Robot Wisdom WebLog Jul98waxing

Robot Wisdom WebLog for July 1998 (waxing)

Thu, Jul 9, 1998 (Full Moon at 11:02 CDT)
This Day in Joyce History: In 1911, sister Eva left the Joyces' Trieste apartment.
TV 2nite: QT-scripted True Romance (UPN)
A privately funded eugenics program: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/mwt/feature/1998/07/cov_10feature2.html

And so it went until Barbara and Smitty Harris had adopted Destiny, Isiah, Taylor and Brandon -- babies No. 5, 6, 7 and 8 from the same mother.
(I've been reading Salon at night, and I think I've maybe been short-changing it because I'm worn out...)

Major junk science? Drug-war budget sim: http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/9807.Sparrow.drug.html

Given a dollar amount, $100 million for example, the program runs 32 different funding schemes and comes up with the one that results in the least amount of cocaine getting out of the three countries over a 10-year period.

Last year's Rainbow left good karma behind: http://www.oregonian.com/todaysnews/9807/st070906.html

"They had a genuine, sincere commitment to leaving the prairie better than they found it," said Terry Holtzapple, part of a team of Forest Service personnel who worked with the family.
Mysteries of the aye-aye: http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/Research/PCAYEART.HTM

The aye-aye's eerie appearance -- which led the Duke primatologists to bestow spooky names such as Nosferatu, Poe and Morticia on the animals -- also works against its survival in its homeland of Madagascar. Superstitious Malagasy believe that if an aye-aye points its finger at them, they're doomed to die, so they kill the animals on sight when they encounter them during the day.
To understand perhaps the biggest mystery -- how aye-ayes use their tapping to locate food -- Duke psychology professor Carl Erickson has spent the last seven years experimentally challenging the animals to perform feats of detection. [Pic source]

New The Nation includes a long, unsatisfying attempt to reconcile academic philosophy and politics: http://www.thenation.com/issue/980727/0727ROMA.HTM

Instead of theories, we need "sentimental education" of the sort movies, journalism and novels provide, which will expand the set of "people like us." In morality, as elsewhere, we make progress, Rorty insists, by becoming bold narrators and Romantic inventors of better vocabularies.
Rorty's vision of philosophy and art is nakedly Darwinian: Let a thousand narratives bloom, and those that survive will survive (not necessarily the fittest, since there's nothing to fit except differing purposes).
We should notice that talking about the "real" has been "more trouble than it was worth." We should "dissolve rather than solve the problem of freedom and determinism." We should dump such mental faculties as "thought" and "sensation." We should "just stop trying to write books called A History of Philosophy."

Top Ten overrated web technologies: http://builder.com/Business/Paul/070898/index.html [Slashdot]

10: Java on the browser
9: Plug-ins
8: Push
7: Video on the Web
6: Open source
5: VRML
4: Surfing the Web without a computer
3: The need for speed [less Yahoo-like design]
2: Bandwidth [more]
1: Portals

Trivializing torture: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/nation/070998/nation8_12453_noframes.html

All he did was talk too much, but that was enough for a judge in Los Angeles to order a defendant zapped with a 50,000-volt jolt of electricity, it was reported Thursday.

Feed's NYC-media-savvy eulogy for Tina Brown's New Yorker: http://www.feedmag.com/html/feeddaily/98.07.09feeddaily_master.html
(I rarely saw it, so if Kurt Andersen of Spy gets the job, I'll be thrilled.)

New Squirrel Nut Zippers (1 Jan below) video: [decent RealVid] http://www.mammoth.com/special/snz/suits.html

Dream: I get my teeth examined by Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets, who's a dentist in his spare time.

The Downsizing King takes a great fall: http://www.foxnews.com/js_index.sml?content=/news/national/0709/d_ap_0709_111.sml

Dunlap acknowledged making costly marketing blunders late last year with outdoor grills and electric blankets, but he said he wasn't given enough time to consolidate the takeovers of Coleman Co., Signature Brands USA Inc. and First Alert Inc. 10 weeks before his firing.

Sensible design tidies up HTML typos: http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/ [SN]

Missing or mismatched end tags are detected and corrected
End tags in the wrong order are corrected
Fixes problems with heading emphasis
[Etc]

There's a lively weblog at the Hacking-the-Buddha site: http://www.manifestation.com/ [via Share-a-comment above]
And Sabren the Buddha-hacker's bio-page is interesting: http://www.manifestation.com/sabren/

Think of a person you really like. Do you see a picture in your mind? Hear their voice? Or talk to yourself about this person? What feelings do you have in your body? Think of someone you don't like at all. Ask yourself the same questions.
The new HTB column is excellent, too: http://www.manifestation.com/buddha/htb00021.html

Finally, I stood in the meta spot, closed my eyes, and mentally pulled each anchor in. There's a very definite kinesthetic feeling associated with this kind of integration. I don't know how to describe it, but you can try it for yourself. I found myself unconsciously rocking on my heels for a minute or two, and then I opened my eyes.
(Wired was born as an imitation of Mondo 2000, which had been called Reality Hackers at one point. I like the designation 'etext hacker'.)

New Guardian Online includes a great piece on the laws of linking: http://online.guardian.co.uk/theweb/899929375-yemen.html

As it turned out, the issue is not whether you can lawfully link, but how. There are dangers, for instance, if you link to another site in a way that cuts out its advertising, or if you cunningly use frames to associate your own ads with someone else's pages.
And videogame gossip: http://online.guardian.co.uk/computing/899929203-videowatch.html

Virgin's violent fighter, Thrill Kill, looks set for an adult rating despite being toned down after advice from the British Board of Film Censors. The dominatrix character Belladonna will no longer simulate orgasm whenever she kills an opponent.
And a sad case of natural poisons in foreign-aid-financed wells: http://online.guardian.co.uk/science/899988368-poison.html

It now seems incredible that so much poisoned water should have been tapped for drinking under a UN programme to provide safe water.
"When you pump water from deeper underground, you are tapping older water, water which has been in contact with the rocks for longer. So it is more contaminated," says Joshi.

The Kline case from lawyers' POV: [multipage, interesting pullquote format] http://www.callaw.com:80/stories/edt0707.html

"As should be apparent, the purpose of my dissent was primarily to encourage the California Supreme Court to reconsider its opinion in Neary," Kline wrote.
"I think it's the dumbest thing I've ever heard," said Senate President John Burton.
(Neither page mentions UC or the rancher!?!)

More detail on quantum dots: http://www.spie.org/web/oer/november/nov96/quantum.html

The small number of transitions possible within quantum dots, combined with the limited scope for oscillations, means that they will, effectively, jump when and where you want them to.
Though they have not yet demonstrated a multiple wavelength memory, Fujitsu researchers have confirmed that such a device could store data-briefly-at room temperature. Memory retention time was 0.48 ms.
And a dots page with a cute Felix the Cat animated GIF: [multipage] http://fafard2.phy.nrc.ca/

They form in a way similar to how water droplets condense onto your bathroom windows when taking a shower.
They are about 25 nanometers in size.
They emit light (photons) when excited with some light, or with an electrical current.
They are the equivalent of man-made atoms.

I've successfully stuffed 20 authors' names into one Excite NewsTracker template:

blanche mccrary boyd, colin wilson, george v higgins, harold brodkey, iris murdoch, j krishnamurti, joseph mcelroy, julian jaynes, patrick o'brian, peter dickinson, peter redgrove, renata adler, robert anton wilson, robert graves, stephen gaskin, velikovsky, wallace stevens, ward just, william blake, william wharton
(Amazingly, these only turn up one or two hits per day, total. And I may move Blake into a different category because he does much better than the rest.)

I posted these questions to HSX, and the replies have made me throw in the towel already: http://www.the-money.com/wwwboard2/movies/messages/5322.html

Quantum dots??? http://www.sciencedaily.com:80/story.asp?filename=980709090311

By capturing single or small quantities of electrons inside box-like structures known as quantum dots or "artificial atoms," Blick says, researchers can harness and manipulate quantized energies. Pairs of artificial atoms have been coupled to create artificial molecules.

