Robot Wisdom WebLog for May 1998 (waxing)

This Day in Joyce History: In 1899, the Freeman's Journal published a protest against Yeats's play, signed by 23 fellow students (not Joyce). Portrait quotes their catcalls:

A libel on Ireland!
Made in Germany!
Blasphemy!
We never sold our faith!
No Irish woman ever did it!
We want no amateur atheists.
We want no budding buddhists.

Chomsky on Microsoft, supposedly (I don't think he gets it): http://www.corpwatch.org/trac/feature/microsoft/chomsky.html

...you also have to read Alan Greenspan, the head of the Federal Reserve, when he's talking internally; when he says, look the health of the economy depends on a wonderful achievement that we've brought about, namely "worker insecurity." That's his term. Worker insecurity--that is not knowing if you're going to have a job tomorrow. It is a great boon for the health of the economy because it keeps wages down. It's great: it keeps profits up and wages down.

Author profiles at Reference.com are done by month: [John McCarthy]

Who calculates the Nielsen ratings of search engines?: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/028245.htm

In March, Relevant Knowledge said that 7.4 million visited Alta Vista. But Alta Vista itself counted 21 million users.

Salon reviews a Rat Pack expose: http://www.salonmagazine.com/books/sneaks/1998/05/11sneaks.html

They were in so deep in all the wrong pockets that they couldn't sing, joke or dance their ways out, and they were too f___ed up to notice even if they could have.

And a great profile of MTV's new accidental VJ: http://www.salonmagazine.com/ent/music/vowe/1998/05/11vowe.html

I cannot remember ever being this rapt in front of MTV, cannot remember the last time I watched the channel and thought out loud, "I can't believe they're letting us see this." Wonder how long this will last?

And Viagra starts to look a little scary: http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/brig/1998/05/11brig.html

But with the pill, I just sat back and watched, in a way it was like I was watching my penis and my lover having a good time. I was a little separate from it, which distressed her.

New City Times looks at Puerto Rico, Cambodia, and Grabbe on digital cash (no Jack Parsons)

PC World switches smoothly over to XML: http://www.theobvious.com/archives/050998.html [SN]

In addition to reusing the articles as complete texts in licensing and stories for our site, we will, over the next few months, begin to allow users to compile custom information packets created by directly querying our XML data store. This targeted searching will be a huge step forward from simple free text searches and will revolutionize the way people find information on our site.

New Risks Digest sounds the alarm about the proposed criminalization of "circumvention": http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/19.73.html

For example, many web sites on the Internet today ask you to register with your name and e-mail address before you can view the information that they contain. A substantial number of people bristle at this notion, and they have figured out ways to circumvent the registration process. Under the legislation, these people could be sued and awarded $200 to $2,500 in statutory damages for each web page that they viewed.

Morning project: quotes from Nabokov: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/jorn/nabokov.html

[Kubrick's Lolita] may turn out to be a lovely morning mist as perceived through mosquito netting, or it may turn out to be the swerves of a scenic drive as felt by the horizontal passenger of an ambulance.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1985, the Zurich JJ Foundation was founded.

Nobody on asg took the Manson quote (7 May, below) seriously (it does sound a lot like The Onion, but it sounds even more like Manson himself), so the author follows-up: [Deja URL]

The story is real. The quotes are directly from a radio interview Manson gave this week to Romanian radio's version of Larry King Live. He wants to be lethally injected, once he meets with the Spice Girls....whom he likens to the Virgin Mary.

This looks lively! An archive of 500+ "progressive, activist, community-based, non-corporate" RealVideo and Audio shows: http://www.freespeech.org/

A newsletter for drug activists called "DrugSense Weekly" has an interesting strategy for linking to diverse web sources, while re-archiving the articles locally: [messy design, though] http://www.drugsense.org/nl/1998/

In their ongoing quest to destroy all human individuality, Microsoft has created a webzine called "Microsoft in Higher Education" (cf "McDonald's in HE"?), which predictably includes product brochures masquerading as articles. But what strikes me most is how phony the 'academic voice' sounds on the net, eg in this essay on email lists: http://www.microsoft.com/Education/hed/news/July/email.htm

The Internet is an enormously popular medium of communication that has developed its own interactional norms, the expected and accepted behaviors of participants.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1899, James first heard Yeats's "Who Goes with Fergus?" at the Countess Cathleen opening. In 1931, HCE was published in book form.

New Science News looks at December's humongous stellar blast: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/5_9_98/fob1.htm

However, several of the findings call into question a popular theory in which bursts are generated when two dense stars, known as neutron stars, collide and merge. Dale A. Frail... notes that to generate the energy associated with the Dec. 14 burst, virtually the entire mass of the neutron stars had to have been converted into gamma rays -- an unlikely situation.

Gorky's memoir of Tolstoy mixes ill-temper with reverence: [long] [Messy URL] [OLB]

I think he regards Christ as simple and deserving of pity; and, although at times he admires him, he hardly loves him. It is as though he were uneasy: if Christ came to a Russian village, the girls might laugh at him.

Of women he talks readily and much, like a French novelist, but always with the coarseness of a Russian peasant. Formerly it used to affect me unpleasantly. To-day in the Almond Park he asked Anton Tchekhov: "You whored a great deal when you were young?" Anton Pavlovich, with a confused smile, and pulling at his little beard, muttered something inaudible and Leo Nikolaevich, looking at the sea, confessed: "I was an indefatigable...." He said this penitently, using at the end of the sentence a salty peasant word. And I noticed for the first time how simply he used these words, as though he knew no more fitting ones to use. Coming from his shaggy lips, they sound simple and natural and lose their soldierly coarseness and filth.

[Gorky:] I was angry, and, taking her by the shoulders, pushed her away from the gate; but she broke away and, facing me, quickly undid her dress, lifted up her chemise, and shouted: "I'm nicer than those rats." Then I lost my temper. I took her by the neck, turned her round, and struck her with my shovel below the back, so that she skipped out of the gate and ran across the yard, crying out three times in great surprise: "O! O! O!"

How strange that he is so fond of playing cards. He plays seriously, passionately. His hands become nervous when he takes the cards up, exactly as if he were holding live birds instead of inanimate pieces of cardboard.

"In human stupidity, when it is not malicious, there is something very touching, even beautiful... There always is."

"I do not like people when they are drunk, but I know some who become interesting when they are tipsy, who acquire what is not natural to them in their sober state; wit, beauty of thought, alertness, and richness of language. In such cases I am ready to bless wine."

In Leo Nikolaevich there is much which at time roused in me a feeling very like hatred, and this hatred fell upon my soul with crushing weight. His disproportionately overgrown individuality is a monstrous phenomenon, almost ugly, and there is in him something of Sviatogor, the bogatyr, whom the earth can't hold. ...a kind of "negation of all affirmations," the deepest and most evil nihilism which has sprung from the soil of an infinite and unrelieved despair, from a loneliness which probably no one but he has experienced with such terrifying clearness.

