cov_nc_17pagl.html

Whatever our legitimate commitment to our democratic ally, Israel (the real point of this Iraqi expedition), our bullying arrogance toward and disrespect for the Arab world, with its long, noble, cultured history, is unnecessarily intensifying hatred of America.

Before Stonewall, I retorted, gay men would have worn T-shirts that said, "Slap Chelsea until she goes to a hairdresser!"

Chelsea's innate character is best revealed by the personality of her charming cat, Socks, who is a terrific model of spunky composure.

By the way, what the hell was Bianca Jagger doing out there on Tucker's death watch picket line?

Yikes:

63% of American adults do not know that the last dinosaur died before the first human arose. 75% do not know that anti-biotics are useless in fighting against viruses. 57% do not know that electrons are smaller than atoms. Almost half of all Americans do not know that the Earth rotates the Sun and does so in one calendar year.

A GREAT subway map (NYC) using color ascii-art: [temp url] http://jota.sm.luth.se:80/~e93-vkn/pics/ascii/manhattan_subwaymap.html

This Day in Joyce History: In 1932, Stephen James Joyce (grandson) was born. In 1940, an Italian translation of ALP was published.

Raccontami di Anna Livia. Tutto sapere vo' di Anna Livia. Beh, conosci Anna Livia? Altro che, conosciamo tutte Anna Livia!

That evil British copy-protection scheme (10 Feb below) turns out to have enlightened anti-spy implications: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/19.59.html#subj4

You can now use software to cause the eavesdropper in the van outside your house to see a completely different image from the one that you see on your screen. In its simplest form, our technique uses specially designed 'Tempest fonts' to make the text on your screen invisible to the spooks. Our paper tells you how to design and code your own.

The new rules of venture capital: http://www.sjmercury.com/business/center/vcmain021598.htm

The generosity of the new order has redefined life in a start-up: No longer are executives forced to take huge cuts in pay in exchange for stock options. No longer are they worried about saving every dime. And a strong job market means few worry about risking a career.

Ann Skea's book review on Newton and alchemy: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=325171624

Newton's alleged mental breakdown (evidenced by two strange letters written within a four-month period in a lifetime spanning eighty-five years) is combined with his alchemical interests to suggest an excursion into black magic.

The Chalk Garden

PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 14 (UPI):

An ape language researcher says she has found the first evidence that apes in the wild make sophisticated travel plans and mark their routes with primitive road signs made of leaves, branches and twigs. Dr. E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh says when the pygmy chimpanzees of the Congo, also known as the bonobo, go traveling in search of food they use a kind of natural post-it-note to lead separate groups to the same place at the end of the day.

Some harmless lunacy: http://www.interlog.com/~oort/serial.html

Who we are is the Serial Diners. We are a cabal of lunatics in Toronto, Canada who meet every Friday, having undertaken to dine at all of the restaurants in the Toronto Yellow Pages in (wow) alphabetical order! We began on November 24, 1989 at the letter A. As of this writing (March 1997), we are halfway through the C's. And you think you know how to waste time!

A nice tale of mother-son tennis, from Joyce Maynard: http://www.joycemaynard.com/articles/court.html

One summer night we went to an outdoor James Taylor concert in a park an hour so from where we lived. Sitting high in the bleachers, we happened to look over the edge, into the park below, and both of us spotted night-lit tennis courts at the same instant, with the same thought in mind. We left the concert, ran four blocks to our car, where we retrieved our raquets, and returned to the park, where we played, barefoot, until the last strains of James Taylor's final encore, when the lights snapped off.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1903, James began his aesthetic notebook.

Desire is the feeling which urges us to go to something and loathing is the feeling which urges us to go from something: and that art is improper which aims at exciting these feelings in us whether by comedy or by tragedy.

Who better to privatize welfare, than the folks who brought us the $640 toilet seat: Lockheed-Martin? http://www.thenation.com/issue/980302/0302HART.HTM

"The State can no longer tolerate Lockheed's failure to perform contractual services.... Lockheed has continuously missed contractual milestones and the State has provided Lockheed with numerous and detailed notices of unsatisfactory performance, which have not resulted in the timely correction of these problems."