A slightly more detailed piece on cyberwar: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/frompost/july98/cyberwar8.htm

It has considered manipulating cyberspace to disable an enemy air-defense network without firing a shot, shut off electricity and telephone service in major cities, feed false information about troop locations into an adversary's computers and "morph" video images onto foreign television channels.
(On the one hand, this immediately lowers the 'room temperature' on the Net about 20 degrees. On the other hand, it means that the Pentagon will be heavily dependent on good hackers, who are bound to throw a monkey wrench into their old mentality. Picture them scouring hacker documentation on the Net-- something good might rub off!)

Juicy issue of the Obscure Store: [multipage] http://www.obscurestore.com/
Though the Microsoft-portal story is pretty dull: [corrected URL] http://www.seattleweekly.com/archives/07_02_98/romano0702.html
Here's another Seattle Weekly expose, on Boeing PR: http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/media0709/index.html

Griffin crossed over to what's known in the information industry as "the dark side"--from working on behalf of the public uncovering and delivering information about an organization, to parceling out information to the public (and withholding it) on behalf of an organization.

Too-good-to-be-true superconductivity news? http://www.unisci.com/news.htm

Materials engineers at the University at Buffalo have made two discoveries that have enabled carbon-fiber materials to superconduct at room temperature -- discoveries so unexpected that the researchers at first thought they were mistaken.

Altman/Trudeau pilot (17 Jan below) scheduled: http://www.variety.com/article.asp?articleID=1117478281

In addition to the pilot, Fox has ordered six additional scripts for the one-hour drama, which focuses on the office dynamics in a startup Silicon Valley software company. Sources at the net say the skein's pickup chances are high.
('Skein'?)

Chomsky quote: [Deja URL]

"There are only two countries in the world that I know of where the concept of anti-X, X being the name of the country, is taken seriously. One is Stalinist Russia, where anti Sovietism was absolutely the worst crime, you know, the biggest charge against anybody is anti Sovietism. The other is the United States..."

A decent short look at personal-preference agents: [multipage] http://www.freep.com:80/tech/qmuze5.htm

Muze developed a different approach. It leased catalogs of music and books, then hired people like Florey to cross-reference the entries by themes, categories, genres and subgenres. These range from such conventional terms as literary/avant-garde to those Muze itself has coined, like galactic empires and space opera.
"I find that the recommendations generated by Amazon.com in response to purchases I've made on-line are more accurate than these generated by questionnaire responses, however."

Wed, Jul 8, 1998
This Day in Joyce History: In 1912, Nora was in Dublin. In 1920, the Joyces moved to Paris.
TV 2nite: Sam Shepard tribute on PBS (Excellent!)
Pentagon's offensive hacking initiative: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/7/9/10383.html

Among the options said to have been considered are shutting down computerised enemy air defence networks, shutting off power and telephone networks in major cities, feeding false data about troop and weapons deployment into enemy military information networks, and "morphing" television propaganda into foreign broadcasts.

New New Scientist includes a cool look at nano-fluid-mechanics: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980711/features.html

Once he has working pumps and valves, Liepmann plans to build a drug delivery system on a microchip that could give patients smaller doses more often.
In 1920, the Serbo-American scientist Nikola Tesla, inventor of fluorescent lights and power grids based on alternating currents, patented a valve with no moving parts.

Ahem: Measured size of Feed's text-pane for their X-Files story, in my default window: 521 pixels wide by 151 pixels high. (Original Apple ][ resolution: 560 by 192.) http://www.feedmag.com/html/feature/98.07debord/98.07debord_master.html
Celebrities who took LSD when it was legal included Cary Grant and Henry Luce: http://www.laweekly.com/ink/archives/98/32lede-070398-whalen.shtml [OJR/Spike]

"For Anais," says Lambert, "it was a disaster. On LSD the world seemed to her terrifying. This, to me, was extremely interesting, because Anais Nin's life was a high-wire act of lies. She had two husbands - was bigamously married - and neither of them knew about the other. And I think that her whole high-wire act became very naked to her under LSD, and she couldn't take it. She was a creature of such artifice, and then suddenly the artifice was stripped away."

More good stuff from Progressive Review:

Inquiring minds want to know. . . Why the heart attack of Nigerian political disssident Moshood Abiola got such big play in the New York Times and on NPR while a parallel case of a key political figure in this country dying of a heart attack while imprisoned by the government attracted so little interest. Like Abiola, serious questions have been raised about the medical treatment Jim McDougal got prior to his coronary and other circumstances of his death.

A convenient long list of forthcoming films: http://www.casenet.com/movie/moviescan.htm

Who's more censorious, China or Disney? http://www.techweb.com/internet/news/features/1998/07/dbrowser.html [Slashdot]

Disney's browser: Searches list of Disney-recommended sites. But some of these might link to the rest of the Net.
Chinese policy: Can search entire Web. If a site isn't blacklisted yet, it's available.

Sometimes you can't tell the loonies from the keepers: [Kibo on ark]

...The Telepathy Channel, which I watch without a TV.
I have been anything but a clown. Can Ronald McDonald make that claim?
[Address:] St. Jill St. John St.

More on SF's Justice Kline: http://www.sfgate.com:80/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/07/07/MN33059.DTL

The high court drew heavy criticism in 1992 when it approved an unusual settlement between the University of California and a Chico rancher. The university said it would pay the rancher $3 million if he agreed that a $7 million jury award he won against the university be wiped off the books.
The majority of the panel members are Republicans, and the target is a prominent liberal judge, prompting some ethics scholars to question the motives behind the charges.
(It still doesn't tell what the rancher sued them for!)
And here's another that says nothing about the original case: http://www.sacbee.com:80/news/beetoday/newsroom/cap/070798/cap03.html
And one that says almost nothing: http://www.latimes.com:80/CNS_DAYS/980706/t000062343.html

That sort of practice, known as a stipulated reversal, is an unusual one. It has been barred in federal courts by a unanimous 1994 U.S. Supreme Court decision written by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.
Here we go-- the crimes of the UC Regents: http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Union/8225/scandal.html

14. A Chico rancher received a $3 million settlement in a libel suit against U.C. after the university blamed him for the death of 500 of his prize cows. The rancher charged U.C. with deliberately covering up for state and federal officials who had poisoned his cows with pesticide. (S.F. Chronicle Aug. 14, 1992)

Tue, Jul 7, 1998
This Day in Joyce History: In 1903 in Ulysses, baby Boardman was born. In 1927, Pomes Penyeach was published.
        They mouth love's language. Gnash
        The thirteen teeth
        Your lean jaws grin with. Lash
        Your itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh.
        Love's breath in you is stale, worded or sung,
        As sour as cat's breath,
        Harsh of tongue.
TV 2nite: Breathtaking Joni Mitchell performance (Sex Kills) on Letterman.
An archive of 1998 Rainbow media reports: [all familiar, I think] http://home.earthlink.net/~kzirk/scroll/Arizona/arizona.html
The Gannett newspaper chain has a simple strategy for raising profit margins from 15% to 35%-- drive all competing papers out of business: [URL pending] (CounterSpin)

Telecommuting success stories: [Insane Nytsyn URL]

For the last 25 years Zekley eked out a modest living in his small shop in Mendocino that sells rare and exotic musical instruments. Offerings at Lark in the Morning include flutes made of turkey leg bones ($170) and 17th-century monkey grinder organs from Germany than cost as much as $12,000. Three years ago, Zekley began writing the computer program to put his catalog on the Internet. Though the chore was difficult, it has transformed his store into a million-dollar business.

Americans' misconceptions about the Japanese: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/japan/american-misconceptions/index.html

It is not clear to me exactly how much Disney borrowed ideas and images from Tezuka. I think it is entirely possible that much of it was coincidence and the animators used scenes from "Kimba" unconsciously. the Japanese animators were convinced that the similarities were not coincidental, and they sent a letter to Disney requesting some kind of acknowledgement to Tezuka. by Sept 1994, 1126 people (animators and others) had signed the letter.
Male vs. female wage disparity. female wages (as % of male wages, 1990-92): Sweden_90, Norway_87, France_81, Germany_78, UK_70, Belgium_64, Canada_63, USA_59, Japan_51

A great weblog for archeologists: http://web.idirect.com/~atrium/commentarium.html

Wired covers X-Day: http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/13466.html

As videos of the naked baptism circulated and word of the impending X-Day spread via the Internet and other media, dozens more were inspired to attend last year's revelry. This year's celebration attracted nearly 400 "misfits, outcasts, and mutants," from as far as Scotland and Australia.