"The Kaliph Abdurahman had during his life fourteen happy days, but I am sure I have not had so many. And this is because I have never lived -- I can not live -- for myself, for my own self; I live for show, for people."

LEO TOLSTOY is dead. A telegram came containing the commonest of words: "is dead." It struck me to the heart: I cried with pain and anger, and now, half crazy, I imagine him as I know and saw him; I am tormented by a desire to speak with him. I imagine him in his coffin; he lies like a smooth stone at the bottom of a stream, and in his gray beard, I am sure, is quietly hidden that aloof, mysterious little smile. And at last his hands are folded peacefully; they have finished their hard task.

He was sitting with his head on his hands, the wind blowing the silvery hairs of his beard through his fingers: he was looking into the distance out to sea, and the little greenish waves rolled up obediently to his feet and fondled them as they were telling something about themselves to the old magician.

The man [from Moscow] was a large, rich manufacturer, with a great belly and a face the color of raw meat; why did he want Tolstoy to be an anarchist? One of the "profound mysteries" of the Russian soul!

He explains to them the teaching of Lao-Tse, and he seems to me an extraordinary man-orchestra, possessing the faculty of playing several instruments at the same time, a brass trumpet, a drum, harmonium, and flute.

"...Talent is love. One who loves is talented. Look at lovers, they are all talented."

"...I will tell the truth about women, when I have one foot in the grave. I shall tell it, jump into my coffin, pull the lid over me, and say, 'Do what you like now.'" The look he gave us was so wild, so terrifying that we all fell silent for a while.

Once one of these "Tolstoyans" at Yasnaya Polyana explained eloquently how happy his life had become and how pure his soul, after he accepted Tolstoy's teaching. Leo Nikolaevich leant over and said to me in a low voice: "He's lying all the time, the rogue, but he does it to please me...."

...he spoke so plainly and brutally, arguing that in a healthy girl chastity is not natural. "If a girl who has turned fifteen is healthy, she desires to be touched and embraced. Her mind is still afraid of the unknown and of what she does not understand; that is what they call chastity and purity. But her flesh is already aware that the incomprehensible is right, lawful, and, in spite of the mind, it demands fulfillment of the law..."

"You are a real mouzhik. You will find it difficult to live among writers, but never mind, don't be afraid, always say what you feel even if it be rude; it doesn't matter. Sensible people will understand."

Sixteen historical versions of Little Red Riding Hood, and 12 of Cinderella, compared, with illustrations: http://www-dept.usm.edu/~engdept/lrrh/lrrhhome.htm [OLB]

The Vatican massacre presents serious mysteries: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/papers/19980508-07.html

Estermann and the Pope also shared a physical resemblance. Judge Priore said he did not discount the idea that Estermann had been used as a decoy for the Pope in situations where he could be seen only at a distance.

Seattle pickets spammer: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/056353.htm

Meantime, reached in Las Vegas, Tony Howard of The Wizard, the service Aurora Nissan hired, expressed no remorse and laughed when he heard about the demonstration. "Boy, some people really got a lot of time on their hands!" he said. "Did they buy a car? My attitude is: Tell them to get a life."

Simulation of a real "Deep Impact" asteroid hit: http://www.sandia.gov/media/comethit.htm

The shock wave from the impact would level much of the New England region. The heat would incinerate cities and forests there instantaneously. The global cloud would then lower temperatures worldwide, and a global snowstorm likely would ensue and last several days to several weeks, initiating a "nuclear winter" that would create more hardships for Earth's inhabitants.

The animations are worth the wait: http://sherpa.sandia.gov/asteroid/

Kibo on ark:

Remember, to convert Centigrade to Celsius, subtract a centipede and add cesium. Then bake at absolute zero for no seconds.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1901, James bought books on Theosophy and Buddhism. In 1932, he sent James Stephens five translations of his poem "Stephen's Green".

(I only cheated a couple of times during TV-Turnoff Week, and liked the results well enough to keep going, with occasional exceptions made. Since Salon gives some warning of upcoming goodies, I'll be copying my choices here, partly as a reminder to myself.)

TV 2nite: Conan O'Brien has trip-hoppers Morcheeba.

Susie Bright liked Viagra: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/brig/1998/05/08brig.html

I'm not usually multiorgasmic, but I recognized this feeling, where the second climax comes from a long way back and then crushes you like a clap of thunder.

More celeb Deja profiles: [Tom Clancy] [Marvin Minsky] [Matt Drudge] [Steve Wozniak] [Nathan Myhrvold] [Mitch Kapor] [John Perry Barlow] [Howard Rheingold]

Ambiguous: [Dave Barry] [Douglas Adams] [Scott Adams] [Roger Ebert]

A not-too-enlightening peek at Netscape's Aurora url-manager: http://home.netscape.com/comprod/products/communicator/future/aurora.html [SN/WebMonkey]

Lots more appalling glitches in the new Risks Digest: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/19.72.html

Unattributed asg report: [Deja URL]

Charles Manson says he'll ask to be executed IF he gets a one hour meeting with the Spice Girls on their upcoming US tour. "The Spice Girls are the authentic heirs to the Beatles and me. Helter-Skelter, baby. They will write the new century's Book of Love and Harmony. I need to guide them." Manson became a born-again Christian after a fan sent him the Hanson CD "Middle of Nowhere.." "I listened to it for weeks. The Hansons are the Beach Boys for the new era," Manson says. "They've turned my life around. I want to pay for my sins with the ultimate sacrifice. I'm looking forward to breaking bread with Christ, soon. Soon as I meet with the Spice Girls to show them The Way."

New The Nation looks at the assassination in Guatemala: http://www.thenation.com/issue/980525/0525pere.htm

Sooner or later, Washington will have to release reams of documents related not just to the C.I.A.'s role but to that of the School of the Americas and other U.S. agencies that colluded, in the name of defeating communism, in training the most lethal apparatus of counterinsurgency in Latin American history.

And Hitchens-on-Viagra bounds from Martin Amis to Marilyn Monroe to Richard Pryor to Macbeth: http://www.thenation.com/issue/980525/0525hitc.htm

I'm hunting around for more on norns, mostly via alt.games.creatures. FAQ: http://www.annapolis.net/members/trissy/faq

My norn won't sleep. What should I do? Remove all stimulus (toys, other Norns). Aggressively tickle the Norn until he crouches down. Most of the time this puts them asleep fast.

What is a Child of the Mind Norn? A child of the mind is the kind way of saying that a Norn is blind. Although blind is perhaps a simple way of putting it, these norns tend to have an attention mutation which means that their attention is permanently focussed on themselves. Capable of being taught to speak by the computer, they will never survive without energy injections and will not reproduce.