Warren Hapke in soc.history.medieval, on millennial hysteria ca 1000 CE:

There's an article on fatalism and the millenium by Joseph B. Trahern in the Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature that you may find useful. Basically, Trahern says that there wasn't any such hysteria--the medieval church didn't interpret the Apocalypse all that literally.

A nice memoir of gender-confusion ca 1967: http://www.nervemag.com/Chase/femboy/

Did those precise, exaggerated mannerisms come naturally? Or did he concoct his persona from brassy or sarcastic characters on TV -- Paul Lynde on Bewitched, Flip Wilson in drag, Mr. French on Family Affair.

Matt Drudge: http://www.drudgereport.com/1.htm

There have been 6,162,100 visitors to the DRUDGE REPORT website in the past 31 days. [29,525 from the White House domain eop.gov, for those who have asked.]

On a.r.k, Ian York translates "Om mani padme hum" into dudespeak:

Hey, dude, I am purely beholding the hell out of the jewel in the flower of the lotus! Like, I just f___ing behold the living s___ out of it, man! I just go, like, "Behold!" and, like, there it is, the jewel, like, right there in the flower of the f___ing lotus! I'm at f___ing Nirvana so fast it would make my head swim if I wasn't, like, separated from the wheel of being and s___!

Your Friend,
Buddha (age 12)

YAY! Chris Gulker has turned up another fine weblog: http://www.olin.wustl.edu/~bogart/

My new project gets off to a limping start: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/solace/00intro.html

A website configured to reject MSIE with a 'bad browser' error: http://www.pjprimer.com/

"If only purging the industry of Gates criminal actions were as easy as keeping his browsers off the web site!"

This Day in Joyce History: In 1900 (per Ulysses), H. Rumbold hanged Joe Gann in Bootle jail.

An interesting bit of film history: Sam Fuller's 1963 social surrealism: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/film/7hoberman.shtml

But however hermetic the hospital ward, the conditions are nothing if not topical-- the patients subject to doomsday visions, war games, and race riots. A guilt-ridden nuclear physicist has regressed to the age of five...

Ana Voog's parents read about her webcam: http://anacam.com/analogs/analogn.html

last night i dreamed that i pushed the button that sent a bomb to china to blow it up.

A basic moral principle: don't loan money to the greedy and selfish, no matter what interest they promise you. Cf 'microcredit': [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/mwt/fgm/1998/02/12fgm.html

His 16 somewhat controversial commandments for Grameen borrowers are embodiments of that philosophy -- thou shall grow vegetables year 'round, thou shall exercise, thou shall not exchange dowries, thou shall keep thy families small.

Mac-fans drive Winer to despair: http://www.scripting.com/

I'm getting so much irritating mail on this, I think I'll just get a Compaq to replace the three Macs.

Another excellent speaker like Michael Parenti is Chuck Collins of UFE/Share-the-Wealth. Here's a page about their guerrilla theater group: http://www.stw.org/sharethewealth/classacts.html

* art for the rest of us TRANSFORMS THE WORLD *

Magic Christian dept: (What's your price?) http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/002587.htm

And so Granville's days are numbered. Beginning next month, the community 25 miles east of Minot will call itself McGillicuddy City for the next four years in an advertising stunt that followed a coast-to-coast contest.

A Big Day in Joyce History: In 1880, JF Byrne was born. In 1899, Joyce made his first pitch for Ibsen at the Literary and Historical Society. In 1900, Nora's admirer Sonny Bodkin died. And in 1919, Joyce lost the second part of his lawsuit against Carr.

E. Teflon Piano's tips for dealing with net.kooks:

1. Always be unfailingly polite to those people whose time, energy and addled vengence you wish to avoid unless you have spare amounts of those qualities that you wish to invest.
2. Strike up a friendship with someone adept at forged cancels.

A rich sarcastic reply to Jesse Berst's whoring for 'multicasting': http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/talkback/talkback_72148.html