A demo of the ancient Xerox Star inspires a meditation on simplifying Linux: http://slashdot.org/features/9807070857253.shtml

Today computers are 1000 times faster, have 1000 times more storage (though only 10 times faster I/O), but does it have 1000 times better software? (the audience burst out laughing when one of the presenters facetiously suggested this).

New Village Voice rehabilitates a forgotten 60s visionary: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/28camhi.shtml

"I was in the field surrounded by hundreds of violets. The violets had human faces with uncanny expressions and were talking with one another just like human beings."
And analyses nostalgia movies: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/film/28braunstein.shtml

While tight inserts of toe socks, smiley faces, and bongs may be the cinematic version of cheap humor, they may [also] be the most direct route to the viewer's heartstrings.

New Voice Literary Supplement includes glimpses of eight promising new (mostly-) novelists: [multipage] http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/index-2.html
The long strange trip from Lewis Carroll: http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/155warner.shtml

In A Perfect World, Kincaid notes that Kevin Costner, playing a convict on the lam, even peeks in the underpants of the eight-year-old T. J. Lowther, whom he kidnapped, and gives his approval: "Good size for a boy of your age."
An anti-corporate novel: http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/155moody.shtml

In the past, I've found Richard Powers's novels (The Gold Bug Variations, for example) encumbered by research, too smart for their own good, more concerned with what lies at the margins of a story than with the work of the story itself. But Gain, though impeccably decorated with insight into potash, alkali, and all facts having to do with the history of soap, is anything but cerebral.
Chris Ware's comix are pretty unreadable taken one by one, but the anthologies sound slightly more coherent: http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/155katz.shtml

A mouse named Quimby is hopelessly in love with a cat's severed head but forever compelled to take advantage of his partner's disabled state: when he gets in a foul mood, which is to say frequently, Quimby drags the cat head around on a leash, or gives it a dropkick, or shoots it.
A thesis about sci-fi's wrong turn: http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/155lethem.shtml

What had been a negligible, eccentric publishing niche, permitted to go its own harmless way, was now a potential cash cow. (Remember when Star Trek was resurrected overnight, a moribund TV cult suddenly at the center of popular culture?)
Might a Phil Dick have learned to revise his first drafts instead of flinging them despairingly into the marketplace if The Man in the High Castle had been recognized by the literary critics of 1964? Might another five or 10 fledgling Phil Dicks have appeared shortly thereafter?
The 1973 Nebula Award should have gone to Gravity's Rainbow, the 1977 award to DeLillo's Ratner's Star. Soon after, the notion of science fiction ought to have been gently and lovingly dismantled, and the writers dispersed: children's fantasists here, hardware-fetish thriller writers here, novelizers of films both real and imaginary here.

Headlines the Weekly World News never dreamt of: http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/latest_news/newsid_128000/128044.stm

Kidney Stones Linked to Life on Mars

Why doesn't this report, on a judge's conscientious stand, explain that stand until the 17th paragraph??? http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/045586.htm

Kline, and other critics, have contended the court was allowing well-heeled parties to buy their way out of embarrassing rulings.

More on Io: http://www.sciencedaily.com:80/story.asp?filename=980707073614

"It's harder for dense material to rise through a low-density crust, although this has occurred on Earth's moon. Perhaps some process mixes the crust back into Io's interior, so the crust has a higher density."

Disney dinos: http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/news/980707/1.html
Cost-effective consulting via the Net: http://www.herald.com:80/business/digdocs/000830.htm

Knowledgespace professionals respond to specific queries via electronic mail for $100 hourly.

Dream (after reading Patrick O'Brian??): I'm managing an expensive London menswear shop. The customers are all difficult, complaining and trying to scam us. Some filmmakers push their way in, to shoot a scene (without permission) in the basement. Three toughs are chased out by my assistant, who wields only a penknife.

Mon, Jul 6, 1998
This Day in Joyce History: In 1920, Harriet Weaver admitted to her anonymous benefactions.
No Salon today
Heh: You can get here now via i.am/jorn. (It's free!)

Rainbows capture murderer: http://www.herald.com/keys/digdocs/040070.htm (agr)

The Shantasena don't carry weapons. They apprehended Giebel by surrounding him while he was sitting in a folding chair, then called police.

Dvorak looooooves Outlook Express (not): http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak/jd980706.htm

Did I survive? Well, yes, but the weirdest part is yet to come, and it turns out not to be Microsoft's fault. Next week, the gruesome conclusion of the Tale of Woe.

Weird-looking URLs: easy.to/remember and i.am/kinnison

Angry new Progressive Review

Don't be so chipper about it, Eleanor. That's what dictators do.

Io facts: http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/billa/tnp/io.html

One current theory is that Io's lavas are molten silicate rock. ... Some of the hottest spots on Io reach temperatures of 700 K [430 C] (even 900 K has been reported), though the average is much lower, about 130 K [-140 C].
...the effects of Europa and Ganymede cause it to wobble a bit. This wobbling stretches and bends Io by as much as 100 meters (a 100 meter tide!) and generates heat the same way a coat hanger heats up when bent back and forth.

A great detailed look at Web advertising revenues: http://www.sjmercury.com/business/center/netcon070698.htm [SN]

"We were thinking of buying 10 keywords, to, for instance, tell people that if they were looking to buy a Nirvana record, we'd sell it to them." said Kristin Lieb, executive director of Newbury Comics Interactive. "But the cost meant that was just not a viable method at all. I could never sell enough Nirvana to make that worth it."
"Whatever is driving the valuations on Wall Street, it's certainly not tied to immediate, short-term or even mid-term revenues," Johnson said. "I can only guess that investors are betting on the really, really long term. But at Jupiter, we look at Wall Street and are mystified."
(It's 20-something tech geeks investing their ridiculously inflated salaries by their uneconomic hearts.)

Hollywood's plan to smear Kevin Mitnick: http://olj.usc.edu/sections/departments/98_stories/hacker_070398.htm

The upcoming film will include a scene in which Mitnick is whistling touch tones into a phone receiver in order to make free phone calls (a technical and physical impossibility) and, most unbelievably, a scene in which Mitnick physically assaults Shimomura with a metal garbage can, leaving him "dazed, [with] blood flowing freely from a gash above his ear."

Happy Trails lyrics: http://www.marketwizz.com/captdave/aviation/lyrics.html

Awesome new Io image: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/
(Gore's Triana WholeEarthCam would deliver a pic five times this size. Io is slightly larger than our Moon, and no matter how much that looks like water ice, they say there's no water worth mentioning. Whatever kind of ice it is, I bet it's skateable!)

Craig Shergold still getting mail: http://www.foxnews.com/js_index.sml?content=/news/national/0706/d_ap_0706_21.sml

In 1991, when Virginia billionaire and Metromedia Co. chairman John Kluge heard the boy's story, he flew Shergold to the United States for a new type of operation.
American Graffiti 25th anniversary bash: http://www.variety.com/article.asp?articleID=1117478138

Okay book review of Kingsley Amis on English: http://www.latimes.com:80/CNS_DAYS/980705/t000061866.html

"Honesty is the best policy" lost its wicked sting and turned soft, he laments, with the disappearance of the original meaning of policy as devious calculation.
The Four Corners manhunt reaches day 38: [multipage. local] http://www.denverpost.com:80/news/cort0705.htm

"If they don't like the idea of being arrested, well, I guess we get to play John Wayne," Bendell said, his eyes beaming from beneath his wide cowboy hat.
A random bit of Wallace Stevens: http://www.latimes.com:80/CNS_DAYS/980705/t000061886.html

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green...
Videogame collectors: http://www.sptimes.com:80/Business/70698/Retrogamers_are_the_w.html

Aaron Brooks, whose sister ran a store in Seminole that featured used video games, has a number of rare Atari games, some valued at $300 to $400, and a brand new Rob the Robot from Nintendo, once taken off the market for safety reasons and of exceeding worth to collectors in the know.