Hacking norn genetic files: http://users.aol.com/dmchess/www/duesing1.html

      01 02 29 00 00 07 02 FE*03 3A 01 F6 01 05 50
      Immune Response - Antibody 6 Reaction
      2*Antigen6 3*Glucose -80> 1*Antibody6 1*Hotness
      1  0NGU


      01 02 2C 00 00 07 02 EA 01 00 02 07*00 06 40
      Sleeping Sickness Reaction
      2*SleepToxin 1*<NONE> -64> 2*Sleepiness 0*Tiredness
      2  7EXB 5UKR


      01 02 2E 00 02 17 01 44 01 00 03 0D*11 07 40
      Alcohol Makes Females Randy Reaction
      1*Alcohol 1*<NONE> -64> 3*SexDrive 17*Sleepiness
      1  2QFT

Woo-woo! Add Roger McGuinn of the Byrds to my list of celebrity net-followups: [Deja URL] (Turns out he posts a lot:) [Deja profile]

The Big Mac as an international unit of exchange? (Reuters)

      Malaysia         $1.16
      Indonesia        $1.16
      China            $1.20
      Thailand         $1.30 
      Australia        $1.75
      Canada           $1.97
      Russia           $2.00
      Mexico           $2.10
      United States    $2.56
      France           $2.84
      Belgium          $2.87
      Britain          $3.05
      Israel           $3.38
      Denmark          $3.39
      Switzerland      $3.87

IMDB lists 116 unglamorous movies based on Pulitzer-winning sources: http://us.imdb.com/List?genres=pulitzer-prize-source

Am I hallucinating, or did Winer do a 180 in the last week, re MS? http://www.scripting.com/davenet/98/05/timeChangesEverything.html

That's what I've been saying in DaveNet, since early 1996 when the dimension of Microsoft's attack on the Internet became clear. Diversity was the loser...

Feed Daily puts Eldridge Cleaver in clear-sighted perspective:

When abroad he said he found the communist systems that the Panthers had been advocating in theory to be "absolutely unacceptable" in practice -- to the point where after repeated run-ins with the cops of foreign dictatorships "I began to miss the Oakland police."

Way cool: Tori Amos is doing live broadcasts in RealAudio, and even my 28.8 does way decent! http://www.tori.com/ [Ana]

(They demand you register at length, but you can use xxx's for most fields. There's also a 90-min reel of old videos etc, that's a little too lo-res for me to recommend.)

Adam Cadre did an adept, Spy-like day-by-day study of the first 133 days of 1997: [multipage, bandwidth-hog, poor navigation] http://www.duke.edu/~adamc/jan97.html

02 Jan: Speaking of mailbombs: Mark Johnson-Williams, creator of Tickle Me Elmo, tells the San Jose Mercury News that the FBI investigated him for six months as a possible Unabomber suspect...

The solution to the Dan-Rather "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" mystery: http://www.newslink.org/ajrrathermay1.html

A psychiatrist said that one of his patients, William Tager -- now in prison for killing an NBC stagehand outside the "Today" show studios in 1994 -- was the man who had attacked Rather 11 years earlier. The psychiatrist said Tager told him he thought the media had him under surveillance and were beaming hostile messages to him. Hence the demand to know the "frequency."

This Day in Joyce History: In 1882, the Phoenix Park murders took place. In 1905, Tom Rochford risked death trying to save a man in a sewer. In 1907, Chamber Music was published:

Who may this singer be
Whose song about my heart is falling?
Know you by this, the lover's chant,
'Tis I that am your visitant.

Get a free reading using the Silicon Valley Tarot: http://www.best.com/~grendler/svthome.shtml [YMMV]

New PC Magazine looks at the impressive traffic-stats for the ESPN website: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/willmott/dw.htm

Jonathan Swift parodied AI in "Gulliver": [Deja URL]

These Bits of Wood were covered on every Square with Papers pasted on them; and on these Papers were written all the Words of their Language in their several Moods, Tenses. and Declensions, but without any Order. The Professor then desired me to observe, for he was going to set his Engine at work. The Pupils at his Command took each of them hold of an Iron Handle, whereof there were Forty fixed round the Edges of the Frame; and giving them a sudden Turn, the whole Disposition of the Words was entirely changed.

A somewhat in-depth look at how alife "norns" added neural nets and genetic algorithms to virtual pets: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980509/features.html

The real innovation in the norn is its "biochemistry", which also helps to continually restructure the network. "It seems odd that AI missed out biochemistry when the brain swims in a sea of chemicals," says Toby Simpson, executive producer of Creatures.

Mac virus fighter gives up: [Deja URL]

I made this decision... because of the widespread and dangerous Microsoft macro virus problem. I believe that there are now well over 1000 of these viruses, and many new ones are discovered every month. They are now a much more serious problem for Mac users than are the classic Mac system viruses. I simply do no have the resources to combat a problem which is this huge in scope and complexity.

How the CIA weeds out analytic thinkers: [Deja URL]

In my era the CIA used -- the Personality Assessment System (PSA) -- to identify the basic Externalized, Regulated, Adaptive individual -- the ERA personality -- that it prefers to hire. ...To me the ERA-type criteria is at the crux of the CIA's problems.

In sum the CIA wants or wanted active, charming, obedient people who can get things done in the social world but have limited perspective and understanding, who see things in black and white certainties and don't like to think too much.

The Unabomber's prison conditions: [Deja URL]

...Kaczynski will spend at least 22 hours per day in his cell, which has about 90 square feet of living space. The cells have beds, stools and tables made of poured concrete. Each of the one-man cells also has a shower, a toilet and a small window, none of which Kaczynski had in the tiny cabin in Montana where he lived for three decades. Inmates even have small televisions in their cells, and access to books from the facility's leisure and law libraries.

New New Scientist features cloning, plus a theory that stone tools were a form of status display: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980509/naxes.html

Hand axes have puzzled archaeologists for decades, because many seem much more carefully made than is necessary for cutting up chunks of meat. "You simply don't need a nice, symmetrical artefact for butchering. You can do it with a simple flake..."

The biggest advertisers of 1997 (1- Chevy, 2- McD, 3- Ford): http://adage.com/dataplace/archives/dp165.html [Feed]

Hemp-rally culture-clash in NYC's Washington Square Park: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/19trebay.shtml

It's like the revenge of Ozzie and Harriet.

The heroic side of LBJ: http://www.salonmagazine.com/books/sneaks/1998/05/06sneaks.html

One of the coups of Dallek's research is his confirmation that, during the 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon used emissaries to convince the Vietnamese to delay their participation in the Paris peace talks until after he was elected. Nixon, a private citizen, was committing treason (delaying peace talks for a war in which America was involved) in pursuit of political office. Johnson had this information (as well as proof that the Greek military junta was funneling millions to the Nixon campaign via Spiro Agnew) and refused to use it. He saw it as leverage against any investigation Nixon might undertake against him that would sully his image.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1880, James's parents were wed. In 1882, a torchlight parade was held for Parnell.

Disturbing images of dolls, with a good text intro: [multipage] http://www.nervemag.com/Levinthal/

More X-Files spoilers, this time for the season finale: [Deja URL]

More Voice: another insightful Wilde-play review: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/theater/19feingold.shtml

Highly intelligent people, even those appalled by his ideas and disgusted by his looks, succumbed to the pleasure and variety of his conversation, to his generosity of spirit, to the bravery with which he upheld his own views and the respect he would accord an equally strong opponent. Anecdotes about him abound because encounters with him were worth having.

Voice Literary Supplement reviews Leslie (Mrs Andrew) Cockburn's memoir: http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/19gonnerman.shtml

She emerged from the jungle with footage of a little girl named Guadalupe Davila describing how the U.S.-financed contras murdered her mother. "They choked her and then they took her clothes off," Guadalupe said, "...and then they peeled off her face." Cockburn's film, which later aired on national television, exposed the contras as terrorists and helped turn U.S. public sentiment against the CIA-trained forces.

An interminable Wired article about mailing-lists includes many useful statistics about how they make money: http://www.wired.com/wired/6.04/es_lists.html [SN]

Not surprisingly, PC World has been extremely successful at selling ads on its lists. The lists charge between 3 and 7 cents per impression, so a single day of ads on Windows 95 Tips costs $7,500.

In a new Village Voice, James Ridgeway reviews 17 of the most suspicious bodies in the Clinton Body Count: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/19ridgeway.shtml

And here's a charmingly incoherent rant about the Lilith grrrls: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/music/19dark.shtml

Or it's the hardest Top 40 radio song to describe, for which I love her -- no bridge and barely a chorus, fibrillating trauma vocals. Three and a half minutes in she suddenly announces, "I need a moment to deliberate," and walks right off the radio as the music falls apart behind her.

And they set the wayback machine to 1973 for an early offensive in the drug war: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/19ledbetter.shtml

Rockefeller asked Fine if he would "like to do something for New York State." Fine said he would, and Rockefeller told him to go to Japan and learn why that nation's drug addiction rate was among the world's lowest. Fine did, and determined that the secret was Japan's mandatory life sentences for drug pushers.

An online database of symbols uses this odd indexing scheme: http://www.SYMBOLS.com/graphicsearch.html [artnetweb]

Is the sign that you want information about single-axis symmetric, multi-axis symmetric, or asymmetric?
Is the sign open or closed?
Are the lines of the sign straight, soft or both straight and soft?
Does the symbol contain lines that are crossing?

This Day in Joyce History: In 1894, Arnott's department store burned down. In 1939, Finnegans Wake was published in London and New York.

Duchovny leaks the X-Files movie plot: [Deja URL]

Kibo, et al, on a.r.k:

   >>:>I want to invent a time machine just so I can kill the guy
   >>:>who named the letter W and have its named changed to "wee".
   >>:
   >>:You know, I've always been meaning to introduce "wee wee wee"
   >>:as a pronunciation of "www", but I've had such little 
   >>:occasion to pronounce an URL aloud.
   >>
   >>I've gotten a couple of other djs at the radio station to
   >>announce our URL as "hut-up wow", but I havn't heard anyone
   >>else say it that way yet.
   > 
   >My preferred pronounciation is "Hat Tip, Woo Woo" but I can't
   >get anyone to use it. Maybe if I actually paid them to do it.


   But this skirts the real issue:  what's the name of "://"?
   I like to call it "lizard lips" because we all know that
   sideways lizard faces have diagonal lips.  Nowadays most smileys
   are too kissable.


   :-X  <-- DO NOT KISS MY SMILEY
   

How net-based campaign-financing records made a splash in Indiana: http://www.cjr.org/html/98-05-06-state.html

Interns from Notre Dame and DePauw University keypunched 19,000 state campaign records from paper into a computer database at the center's offices in Washington under the direction of the research group's Diane Renzulli.

For the first time, Indiana citizens were reading articles of breadth and detail about their politicians and the forces supporting them. Within days, nearly 2,000 people contacted the Star and News, angry about what they had read -- the largest response to any story or series in the paper's history.

Another excellent day for the Progressive Review:

Reader Rick Fromme, who has been a sports parachutist, offers this remarkable metaphor to describe the danger of doing nothing about the environment: "In descent you never have any impression you are falling toward earth - until about 1000 feet from impact. The change is abrupt, from a 'static' environment to a world rushing up at alarming speed. You have less than 30 second to the ground - roughly 5% of the total jump. The problem is, if you get to 1000 ft and haven't pulled the chute, chances are you won't survive."

Nerve fetes Marvell's classic To His Coy Mistress: http://www.nervemag.com/JacksNaughtyBits/Marvell/

For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

Can you measure the value of a web company by how many sites link to it? http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/98/111440.html

A report in Dow Jones Newswires said Amazon.com's bond offering is causing analysts to re-think what they learned in business school when it comes to Internet-based companies. The news wire said that analysts must think of tangible assets in a different light, because companies like Amazon.com have their assets in the "virtual realm."

Yet another approach to interactive TV: http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/98/111423.html

Interactivity will come into play through the use of remote control "clickers." You'll be able to "press 1" on your remote to receive a five-day forecast, and "press 2" for more information on a particular topic, such as temperature, for instance.

Cultures collide as a Turkish village gets its first TV: http://www.feedmag.com/html/feedline/98.05adams/98.05adams_master.html

Hayriye flips to the music station, and the screen opens on a half-clad vamp crawling across a long table laid out with a feast, red wine dripping from the corners of her mouth. A long-haired, muscular man at the end of the table beckons the woman onto his lap. Bahar, who has finally come down from the roof of the shed to join her family, pulls her head scarf over her face and yelps like a wounded animal. Abdul says something and Hayriye changes the channel.

Some interesting replies to the AlertBox on internationalising the Web (20 Apr below): http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980419_comments.html

Including this link to 126 ways to make money off your website, via referrals: http://www.markwelch.com/bannerad/baf_commission.htm

107. WebCards Promises $1 for each registration asking for free samples. Be wary: this sounds "too good to be true" to me.

Danny Yee reviews a punctuated-equilibrium approach to language evolution: http://www.anatomy.usyd.edu.au/danny/book-reviews/h/Rise_Fall.html

He criticises the proposed Niger-Congo language family, glances at the problems of lexicostatistics and glottochronology, and demolishes the follies of Nostratic and other such super-families. (Here he also explores the consequences of the isolating- agglutinative- fusional cycle for discerning genetic relationships.)

(Whew!)

This Day in Joyce History: In 1902, George Joyce (brother) died, used by James in 1904 in "Stephen Hero" for the death of Isobel.

Somebody who wants information to be free: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/078699.htm

The issue, according to Malamud, is that federal agencies have been dragging their heels in an area that is vital to commerce and technology innovation. He said that although IBM has put patent data online, its system is cumbersome and not widely used by competitors who fear that their searches might tip off IBM to their current research.

Chelsea Clinton's boyfriend's webpage: http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~mdpierce/

Are philosophers qualified to offer psychotherapy? [Deja URL]

...a new movement to promote doctoral-level and master's-level philosophers as personal and corporate counselors has raised new quality-of-care issues for psychiatry and the traditional allied mental health professions. The issue gained prominence when New York State Assemblyman Ruben Diaz Jr., a Bronx Democrat, introduced legislation last month to authorize licensure of philosopher therapists.