Sun, Jul 5, 1998
This paleontology conference sounds like it will make some waves: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/7/6/9906.html

He pointed out that gene frequency analysis in modern populations was capable of showing that in the 12th century Henry II sent Flemish workers to Pembrokeshire to develop the area and keep out the Celts.
From Magritte to Noel Godin (5 Feb below) to the Belgian Underpants Museum: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/7/6/9861.html

Tintin also comes in for a slating. He is pictured doing unmentionable things to his pet dog, Snowy.

Hollywood Stock Exchange: I spent half my $2M stake already. Some advisor claimed starbonds should be bought according to their Yield, so I went with Aiello, Gershon, Hunter, Brando, Madsen, Liotta, and Paul Newman. For movies, I thought the prices looked good on Carpenter's Vampires, Joan of Arc, Eastwood's True Crime, a couple of Drew Barrymores, and the call options on Eyes Wide Shut.

Fascinating Cuban archeology: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/067880.htm

They include several rare duhos, the hammock-shaped wooden stools that Taino shamans squatted on. The fishermen also found idols carved out of a black, heavy wood that are in such good condition that it is possible to see minute detail, like the vertebrae carved along the spine of a male figure. Also on display at the museum are an axe with the stone head still attached and several elaborately carved flat sticks that the Taino used to induce vomiting during purification ceremonies.

Do bicycle seats cause impotence? http://www.nd.edu/~ktrembat/www-bike/BCY/men.bikes.html

"When a man sits on a bicycle seat he's putting his entire body weight on the artery that supplies the penis. It's a nightmarish situation."

Human lab-rats form community: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/health/070598/health15_7412_noframes.html

One issue was dedicated to a 19-year-old Rochester, N.Y., woman who had a heart attack a few hours after she left a research unit where she received a fatal overdose of lidocaine, a local anesthetic. She was being paid $150 for participating in research on the effects of smoking and air pollution.
"I'm definitely no brain slut," said Helms, using a phrase he coined for participants in psychiatric studies, as opposed to lab rats, or guinea pigs, who volunteer for physical research. ... He says he grew tired of the job and now, as a full-time guinea pig, he makes about $15,000 a year.

Rainbow wrap-up, w/pic: http://www.azcentral.com:80/news/0705rainbow.shtml

"You can plant grass, but you never know if it'll take," he said. "The resource damage will last a long time, but we don't know exactly how long. No one has looked at it yet."

A great clarification of the Chiquita fiasco: http://www.cincypost.com/news/chiqu070498.html

The Enquirer's apology says an internal investigation is continuing to determine "whether others involved in the Chiquita articles also engaged in similar misconduct." Because some Enquirer reporters believe that any thorough probe inevitably will point incriminating fingers at the paper's top brass, some cynically describe it as an "O.J. investigation" -- comparing it to O.J. Simpson's claim to be searching for the killer of his wife and a friend.
Chiquita's voice-mail equipment includes an internal tracking device that operates like a caller-ID system, identifying where calls originate, Chiquita officials say. Those records helped officials trace many calls to numbers Chiquita says are linked to Gallagher.

NY Times Rainbow story: [Deja URL]

Down a dusty, rocky trail and through a knot of pine trees, past a naked guy chewing leaves, a fully clothed Christian choir and a retired Jewish pie thrower, is the meadow where the Rainbow Family is holding its 27th annual gathering to party and pray for peace.

Cool: Damon and Affleck making mini-series of People's History: http://www.yahoo.co.uk/headlines/980705/entertainment/899632259-5.html
(I haven't actually read this, but even John Holt recommends it:) http://www.holtgws.com/ilm.htm#PE

Some trends:
Privatising an obsolete uranium-enrichment plant: http://www.nypostonline.com:80/070598/business/3898.htm

Don't touch this one, not even with a radiation-proof robot.
Russian mob hides money in Caribbean: http://www.herald.com:80/americas/digdocs/060881.htm

Caribbean officials are particularly worried by the level of corruption that the super-rich Russians can unleash in the region's nations, many of them tiny islands once ruled as colonies by Great Britain.
The Bridget Jones phenomenon: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-07/05/031l-070598-idx.html

You're not -- like your skeletony American cousin Ally McBeal -- perfectly coiffed.
Clothes-on nudie bars: http://www.accessatlanta.com:80/news/1998/07/04/stripclub.html

"I'd rather be sober and look at naked women," he said, "than drunk and look at clothed women."

Sat, Jul 4, 1998
This Day in Joyce History: In 1849, Jack Joyce (father) was born. In 1887, George Joyce (brother) was born. In 1931, James and Nora were legally wed.
TV 2nite: Unstrung Heroes (ABC); Salon says Duchovny was great on SNL

The Hollywood Stock Exchange is like the Foresight Exchange (18 Jun below), for films and stars only: [multipage] http://www.hsx.com/update/bondlist_All.htm
    Symbol        Name             Last Price   Yield   Today
    HHNTR   (CC)  Holly Hunter        $652.00   36.81%    -24
    HHUNT   (AAA) Helen Hunt         $1915.00    3.13%    -24
    HKEIT   (CC)  Harvey Keitel       $770.00   31.17%      0
    HSTER   (BBB) Howard Stern        $876.00   15.98%    -32
('AAA' reflects Hunt's huge average boxoffice in the last 3 years. Her 'price' is traders guessing how much her future films will make.)

Contrarian of the week: Feed says stop romanticising Tibet: http://www.feedmag.com/html/feedline/98.06kearney/98.06kearney_master.html [HG]

Western fantasies about Tibet could easily translate into hard capital if Tibet were to become, as Donald Lopez, Jr. writes, invoking a 1930s vision of Tibet, "a service society for the white race" that provides the ancient wisdom that the West lost.

A nice analysis by DC Dave of new developments in last year's under-reported murder of an ex-White-House-intern: [Deja URL]

She, by the way, was shot five times.

Wishy-washy Rainbow update, with pic: http://detnews.com:80/1998/nation/9807/04/07040066.htm

"You have to experience it to know what it's all about. It's an experiment in living peacefully together. To have everybody fed, everybody happy, treat everyone's feelings so that they are valuable and important."
Officials say local businesses have removed the handles from their outdoor taps to prevent Rainbows from stealing water.
The most common fashion look is long dreadlocked hair, strings of beads and a flowing dress or skirt. The women are even more elaborately clothed.
The manager of the Safeway in Springerville ... said his grungy customers are some of the nicest people he'd met.
And a better one, with pix: http://www.azcentral.com/news/0704rainbow.shtml

The arrest nearly turned ugly when a crowd surrounded the officers trying to make the arrest.
YAY! The Subbies got an article, too: http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe/globehtml/185/July_5__1998__Apocalypse__nah.htm

SubGeniuses nationwide poured into Sherman, N.Y., last week for an end-of-the-world orgy. On a clothing-optional campground, followers of this Dallas-based church have already indulged in blood wrestling (instead of mud wrestling), mass marriages (one couple, hundreds of ministers), poorly played music, and lots of sex (in preparation for the extraterrestrial nymphs).

Editor & Publisher has a regular column about international Web politics: http://www.mediainfo.com/ephome/news/newshtm/webnews/global.htm

Iran's Expediency Council, comprising senior government officials who advise Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has begun discussing the implications of the Net in Iran.

Recap of Iomega mania: http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/investor/1998/980720/inv.html [OSRR]

I pointed out that Iomega's market value -- then $507 million -- had ballooned to nearly five times that of its rival Syquest, even though Syquest's sales were more than double Iomega's.

Behind the scenes at HotBot: http://www.internetworld.com:80/print/current/infrastructure/19980629-hotbot.html

As with most search engines, traffic spikes can be driven by whatever is on people's minds on a given day. HotBot has had its "Clinton-Lewinsky" spike, its "Seinfeld" spike, and its "Pakistan nuclear bomb" spike, Dwelle said.

Fri, Jul 3, 1998
This Day in Joyce History: In 1932, James smuggled daughter Lucia (25yo) out of a mental hospital.
My search-engines haven't been picking up anything about the Rainbows, so I went looking for AZ papers, and found this report of water-rights wars: http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/1998/070298/news1.html

Nicknamed "Sug" (pronounced "Shug," as in Sugar), she has been dubbed the "Water Bitch" by some attending the Gathering. For attempting to enforce her water rights, she says, she's received death threats.

The other side of the sarin-Tailwind fiasco: [Deja URL]

Dear Golem, My name is April Oliver and I produced the various SOG pieces on CNN. A friend passed on your e-mail postings and I have read them with great interest. Currently, a fairly well orchestrated counterattack on our reporting is underway -- and I am afraid they have decided to make me the target.

How Pressure for Profit Is Perverting Journalism: [multipage] http://www.cjr.org/html/98-07-08-moneylust.html

"OK, the first year I'll cut stuff I probably should have cut earlier anyway. Next year I'll have to reduce the number of editorial pages in every issue. In the third year, for damned sure, it's got to be people that will have to go: editors, writers, fact-checkers, art department staff. Then I'll hit a wall. Sooner or later I will have so cheapened the product that it will just go out of business. That's simple arithmetic."
And talk about pressure: half the respondents in an AP managing editors poll call their jobs "highly stressful." Their median workweek: fifty-two hours. ... Average base pay at papers having 30,000-75,000 circulation: $23,000.
Hewitt is fond of saying that 60 Minutes ruined it for everybody in news, proving as it did that a news program could be a colossal money machine, and perking managers' hopes that comparable riches could be extracted from all news broadcasts.
(My take: Covering gossip is fine; but sociopolitics are just as interesting if you treat them with courage and passion.)

A nicely done historical argument against corporations: http://www.ratical.com/corporations/TCoBeij.html

In hundreds of cases decided in the latter half of the 19th century, judges declared that the corporate rate of return on investments (i.e., profit) was corporate property and, hence, could not be meddled with by citizens or by their elected representatives.

US military finds cost-effective bio-war strategy: [Deja URL]

Basically, this is about military research on letting loose a biological warfare agent using mosquitos or bugs to spread the disease, rather than using an aerosol mist.

Watch for Monica Lewinsky to visit her lawyer: http://www.webdevs.com/monicacam/

New hiding place for viri: [Deja URL]

We've all seen examples already of vendor's own flash upgrades hosing the hardware, in some cases preventing even a subsequent corrective flash or a flash back to the previous ROM. But these are all just accidents. It's the potential for malicious flashrom attacks that scares me.

Looks like the SubGenii are gonna have more fun than the Rainbows this weekend... even if the world does end: [multipage, heavy graphics] http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/fun/devivals/X-Day98/X-Day98.html [NTK]

New York X-Day Plane Tickets: Round Trip or One-Way?!
A cheap hobbycam, in the UK anyway: http://www.reality.demon.co.uk/tyco.htm [NTK]

A local shop recently acquired a large number of these and started selling them at 19.99 UKP, at which point they sold, but as security cameras, not toys!

Safety Boy's post-mortem on yesterday's security alert: http://www.scripting.com/davenet/98/07/wereNotPrepared.html

As an experiment I tried calling their main number to see if they could receive a security alert over the phone, and found that they had a company policy to not give out phone numbers. I could make a reservation, but I couldn't speak with their computer operations people. I said it was an emergency. I asked to speak to their president, but the request was refused.

50s polio-vaccine time-bomb? http://www.ioa.com/~dragonfly/vaccines.html

People who lived in Massachusetts and Illinois who received identified lot numbers of the contaminated vaccine administered in the 1950s are now demonstrating ten times the rate of the osteosarcoma bone tumors as those who received vaccine free of the SV-40 contaminate in other parts of the country.

Doug Thomas writes clear columns explaining hackers to non-hackers: http://olj.usc.edu/sections/departments/hacker.htm

But Lamprecht was not only banned from the Internet; he has also been prohibited from serving as a "computer programmer, troubleshooter or installer," the three professions that he held before his arrest. This in spite of the fact that his former employer offered to rehire him after his release.

Pagan Kennedy's boho dance: http://www.bookwire.com/pw/features.article$9776 [OSRR]

Kennedy signed up for Gordon Lish's celebrated fiction-writing seminar at Columbia University and found herself the famous talent-spotter's class pet. He'd tell her she was going to be famous in front of the rest of the class, and published her fiction in The Quarterly.

A cool image of Making Saving Private Ryan: [the bottom one] http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/news/980703/1.html
You don't have to respect Spielberg to expect a great war flick. Here's the script for the first minutes: http://countdown.8i.com/c2spr/script.html

DELANCEY: Captain, are we all gonna die?
MILLER [Tom Hanks]: Hell no, two-thirds, tops.

Limited time offer: original Chiquita articles here: [300k textfile] http://www2.thecia.net/users/rnewman/chiquita

A slightly-deeper-than-average look at Karen Finley: http://www.mostnewyork.com:80/LIFE/070298/FEMME_FI/FEMME_FI.htm

"The decision is so horrible because it's made by people who have not even seen the show."

Diane Patterson's tips on journal-writing are adept: http://www.spies.com/~diane/Diary/websuck.html

Here's my set of categories:
The Good Ones
The Guilty Pleasures
The Depressives
The High Schoolers and College Freshmen
The Perky Ones (Christians)
The Nerds
The Annoying and Obscure

Don't miss: Salon's overview of online journalling: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/07/cov_03feature.html

Many of the biggest journal "fans" began online journals themselves, and soon everyone ended up mostly writing about each other. Some of them got famous, others got resentful. "After a while," says Massie, "it started getting very negative."
Before long, "I felt as though I had to write, had to tell. Not the manic self-torture of, 'Gee, I gotta write this letter,' but rather an excitement of knowing that I could be as creative or as honest as I liked, and there would be a built-in audience."
And an okay insider's look at Time's lust for good copy: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/1998/07/03media.html

Each time an editor attempted to "clean up" a quote or remove a complexity that ran counter to an editorial presumption, most of the reporters would resist, putting their views into memos.

Thu, Jul 2, 1998
Eyes Wide Shut gossip: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/7/3/9345.html

Tom Cruise, used to two or three takes on Mission: Impossible, soon learnt the Kubrick way, 95 takes of him walking through a door. Kubrick was enjoying himself. Watching the video playback, he looked up at Cruise and said, "Hey, Tom, stick with me, I'll make you a star."

Gates thumbs nose at the land of Moon: http://www.techserver.com/newsroom/ntn/info/070298/info1_22816_noframes.html

The $20 million offer was reportedly conditioned on Hangul & Computer giving up its popular word-processing program. Korean newspapers claimed Hangul had 80 percent of the market, but that now Microsoft Word's Korean version could eat the market unhindered. ... But Hangul won't die easily. It has more functions and is easier to use than Microsoft's MS Word.
One group is calling for Koreans with pirated copies of Hangul to pitch in $7 each to save the company. Others suggest the government buy Hangul programs en masse or, if the programs can't be saved, arrange to leak the software codes to engineers who can produce new versions.

New Consortium looks at anti-Castro terrorism http://www.consortiumnews.com/consort2.html

"We don't consider these actions as terrorism because people fighting for liberty cannot be limited by a system that is itself terrorist," declared CANF president Francisco Hernandez.
Another standby plan, called Operation Dirty Trick, proposed blaming Castro if John Glenn's Mercury space flight crashed. The manufactured story of Cuban sabotage would generate fierce public anger as well as political demands for invading Cuba, the planners thought.

In a new The Nation President Gore is foreseen, and Arthur Danto defends Karen Finley, but Alex Cockburn thinks coal miners are fighting a worthier fight: http://www.thenation.com/issue/980720/0720COCK.HTM

The fund levies a tax on every ton of coal mined to pay for cleanup, said levy totting up to some $250 million a year. With this kind of money floating across the government's books, it didn't take long for someone to take an unhealthy interest. Over the past five years, the Clinton Administration has indulged in its own bout of takings, skimming $125 million a year for deficit reduction, more than twice the amount snaffled up by Reagan and Bush.