Top-paid CEOs, according to Fortune: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/068722.htm

        Rank  Company          Chief Executive        Compensation
        1    Travelers Group       Sanford Weill       $228 million
        2    Conseco               Stephen Hilbert     $125 million
        3    HealthSouth           Richard Scrushy     $107 million
        4    Occidental Petroleum  Ray Irani           $105 million
        5    AlliedSignal          Lawrence Bossidy     $58 million
        6    Intel                 Andrew Grove         $53 million
        7    HBO & Co.             Charles McCall       $52 million
        8    Monsanto              Robert Shapiro       $52 million
        9    Morgan Stanley, DW    Philip Purcell       $48 million
        10   Cendant               Henry Silverman      $44 million
        11   General Electric      John Welch Jr.       $41 million
        12   American Express      Harvey Golub         $38 million
        13   Health Management     William Schoen       $32 million
        14   Bristol-Myers Squibb  Charles Heimbold Jr. $29 million
        15   Pfizer                William Steere Jr.   $29 million
        16   America Online        Stephen Case         $27 million
        17   Robert Half Intl      Harold Messmer Jr.   $25 million
        18   Providian Financial   Shailesh Mehta       $24 million
        19   Merrill Lynch         David Komansky       $24 million
        20   Bear Stearns Cos      James Cayne          $23 million
        21   Wells Fargo           Paul Hazen           $23 million
        22   Network Associates    William Larson       $23 million
        23   Colgate-Palmolive     Reuben Mark          $22 million
        24   Aflac                 Daniel Amos          $22 million
        25   American Home Prod    John Stafford        $21 million

A fascinating unhinged mind: [Deja profile]

In his system, two trees separated by a brook are selected as the conduit for the passage of digital data from consumer to government computer. It is precisely his mindprint that allows this. Models of the trees are made through the access that his regression gives to them, and from his link to the human race through his mental common denominator with it, data can then pass from consumer, through the model of his mind, through the trees, and into computers.

Robert Parry's muckraking Consortium has extended its free-access period: http://www.delve.com/consort.html

        The username will be: consort
        The May password will be: conx987

New City Times looks at the new drugwar on tobacco: http://www.zolatimes.com/V2.14/tobacco.html

This tactic -- prohibitive taxes designed to discourage consumption, has been adopted before -- most notably in Germany and Canada. In both nations, a lucrative black market materialized almost instantly. In Germany, forty "tobacco-related" murders were recorded in the first year of the tax. Both nations quickly abandoned the experiment.

Sig quote of the week:

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -- Voltaire

Neurophysiology looks at meditation: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/papers/19980502-15.html

In the experiments Newberg invited Tibetan Buddhists to his laboratory and set them up with their rugs, cushions and prayer wheels. Before they began to meditate, an intravenous tube was inserted so that a radioactive isotope could be injected as they were resting and again - after they pulled on a string in a prearranged signal - as they reached a peak meditative state.

Chris Johnson is a hi-tech watch enthusiast, including the Ruputer, the Timex DataLink, and a series of smartcard Swatches: http://www.geocities.com/FashionAvenue/5967/watcht.htm

This Day in Joyce History: In 1904, there was a whirlwind in Dublin. In 1918, the fight with Carr over who'd pay for his costume took place. In 1930, ALP was published in book form.

Ana shows her plumage

New Risks Digest offers the usual smorgasbord of screw-ups: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/19.71.html

New Science News explores whether dieting is healthy

Her pain is our gain: a nice profile of Garbage's Shirley Manson: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/papers/19980430-08.html

Manson looks in the mirror and sees "a bloodhound, a fish, with big, baggy eyes. That's what people used to say to me. I was told I was ugly from the time I started secondary school, and I still see everything people used to freak out about."

...a woman who was too self-conscious to go shopping alone till she was 28.

New The Nation fetes "Love and Rockets": http://www.thenation.com/issue/980518/0518mark.htm

Consider Luba, the main character in Gilbert Hernandez's saga of the fictional Central American village of Palomar. Certainly she is one of the most complex figures in recent American fiction -- daughter of an Indian field hand, onetime trophy wife of a nightclub owner with gangster ties and mother of seven children by five different fathers, she rises from bathhouse owner to mayor of Palomar.

And from "the democratic wing of the Democratic Party", Paul Wellstone may run against Gore: http://www.thenation.com/issue/980518/0518conn.htm

The Language Construction Kit (for artificial languages) looks cool: http://www.tezcat.com/~markrose/kit.html

Bald Eagle Cam shows a 3-wk old eaglet in its nest, live: http://www.nu.com/eagles/eagles.htm

Joyce Maynard improvises a memoir on xmas-gift magic: http://www.joycemaynard.com/wwwboard/messages/21491.html

I bought the cars and games and dolls, but I always wanted there to be something under the tree that looked as if it had truly been conjured up by elves. A MAGIC present. Every year, there would be something like that. A wonderful doll house, or a whole wardrobe of handmade clothes, or a little puppet theater, or a real wooden fort....

From the twisted mind of Kibo: (ark)

...The Harvard Bathroom Library, where they have one of every bathroom ever built.

New Boardwatch traces the evolution of net backbones, identifies the worst bottleneck, and proposes leveraging new guidelines via the WorldCom-MCI merger: http://www.boardwatch.com/mag/98/may/bwm1.html

The common knowledge that you can reach any point on the Internet from any other point has, unfortunately, never held true for more than a day or two at a time.

If voice, fax, and ultimately video are to move onto IP networks, it does not make sense to run all that traffic through four rooms in the United States (or am I alone in thinking this is madness?).

Fortunately or unfortunately, the merger question provides us a unique moment in time - a huge opportunity. It's a big merger, with big players. If it were "held hostage" to a new peering policy that guarantees a competitive Internet, then once that is resolved, the merger has no teeth to bite the rest of us...

...after noting some superb scores on our backbone performance indexes by SAVVIS, I've become a believer. They have, if nothing else, shown one way toward scaleable performance - an expensive way at this point, but a way.

And a comparison of Win95 shareware 'search bots': http://www.boardwatch.com/mag/98/may/bwm39.html

"We have some pretty neat graphics we have done which end up getting stolen and put on other sites," T.J. said. "We always name our file with odd names-like mainlogo204c4.jpg. A quick search with WT shows us every page on the Net using those graphics."

(Heh. You wish...)

(A record-setting day-of-boredom!)

A UK script-reader rattles off the ten new basic cliche-plots: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/papers/19980430-06.html

Dept. of robot wisdom: a book review on "Affective Computing": http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/digicult/dc980429.htm

...Picard sees connecting to our "affective bits" as a way of honoring rather than mocking our humanity. As her personal Web pages attest, Picard is a practicing Christian, and her faith plays no small role in her involvement with affective computing.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1769, the Duke of Wellington was born. In 1895, Wilde's first trial ended in a hung jury. In 1904, the real Keogh vs Garry boxing match took place. In 1918, Joyce's English Players presented "The Importance of Being Earnest" in Zurich.