Winer is wearing his safety-patrol duds today: http://www.scripting.com//

Amazing! Someone just sent me a URL that gets me the password for the frequent flier mileage database of a major US airline. I'm not publishing the URL. But given what I've seen today, security is so poor at major websites, you don't have to wait until Y2K for a likely meltdown.

An over-the-top rave for the new Spielberg: http://www.pwunder.com/reviews/savingprivateryan.html [AIC]

With the skill of the master film maker that he is, the technology of modern day cinema and the stereophonic zing of bullets zipping by your head, you will witness, for the first time (unless you were actually there) what war really is. The horror is so intense and the gore so grimly realistic, that even the most jaded viewer will go into an instant state of shock. I will never, ever recover completely from the opening scene of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN.

Nerve's Photo-of-the-Day is a knockout: [mild nudity] http://www.nervemag.com/photoday/

New Science News has various scary tales of parasitic lower lifeforms

Dave Winer shares his newspage hotlist: [pure tech] http://www.scripting.com/dwiner/notepad.html

A very promising, professional-looking weblog-like page: http://www.obscurestore.com/

Critiquing science journalism: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/health/070298/health9_5421_noframes.html

Binge-and-purge reporting means that an advance in science gets over-enthusiastic initial news coverage. A whole wave of stories hype the discovery, with network news shows featuring the feat and presenting special in-depth reports. Then come a second wave of stories, often conveniently ignored or minimized by the TV folks, expressing all kinds of reservations about the initial report. That's the purge.

Mental floss for brain plaque: http://www.sciencedaily.com:80/story.asp?filename=980702085718

Wed, Jul 1, 1998 (First Quarter)
Molecular visualizations as gorgeous art: [multipage, lots of animations] http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/citation/wc980701.htm

Two chemists in Switzerland have plastered a repeating image of the face of a smiling middle-aged man over the surface of their rendering of an enzyme inhibitor known as a "Hirudin structure." Just below it on the page is a repeating image of Claudia Schiffer covering another enzyme inhibitor, known as an "Er2 Structure."

Calculating the cost of the Cold War: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/7/2/9308.html

In the decades since the United States began to develop the atomic bomb in 1940, the Washington government has spent $5,800,000,000,000 on nuclear arms and $19 trillion on defence, a new study has calculated.
And the cost of the Automotive Age: http://www.guardian.co.uk/gweekly/duty.html

Since the car first killed, at Crystal Palace, London, in 1898 (the victim a pedestrian), motor vehicles have claimed 30 million lives in accidents alone.
Farrakhan in England: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/7/2/9187.html

They also believe that they are the only authentic humans and that whites are the product of a bizarre genetic experiment by an ancient scientist called Yakub in rebellion against Allah. According to Fard, Yakub grafted a fair-skinned hybrid of the original black race, but in grafting out the creatures' colour, he also grafted out their humanity.

An obscure ecotopian experiment in Colombia called Gaviotas: http://www.loe.org/html/books/gaviotas.html

(Women and children singing; creaking sounds) WEISMAN: When we arrive at the open-air Gaviotas preschool, children are on the playground. Their see-saw is actually a pump in disguise. As they rise and descend, water gushes from a vertical pipe into an open cement tank.
More: http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC42/Colombia.htm

At the same time revenue from windmills and pumps dropped as Colombian agriculture was battered by an unexpected onslaught of cheap imported foods, the fallout of new free trade policies. So Gaviotas has decided to scale down its manufacturing. But no one is getting laid off. "Gaviotas isn't a company," Lugari says, "we're a community. "

Elvis Costello's brothers let an AI produce their song: http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/newsid_123000/123983.stm

Honeybee populations devastated: http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/ud-honbee.html

In the wild, "only 10 percent of all feral honeybee colonies remain within the northeastern United States ... Our bees had little natural resistance to this imported mite," he says...

IRC sad sack (Barry) comes on to bot (Julia): http://foner.www.media.mit.edu/people/foner/Julia/section3_3.html

Barry: Are your breasts well rounded or flabby? (I love all)
Julia: I'd rather be overhauled by a Yugo mechanic, Barry.

New New Scientist looks at hypnosis

Here's one source that doubts an earthquake (22 Jun below) caused Chernobyl: http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/world/monitoring/newsid_83000/83608.stm

Former Chernobyl manager Viktor Bryukhanov told Interfax he shared the official theory that the cause of the world's worst nuclear accident was the departures from safety rules by the plant's technical personnel. [Pic source]
The purported quake would have been around 1:23:25 on this detailed timeline: http://webnuc.nuce.psu.edu/~chernoby/tlinedt.html

At 1:23:31, the insertion of control rods is unable to balance the increased reactivity. At this point the power is increasing, yet not enough to melt the fuel.

Hmmm: Excite NewsTracker appears to have reset its archive to zero with the new month...?

Another set of possible breaking-news pages: [lots of gifs, alas] http://www.nandotimes.com/nt/world/index_noframes.html (fm)

Slashdot readers sniff out the hoax in yesterday's hyperemulation jpeg: http://slashdot.org/articles/9806301719210.shtml

Unless it's two of the best-kept secrets in Newton-dom, there are no such things as "NewtonCE" or "CoPilot for Newton."

Tue, Jun 30, 1998
This Day in Joyce History: In 1915, the Joyces arrived in Zurich. In 1930, James pretended to regain his sight during a performance by John Sullivan.
TV 2nite: Frontline on Mexico; Tori on Leno
More from Chuck Collins and his gang (12 Feb, 11 Jun below): http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/nation/98/04/01/richrevolt.2-0.html

Scions of some of America's richest families and new-money entrepreneurs told lawmakers that they're sick and tired of getting too many benefits and won't take special tax windfalls anymore.

Van Gogh goes to Vegas: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/7/1/8993.html

The pictures will hang in private gambling rooms and VIP suites that are the exclusive domain of very, very rich men.

A fascinating meditation on the Mommie Dearest cult: http://www.salonmagazine.com/mwt/feature/1998/07/01feature.html

Joan Crawford had as large a gay following as any star throughout her career, and she is representative of the devolution -- from idols to virtual laughingstocks -- screen legends have undergone.
While for Christina Joan Crawford was a flesh-and-blood tormentor and for us she was a celluloid lifeline, for both she has come to represent a period when the truth about our lives could not be told.

Today was the 90th anniversary of the Tunguska meteor-or-whatever: [Deja URL]

At about 7:15 a.m. local time on June 30, 1908, hundreds of Russian settlers and Tungus natives in the forested hills northwest of Lake Baykal looked up in amazement. A brilliant white light was racing across the sky, casting shadows on the ground, and dazzling the eyes of many who tried to stare at it. Minutes after it passed, a distant rolling thunder came to the ears of the witnesses.

Coming next March: John LeCarre's international banking thriller "Single & Single"

Annals of HyperEmulation: [50k jpeg] http://evillemur.blacklightmedia.com/emu.jpg [McOS]

...a Macintosh emulating Win95 (VPC), emulating MacOS (Fusion), emulating the GameBoy (Virtual GameBoy), emulating Windows CE (WinBoy), emulating the Newton OS (NewtonCE), emulating the Pilot (CoPilot for Newton), and finally emulating Linux (Linux for Pilot)

Now there's a concept: http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,23737,00.html

According to the site, the service will provide Internet access customized for music fans; a "davidbowie.com" email address (name @ davidbowie.com); local dial-in numbers throughout North America; live technical support provided by Concentric Networks; "uncensored" Net access including email, newsgroups, and the Web; "exclusive Bowie content updated constantly"...

How spammers view spamming: http://cnn.com/TECH/computing/9806/29/spammer.idg/index.html [Slashdot]

He could have made a quick killing if he had followed the Sanford Wallace model, but Hardigree says he decided to operate in a responsible manner. "I'm extremely proud of what I do," he says.

An okay look at Salon: http://www.techserver.com/newsroom/ntn/info/063098/info18_5070_noframes.html

Executives say that revenue is on pace to hit $6 million this year -- about what it costs to run the magazine -- compared with just $200,000 collected in 1996. Advertisers are finally pouring in, with more than 85 on board this year, compared with just five a year ago.
Talbot says Salon has a core readership of about 60,000 people.

L'Academie Francaise gets hip: (AFP)

Under new rules to be officialised July 9 within the education ministry, a woman teacher, previously known as "le professeur", will henceforth be referred to as "la professeur" while a women doctor, now called "le medecin" will be called "la medecin."

New Village Voice includes Hentoff's revelation about untaped FBI interrogations: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/columns/27hentoff.shtml

"They went out of the room to check with their supervisors and returned saying they had confirmed that no-recording was official FBI policy. When I asked where it was written, I was told it was not in writing, but it was FBI policy."
And the Mengele of Pennsylvania's Holmesburg prison: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/27gonnerman.shtml

But when Kligman walked into Holmesburg, "All I saw before me were acres of skin," Kligman told a reporter in 1966. "It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time."
"All we did ... is offer them money for a little piece of their skin," Kligman said.
And a brilliant exercise in comparative etext studies: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/columns/27ledbetter.shtml

A recently completed academic analysis found that as many as ten different versions of the infamous memo have been published by seven national news outlets. Moreover, the Voice has confirmed that at least three of those organizations altered the "talking points" document, even while presenting it as the genuine article.
Fox and Gillis say this repetition suggests "that the first [section] was block copied on a word processor and pasted below in a tentative attempt at actually creating an affidavit." ... The paragraph is tacked on to the bottom of the first legalistic portion of the document, as if it were the tag at the end of an e-mail.

Wag that dog: Drudge points out the Iraq missile-attack story was delayed until the exact minute Linda Tripp entered the grand jury: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

I've wanted a timeline on CIA-Contra-crack: http://www.sevenstories.com/timeline.htm

December 27, 1986 - Assistant U.S. attorney assigned to Blandon case allegedly commits suicide in Los Angeles soon after Blandon case is rejected for prosecution in Washington, D.C.

An older New Scientist piece about a successful automated composer: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/970809/features.html

"EMI functions the way most composers function," says Cope. "We struggle with the routine note-to-note rules, but always in the back of our mind we have the idea that we're within this larger piece."
"As far as I'm concerned, EMI's Mozart is better than 99 per cent of non-Mozart classical music," he says.
Hofstadter, too, thinks EMI stands almost alone in the field of artistic artificial intelligence.
And a page of audio clips including one by EMI: http://www.computer.org/tab/cgm/cd.htm

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett philosophize on their billions: [multipage] http://www.pathfinder.com:80/fortune/1998/980720/bil.html

[WB:] So I suggest that you look at the behavior that you admire in others and make those your own habits, and look at what you really find reprehensible in others and decide that those are things you are not going to do. If you do that, you'll find that you convert all of your horsepower into output.
[BG:] And so I soon came up with this incredibly conservative approach that I wanted to have enough money in the bank to pay a year's worth of payroll, even if we didn't get any payments coming in.
[WB:] I don't think the Internet is going to change how people are going to chew gum. Bill probably does.
[WB:] Let's just say that I found a way to clone Jack Welch, and ran off 499 clones of him. Jack continued to run General Electric, and these other 499 ran the rest of the FORTUNE 500. Is the FORTUNE 500 going to have a higher return on equity five years from now or not? ...Capitalism tends to be self-neutralizing like that in terms of improvements.
[WB:] In most acquisitions, it's better to be the target than the acquirer.
[WB:] I don't worry about not buying Microsoft, though, because I didn't understand that business. And I didn't understand Intel.
[WB:] And the genie says, "Here's the catch. You don't know if you're going to be born rich or poor, white or black, male or female, able-bodied or infirm, intelligent or retarded."

An okay piece on current Media Lab projects: http://www.usatoday.com:80/life/cyber/tech/ctd016.htm

LEGO is one of the original sponsors of the Media Lab. For $200, you get 700 LEGO pieces to build a robot and the RCX microcomputer, a microprocessor encased in a LEGO brick about the size of a pack of cigarettes, which serves as the brain that runs the creation.

Wired picks up the tortured-norns story: http://www.wired.com:80/news/news/culture/story/13293.html

"The primary thing I've learned is that the majority of so-called "loving" Creatures players are vindictive, hateful people who lack a firm grip on reality."

A nice profile of the Ain't-It-Cool movie-gossip site: http://www.calgaryherald.com:80/entertainment/980629/1821230.html

Mark Bernstein, who runs the Internet service CNN Interactive for the cable-TV broadcaster, believes lone opinion brokers eventually will be swept aside by established journalistic organizations.
(Ha!)

A dull review of a great TV documentary on the Castro. http://www.freep.com:80/fun/tv/qduf29.htm

The neighborhood, known as a sort of "Boys Town," says Stein, has never been very welcoming to either lesbians or black homosexuals.

Mon, Jun 29, 1998
TV 2nite: Alice Nutter of Chumbawamba on Politically Incorrect

A great video series on European cinema history: http://tcm.turner.com/TCMWeb96/June96/episode1.html

Don't miss: eBay examined: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/06/30feature.html

eBay's founders are fond of telling stories about welfare families who have pulled themselves out of poverty by setting up little eBay businesses, craftspeople who couldn't sell their products until they discovered eBay and disabled people who have become full-time auctioneers without having to leave their homes.

Why does the UK Guardian have the best Amish-drug-gang coverage?!? http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/6/30/8788.html

From about the age of 17, Amish teenagers participate in a rite of passage called rumschpringes, translated literally from Pennsylvannia Dutch as "running around" or loosely as "sowing wild oats".
"They have no idea of how things go on. They have no realisation of guns, drugs and robberies," says Anne Swaigert, an elderly woman who runs one of the many antiques shops in Gap. "You have to sit them down and explain it. They're in awe."

An interesting-looking new "NY Review of Books" has pieces on the UN, on Nixon, on parenting since Spock, on TWA800, and here Garry Wills and Jesse Jackson expressing disappointment with "Bulworth": [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998071624R

New super-compressed graphics format, DjVu, about 20% of jpeg: http://djvu.research.att.com/home_mstr.htm [Slashdot]

MIT media lab spawns Dublin campus: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/98/06/28/stiireire01032.html?1063974 [Slashdot]

Ireland was chosen as the site for a replica of the American institute instead of other European rivals because of its well-developed information technology infrastructure and rich culture.

New tech explores human impact on Australia: http://www.csiro.au/news/mediarel/mr1998/mr98150.html

CSIRO scientists Dr Jon Olley and Dr Gary Caitcheon and Professor Bob Wasson from the Australian National University are pioneering a revolutionary way to date single grains of sand.
The grains of quartz sand act like tiny clocks. When they encounter sunlight, it releases energy stored in the crystal lattice, setting the clock to zero. But once the grain is buried away from light, it begins to accumulate radioactive energy from the surrounding soil, and from this the time since burial can be calculated.
("To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.")

NewsHub has mostly replaced SJMerc for my breaking news, now that I've discovered its science, entertainment, world, and USA sections: http://www.newshub.com/tech/bytime.html

Investigative-journalism coups from Computer-Assisted Reporting: [multipage] http://www.ire.org/resources/conferences/training/carprojects.html

The full text of the Enquirer's apology to Chiquita: http://enquirer.com/chiquita/index.html

...the facts now indicate that an Enquirer employee was involved in the theft of this information in violation of the law. The employee involved, lead reporter Mike Gallagher, has retained counsel and will not comment on his news gathering techniques.

Clinton gives Chinese students better access than here: http://www.foxnews.com/js_index.sml?content=/news/international/0629/i_ap_0629_42.sml

"Do you think that in the United States today, there are also some problems?" The audience of some 500 students, sitting in a freshly painted white and gold-trimmed school auditorium, applauded her question.

Gates thumbs nose at the land of Bjork: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/NATION/t000060261.html

...centuries of Icelandic isolation and vigilance have preserved a national grammar, vocabulary and spelling that are virtually identical to what the Vikings spoke when they settled this land in the 9th century.
Microsoft's sin: It refuses to translate Windows into Icelandic.
The etymology of the Icelandic word for computer, toelva, is similarly pure: It is a compound word, put together from the Icelandic words meaning "digit" and "prophetess," alluding to a computer's great store of knowledge.