Savvy move: an official MUD for Xena: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/reviews/1998/04/30review2.html

With a base of more than 50,000 subscribers (who collectively log roughly 2 million hours of gameplay a month), Simutronics was the logical choice for Universal when it decided to create a Xena and Hercules game.

A great midwestern novelist, Wright Morris-- who illustrated his novels with his photos-- has died at 88. Here's an old appreciation: http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/yale_journal_of_criticism/9.1trachtenberg.html

...there are beds with a single image, over-exposed. There's an etched clarity about them, like a clean daguerreotype, and you know in your heart that was how the man really looked. There's a question in your mind if any other man, any other human being, could lie in that bed and belong in it. One might as well try and wear the old man's clothes.

"These objects, these artifacts," he told the interviewer, "are structured with emotion, with implication, toward which I am peculiarly responsive. I see many of them as secular icons. They have a holy meaning they seek to give out."

Between wearing something in and wearing it out the line is as vague as the receding horizon, and as hard to account for as the missing hairs of a brush.

Nearly anybody would say you look like a man who grew up around here -- but I think I'd say what there is around here grew up in you. What I'm saying is that you're the one that's inhabited.

NO!!! They already killed that cow (below, today) that made its own rules! http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/021328.htm

Van Deventer confirmed that his cow Superstar, a black and white Friesian Holstein, died Tuesday, a week after falling ill following an experiment by scientists to take skin samples from under her tail.

New New Scientist includes ticklish, giggling rats: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980502/nlaugh.html

"We'd be surprised if rats have a sense of humour, but they clearly have a sense of fun," he says.

And horrible statistics about humans eating primate 'bushmeat': http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980502/nfocus.html

And they link to Seiko's 102-by-62-pixel wristwatch-computer page: http://www.seiko.com/Ruputer.html

Some gorgeous art-nudes at Nerve: [multipage, may require passwd] http://www.nervemag.com/Chiocca/

Cool features and annoying bugs in the lo-tech Opera browser: http://www.sjmercury.com/business/tech/docs/021696.htm [SB]

A reflective interview with Spike Lee: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/18dauphin.shtml

With his 1986 debut, She's Gotta Have It, Lee helped inspire and solidify a number of trends that are still doing good box office -- mental and otherwise -- 12 years later: a commercially viable independent cinema, an aggressive rhetoric of black filmmaking as political or public good, a guerrilla-warfare take on indie movies where any unknown with a few dollars and a dream can envision leaping into the national consciousness, and an artist-as-brand-name philosophy where black filmmakers want to scale not only the heights of their own profession but also the worlds of ready-to-wear, record production, and advertising.

And reflections on Oscar Wilde's symbolic value: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/columns/18goldstein.shtml

It would be a tragedy, indeed, if the Oscar boom turned the real man into a tchotchke of nobility.

This Internet 'new-book shelf' adds a dozen new titles daily: [150k] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/booknew.html

Including a 1912 volume on the Titanic disaster: [multipage] http://www.mtroyal.ab.ca/gaslight/titanic.htm

CHAPTER XV. BOY'S DESPERATE FIGHT FOR LIFE. Plunged Into Icy Sea -- Did Not See Berg -- Parted From Parents -- Saw Many jump Overboard - Leaped Into Ocean -- Eight Year Old Boy's Narrative -- Was "Very Quiet After He Was In Boat" -- Another Lad Tells How He Saw His Uncle die

On alt.folklore.computers, Ed Rice explains why details from the 50s are still sharp in people's minds: [Deja URL]

Third, as has been mentioned, the manuals were terrific and they were readily available and a lot of us slept with them under our pillows. Well, I did, anyway. Fourth, it was all reasonably simple and logical, given the basic engineering one had to work with and the basic electronics of the day.

Tommy the Terrorist on chi.politics: [Deja URL]

...I was not saying the communist alternative was the best; simply pointing out that it's a natural reaction to the dictatorship format of the corporation. Given a choice between the dictatorship of the boss and the dictatorship of the worker, most workers would have to be pretty dumb to pick the boss.

Cow produces six times average milk: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/070163.htm

The vet said to me "This cow is making its own rules."

A voice that's consoled me greatly, in the last six years: http://www.davebarb.demon.co.uk/dsbgcds.html

Matt McIrvin on a.r.k:

This is reminiscent of an essay by Stanley Fish called "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," about why academics drive Volvos: they want to drive a moderately upscale, luxurious car without appearing to want one. I read it in a used book store and didn't buy the book because I don't want to appear to want essays by somebody named "Stanley Fish."

A funny rant about media hype over Hollywood moguls: http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/poni/1998/04/29poni.html

Isn't it a far more damning comment on America's values that we can't even look at the movies anymore without fixating on shareholder return and ROI?

Remember when the comic "B.C." was sort of hip? Now it's violently reactionary: http://www.creators.com/comics/compage/bc/bc41998.gif (CounterSpin)

I'm jealous! A city of 5000 permanent residents (?!?) supports two vital daily papers: http://www.newslink.org/ajrwizdaapr98.html

CJR has posted a superb long 1981 profile of conservative moneybags Scaife-- so it's not tainted by the current hothouse of hype: http://www.cjr.org/html/81-07-08-scaife.html

...he has increasingly turned his attention from journalism to other, more ambitious efforts to shape public opinion, in the form of $100 million or so in grants from Scaife charities to conservative, particularly New Right, causes. These efforts have been dramatically successful. Indeed, Scaife could claim to have done more than any other individual in the past five or six years to influence the way in which Americans think about their country and the world.

A handsome man in the blond, beefy style one associates with southwestern ranchers or oil millionaires, the forty-eight-year-old Scaife dresses like a Wall Street executive. His astonishingly blue eyes are his most striking feature. A friend from an early age of J. Edgar Hoover [yikes!] and long-time admirer of Barry Goldwater, Scaife is said by those who know him to be fascinated by military and intelligence matters.

Scaife abruptly closed down Forum in 1975, shortly before Time Out, a British weekly, published a purported 1968 CIA memorandum, addressed to then-director Richard Helms, which described Forum as a CIA-sponsored operation providing "a significant means to counter Communist propaganda."

"Ten years ago the liberals kind of had a copyright on organizations outside of government," says Leon Reed, an aide on defense matters to Senator William Proxmire. "At some point the Right realized that all of the things like shareholder resolutions and testifying before Congress can be used by anyone."

"They always wanted me to tell them about how things work at CBS," Mair recalls. "They seemed fascinated by the media and loved to hear all the gossip. But, at the same time, they had a conspiratorial view of how the media work."

At the bottom of the stairs, the following exchange occurred: "Mr. Scaife, could you explain why you give so much money to the New Right?" "You f___ing Communist c___, get out of here."

New "NY Review of Books" includes a very long study of translating Kafka's Castle: [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998051414R

New Lingua Franca includes a neat theory about the origins of reading silently: http://www.linguafranca.com/9804/ip.html

In his provocative new book, "Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading" (Stanford), Saenger argues that the practice of transcribing Greek and Latin manuscripts without spaces, or in scriptura continua, made reading silently a mind-bogglingly difficult task.

In a classic 1968 article, "Silent Reading in Antiquity," Bernard Knox wondered sarcastically, "Are we really to imagine that Aristarchus read aloud all the manuscripts of Homer he used for his edition?"

M. Otis Beard on a.r.k:

About a month ago, I went shopping with my insane Taiwanese girlfriend, Communist Spice. As is my wont, we were methodically cruising every aisle in the store. When we entered the pet aisle by mistake (we have no pets) she stopped dead in her tracks. Picking up a can with a picture of a cat on the label, she held it out for me to see. "You are eat this in you country? We not eat cat in Taiwan."

For their feature on strippers, the new Village Voice had their dance critic do an informal history of nudity in modern dance: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/dance/18jowitt.shtml

Not a single spectator, choreographer Wendy Perron remembers, walked out of a 1971 loft performance in which Barbara Dilley, wearing only wreaths of flowers around her head, waist, wrists, and ankles, spun within a circle of lit candles for almost an hour.

And they have a nice, muted appreciation of Tori Amos: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/music/18weisbard.shtml

But even a pavement pounder would have a hard time denying the depth of her frivolity.

And reports on interactive sculpture, etc: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/cyber/18bunn.shtml

A nicely done museum of teletype-style ascii-art from the 60s: [lots of thumbnail gifs, mild nudity] http://www.threedee.com/jcm/aaa/index.html

A long scenario for 2003, predicting Microsoft's breakup in a world of modularized software, includes this tantalizing tidbit: http://future.sri.com/bip/ScanTOC/AM-S2133.html [YMMV]

...even a small-scale but pointed palace revolt among the Microsoft Internet group that, though officially unreported, became the best-known corporate secret on the Web.

A promising archive: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting: http://www.fair.org/extra/extra-highlight.htm

Including this on biased coverage of the CIA's 1997 birthday: http://www.fair.org/extra/9711/cia.html

Nor did USA Today's lengthy story (9/18/97) quote any sources critical of the CIA. In the absence of balancing sources, its quotes from CIA boosters amount to disinformation, as in this description of the CIA-orchestrated coup in Chile in 1973: "Ray Warren, 76, from Maryland's Eastern Shore, also didn't lack for excitement. He headed operations in Chile when leftist Salvador Allende was elected president. Warren says the CIA 'helped keep the democratic opposition alive.' Allende was overthrown by the Chilean military in 1973, a coup that ushered in 16 years of right-wing dictatorship." If you didn't know the history of Chile (or the CIA's politics), you might conclude from this passage that the CIA was defending the elected government and fighting the dictatorship.

And documenting incredible anti-union press bias in coverage of Ron Carey: http://www.fair.org/extra/9803/carey.html

And concisely countering the media whitewash, tallying the many arguments against food irradiation: http://www.fair.org/extra/9803/irradiation.html

Yet Colby told FAIR's CounterSpin radio program (12/12/97) that he gave the [NY] Times reporter a two-page list of scientists who have reservations about food irradiation. Kolata "was so antagonistic, I had to stop the interview several times," claimed Colby.

And some revealing caveats about Americans-are-getting-dumber statistics: http://www.fair.org/extra/9801/schoolhouse-crock.html

The Guardian has a fun section of trivia questions answered by readers: [multipage] http://nq.guardian.co.uk/

Could a Roman ride a horse in a toga without looking undignified? Or did the they have special riding clothes?

For riding, a short tunic was usually worn along with a pair of woollen or leather half breaches to protect against chafing.

Last night on AOL, Koko proved to be a gorilla of few words: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/007250.htm

"Lips," Koko said, using her codeword for woman. "Koko loves lips."

This Day in Joyce History: In 1907, James lectured in Trieste on "Island of Saints and Sages". In 1930, John Sullivan debuted in Dublin (arranged by James).

Camille Paglia takes yet another bold stand (or three): [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/pagl/1998/04/28pagl.html

My libertarian position is that all people, gay or straight, should be free to pursue any brand and degree of consensual sex, as they see fit. But I'm getting sick and tired of the sentimental, feel-good, liberal propaganda that is concealing and denying the blatant, Nero-era decadence of so many gay men's lives, where compulsive, tunnel-vision promiscuity has become institutionalized.

[Seinfeld's] George and Kramer characters (played by Jason Alexander and Michael Richards) are so physically repellent that I find the show literally impossible to watch.

That reverse-engineering law (15 Apr below) would be far worse than I realised: http://www.badsoftware.com/ali.html (gnu.announce)

- Prohibition against publishing detailed criticisms of the software.
- Prohibition against reverse engineering.
- Prohibition against decompiling the software.
- Prohibition (via the ban of reverse engineering) against developing products that are interoperable with this one.
- Restrictions on the nature or purposes of use of the product. - Restrictions against competition.
- Publisher has choice of law (entirely unrestricted to whatever state or country the publisher chooses)
- Publisher has choice of forum (the publisher can choose that you have to sue them in Nigeria).

Seen on alt.fan.unabomber:

"The number of people who share a commitment to ecological sustainability, alternative health, gender equality, the renewal of family and community relationships, and spiritual growth... is far greater than most of us dare imagine... Sociologist Paul Ray estimates that this group... comprises roughly 24 percent of the US adult population. One of our defining characteristics, however, is our belief that few other share our values...." UTNE READER, May-June '98, Page 12

Amazon acquires IMDB (brilliant movie database): http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/98/111188.html

YAY! Michael Moore sitcom pilot:

Chris Elliott (Get A Life, David Letterman, Cabin Boy), Gail O'Grady (NYPD Blue), and Alexandra Wentworth have joined Jim Belushi in the pilot of BETTER DAYS, a possible CBS sitcom created by Michael Moore (Roger and Me, TV Nation, The Big One) about a town where everyone is unemployed.

A curious concidence may imply Catch 22 was plagiarised: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/080605.htm

According to the articles, the similarities involve like scenes and descriptions, such as an image of a wounded pilot wrapped in a white body cast, a drunken party that ends in gunfire and the rape of an Italian woman.

Disgruntled pranksters hack their employers' networks: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/055015.htm

The prankster tape recorded the sound of a ringing phone, then programmed it into the computer network so that the ring rotated from the speakers of one computer to another.

Witty new evidence Neanderthals had speech: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/085389.htm

It occurred to the scientists that the size of the hypoglossal canal might serve as an index of the vocal abilities of modern and early humans. The wider the canal, they assumed, the more nerve fibers there could be to control the tongue muscles.

(I'm reading de Waal's bonobo book, which says bonobos have much richer speech behavior than chimps.)

Feed blames Ganz-Mandel for a particular strain of Hollywood hypocrisy: [good side-links] http://www.feedmag.com/html/filter/98.04auburn/98.04auburn_master.html

Films like Houseguest, Nine Months, and Father of the Bride are just a few examples of what now constitutes a genre unto itself, much the way Quentin Tarantino has spawned a tiresome industry of imitators.

The Martin Luther King of Guatemala was assassinated yesterday. Lehrer gave it 30 seconds of his 5 minute recap, but Peter Jennings said not a word: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/042329.htm (Pacifica gave it 7 mins out of 30.)

The report [he'd] issued Friday, based on 6,000 interviews with survivors, blamed the army and so-called civilian self defense patrols for about 80 percent of the 150,000 deaths and 50,000 disappearances in the civil war, which lasted from 1961 to 1996.

Kibo on a.r.k:

I'm so rich my bathroom flushes with Orbitz.

I didn't follow the Jovanovic cybersex trial, but if this article is right, he got seriously screwed: http://www.nypost.com/news/1279.htm

In a fine new The Nation, Chris Hitchens fetes nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu: http://www.thenation.com/issue/980511/0511hitch.htm

It was a treaty between Israel and Norway on the supply of heavy water that was unilaterally violated by Israel when it diverted the material from the promised "peaceful use." (It also pooled its nuclear secrets with the apartheid regime in South Africa, tested a nuclear warhead in the South Atlantic and between 1964 and 1965 stole hundreds of pounds of enriched uranium from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation [NUMEC] in Apollo, Pennsylvania. This coup was followed by the November 1968 Israeli hijacking of a Liberian-registered vessel, the Scheersberg A, which carried 200 tons of uranium ore. "Internal affair," indeed.)

And a moving book review about the early civil rights movement: http://www.thenation.com/issue/980511/0511ehre.htm

On that winter day, February 13, 1960, there was something quite striking about the sight of 124 young people, almost all of them black, all of them well dressed, leaving a black church in downtown Nashville and walking through the streets in the most orderly manner imaginable and going to a number of the city's downtown dime and department stores and quietly taking their places at the luncheon counters. This was a time before "the movement," before "sitting in" had become a well-rehearsed political art form -- a time when a black person taking a seat at Woolworth's was, from a white perspective, committing either a ludicrous gaffe or a crime punishable by jail and beatings. Nor were these the children of seasoned radicals who had encouraged risk-taking -- but of sharecroppers, domestics and anxious middling-level black professionals, most of whom were horrified that their sons and daughters had stepped so far out of line.

And a belated rave for the Communist Manifesto: http://www.thenation.com/issue/980511/0511berm.htm

People who were Communists didn't seem to know the book any better than people who were not. (At first this amazed me; later I saw it was no accident. Classical Communist education was Talmudic, based on a study of commentaries, with an underlying suspicion of sacred primary texts. Among Orthodox Jews, the Bible is a sort of adult movie -- a yeshiva-bucher is exposed to it only after years of Talmudic training, to insure that he will respond in orthodox ways ...)

Stockholm (AFP):

Stanley Kubrick has finally lost patience with Jennifer Jason Leigh, replacing her with a Swedish actress for final shooting of his "Eyes Wide Shut" thriller. According to Sweden's TT news agency, he has asked Marie Richardson to take Leigh's role because the American actress was busy working on another project in Canada.

Scientology wars take to the streets in Washington state: http://www.factnet.org/Scientology/cruisekidmanbacklash.html

Alex "Lupus Yonderboy" Suter on a.r.k:

I prefer Red Tick Beer to Duff. It's just the right mix of hopps, barley, and something I can't quite put my finger on...

Salon has two excellent pieces on email romance: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/04/cov_27feature.html

Face-to-face we'd have ripped each other to emotional shreds, but the distance of e-mail -- in both time and space -- enabled us to assess our feelings and communicate them clearly and politely. In the long run, it drew us closer.

Of course, all human interaction involves some self-editing -- whether it's the way you style your hair, plastic surgery or what you choose to say and hide in conversation. Getting to know someone primarily over e-mail simply leaves more room for such self-invention.

Gwinnell actually recommends the Internet as a battleground for some couples.

And: [multipage book-excerpt] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/books/1998/04/cov_27books.html

How could I be in so deep so fast, without any physical contact? Without even seeing what he looked like? Because from the moment I logged on and the words I longed to hear scrolled across my screen -- smart, funny, doctor, English, top -- I started to assemble my perfect lover. It happened subconsciously, against my better judgment.

I found myself confessing the most private truths about love, death, sex, religion, my family -- all in the first 24 hours.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1882, Shotover won the 2000 Guineas at Newmarket. In 1906, James refused to bowdlerise Dubliners. In 1985, Kidd and Gabler faced off in NYC.

A new City Times includes a very long expose on an especially medieval branch of the prisons-for-profit scam, by DC Dave: http://www.zolatimes.com/v2.13/FPI.html

And the latest Jack Parsons chapter is all about Crowley and L Ron: http://www.zolatimes.com/V2.13/Jpar7.html

And some griping about the 1913 machinations creating the IRS: http://www.zolatimes.com/V2.13/Hulldisa.html

If XML is as incompatible with HTML as this page implies, then its significance seems horribly shrunken, to me: http://www.techsoln.com/frontier/blox/misc/html.html [SN]

A knowitall called the Cyberchef answers a zillion questions about cooking procedures: http://www.foodtv.com/pcychef.htm

When you chop or slice an onion, you release a gas, composed of sulfuric compounds, that reacts with the water in your eyes to form sulfuric acid.... In addition to your suggestion of rinsing the onions as you cut them (cutting them under water could prove impractical and even dangerous) you can also try freezing the onion for 20 minutes before chopping it or wearing safety goggles, available in any hardware store.

The ethics of undeleting files from a 2ndhand pc: http://www.sjmercury.com/columnists/cassidy/docs/mc042698.htm [SN]

Here's the transcript of Clinton's deposition on Willey, Lewinsky, Jones, Flowers, and several Jane Doe's, but it's mostly boring: http://whatshotin.com/Features/features174clintondeposition.shtml

Q. Do you remember giving her an item that had been purchased from The Black Dog store at Martha's Vineyard?

A. I do remember that, because when I went on vacation, Betty said that, asked me if I was going to bring some stuff back from The Black Dog, and she said Monica loved, liked that stuff and would like to have a a piece of it, and I did a lot of Christmas shopping from The Black Dog, and I bought a lot of things for a lot of people, and I gave Betty a couple of the pieces, and she gave I think something to Monica and something to some of the other girls who worked in the office.

...I wasn't paranoid like this until things like this occurred.

A mailinglist about social dynamics on mailinglists offers an impressively honest self-history: http://rdz.stjohns.edu/lists/netdynam/ndhistry.htm

14. At the end of March the founder commits suicide, with ensuing emotional turbulence on the list and change of listowner (to James).

And their glossary: http://rdz.stjohns.edu/lists/netdynam/ndgloss.htm

In the 'Tracy waltz' a newbie who shows signs of being willing to expose intimate feelings on-line (so far always female) is encouraged (generally by male oldbies) to make increasingly longer and more self-revelatory posts until the discrepancy between the overall tone of the list and the by-now-embarrassingly personal posts of the current 'Tracy' becomes clear even to her and she unsubs or subsides to lurker/semi-lurker status expressing a sense of having been (mis)used.

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