Lame AP Rainbow story, with two dim gifs: http://www.foxnews.com/js_index.sml?content=/news/national/0629/d_ap_0629_26.sml

"I've been doing this four years," she says. "I have four kids and seven grandchildren. They think I'm whacked."

Learn2.com continues adding more online life-skills tutorials: http://www.learn2.com/browse/browset.html

2torial #0532: Spin a Basketball
2torial #0526: Stash Stuff Discreetly
2torial #0736: Steam Vegetables
2torial #0833: Stop a Nosebleed
(These are multipage, but if you skip to the last page there's sometimes a hidden single-page version, for printing.)

Sun, Jun 28, 1998
This Day in Joyce History: In 1886 in Ulysses, Bloom arrived at the Queen's Hotel.
Drudge is juicy tonight: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

In the first independent scientific review of UFOs in 30 years, an international panel of scientists has concluded that some supposed sightings have been accompanied by "unexplained physical evidence" that deserves serious scientific study.

I smell a rat: Here's one of the few surviving reports on the Cincinnati Enquirer's expose on Chiquita, which the paper has now agreed to pay $10M compensation for, as untrue: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/biz/050498/biz19_27222_body.html

Sixty Minutes reran the noxious Leslie Stahl anti-Web hatchet job (28 Dec below) and I snapped this pic of J. Orlin Grabbe of the Laissez-Faire City Times: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/60attack.htm

I wore my best Greg Allman wig, drank a guiness on camera ... I decided on this image about two weeks before the interview: but, as it turned out, I had the flu and was losing my voice...

Lili Taylor is great (Dogfight is a nice 1963 period piece). She's interesting in profiles. too: [multipage, washed-out colorscheme, Dazed & Confused is the most detailed] http://www2.bitstream.net/~bradyh/lili/Articles.html

In high school, Taylor was diagnosed as manic-depressive. However, she decided not to take drugs to treat the condition because she was afraid it would interfere with her life as an artist and she wasn't convinced that the diagnosis was correct.
"I don't do lingerie. I don't play roles that diminish females or tell the same story about the whore with the heart of gold. This year was really important to me because it affirmed that my heart has not lead me astray ... by taking me down the path that not everyone said was the right one."
"It's so scary how we keep getting this certain kind of passive, f___ed-up young woman on screen who doesn't have anything to do with our real lives. And the reason is because that woman isn't threatening..."

A nice retrospective for Mailer's 75th birthday: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/enter/062898/enter2_911_noframes.html

"All the things I wrote against I feel like I have lost," he said in an interview at his Brooklyn home, a riverfront townhouse where he has lived for 40 years. "The corporation has taken over, and the computer has taken over."
And a cute couple who specialize in Hemingway parodies: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/enter/062898/enter31_1020_noframes.html

They met in Jack's native San Francisco. She was starring as sultry Lola in a touring company of "Damn Yankees." He was doing character roles in films and TV series like "Streets of San Francisco" and "The Bold Ones"...
And tabloids sell out Peru's investigative journalists to the military: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/world/062898/world17_15108_noframes.html

Lima's biggest newspapers contend the attack campaign is being orchestrated by the feared National Intelligence Service to discredit reporters who probe military corruption and human rights abuses.

Fridge-magnet set based on Perl: http://www.tpj.com/tpj/poetry/ [Slashdot]

BEGIN DESTROY END FILE ISA UNIVERSAL to is have with are you me of in it the carp croak confess Safe perl http new self strict abs accept alarm and and bind bless caller chomp chop close connect continue crypt defined delete die do dump each else else eval exec exists exit exp flock for for fork format getc glob goto grep hex if if index int join keys kill last length listen local log map my my ne next next no not not oct open or or pack package pipe pop print print push qw rand read redo ref rename require reset return reverse seek select shift sin sleep sort splice split study sub substr system tell this tie time times truncate undef unless unlink unpack unshift untie until use values values vec wait warn while while write

Alan Rudolph making Vonnegut's "Breakfast": [Messy IMDb URL] (agc)

Ana Gachet

Review of a book that traces a Van Gogh portrait's path thru time: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-06/28/018l-062898-idx.html

Four days later, he arrived in Auvers, a country village near Paris, to be near Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, an amateur painter himself and a physician specializing in the treatment of nervous disorders, notably depression. Within days, however, the artist wrote to his younger brother, Theo, a Paris art dealer who subsidized his work: "I think we must not count on Dr. Gachet at all . . . he is sicker than I am." [Pic source]

Home shopping for venture capitalists: http://www.forbes.com:80/asp/redir.asp?/forbes/98/0601/6111142a.htm

Gould is a guest on MoneyHunt, a half-hour show that airs on public television in 130 stations nationwide. It gives would-be entrepreneurs a ten-minute crack at persuading a panel of experts that they have a good thing. Winners get free advice from the experts. It's billed as an entrepreneurial Meet the Press. But it occasionally comes off as venture capital's Gong Show.

John McCarthy on alt.fan.unabomber: [Deja URL]

The "noble savage" mythmakers find virtues they sense as lacking at home in more primitive peoples. Margaret Mead liked sexual freedom, Rousseau liked equality and Tacitus admired the Germans for being more warlike than the Romans of his day.

NgWings debunks de Mille's debunking of Castaneda!?! [Deja URL]

Similar omissions and errors abound in his text and I can show that none of his proofs holds under examination. (Other "proofs" deal with behaviour of animals, walking in the desert heat, rain temperature and properties of Agave fibre).

Dept of Serendipity: Using NewsTracker, the following quote appeared after a video game review, suggesting a "Re-enact the Passion" game:

Take the spear used to pierce the side of Jesus on the cross.
The actual story is a pretty good piece on religion in the tabloids: http://www.star-telegram.com:80/news/doc/1047/1:FAITH1/1:FAITH1062698.html

2. Relics rule. Not all sacred souvenirs have gone the way of the Lost Ark. Take the spear used to pierce the side of Jesus on the cross. Hitler did take it, according to The Sun.

I said I wouldn't repeat Raphael's links, but this image has been haunting me: http://www.post-gazette.com:80/healthscience/19980623brobots4.asp

Kibo on ark:

Dear blnadri, did you know that if you drive a Kia car and try to install a Nokia cell phone, there is a massive explosion which destroys the entire space-time continuum?

Sat, Jun 27, 1998
This Day in Joyce History: In 1881, grandmother Ellen Joyce died. In 1886 in Ulysses, Rudolph Bloom drank poison.
TV 2nite: Portishead on SNL (Lame, overlit.)
Three great RealAudio fish sounds: longing, anger, and... gas? http://www.abcnews.com/sections/science/DailyNews/singingfish980625.html

New Science News does dinosaur feathers

The Obsever launches a Human Rights Index: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/papers/19980627-14.html

Our index has not been constructed by arbitrary whim, but by careful deliberation, multiplying abuses of human rights over 13 categories -- including extrajudicial killing, torture and disappearances -- by a country's Human Development Index (HDI) as defined by the United Nations.
1. Algeria
2. North Korea
3. Burma
4. Indonesia
5. Libya
6. Colombia
7. Syria
8. Iraq
9. Yugoslavia
10. China

Hour of Slack:

The difference between heaven and hell is which end of the pitchfork you're on.

Tolkien theme park planned: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_65000/65773.stm

No comment: http://www.foxnews.com/js_index.sml?content=/scitech/wires2/0626/t_rt_0626_20.sml

And interactive candy -- a combination of candy and toys -- was among the fastest growing categories. According to trade statistics, there were 1,553 new items introduced in 1997, with interactive products leading the way.

WLUW cart: [Messy IMDb URL]

"I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that. ... What I really want to do with my life -- what I want to do for a living -- is I want to be with your daughter. I'm good at it." --John Cusack in Say Anything (he goes on to reveal his chosen career is kickboxing)

Greenpeace's live RealVid from Glastonbury is working great: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/glastonbury/
(Except it keeps crashing my Mac Netscape 4.0.3!)

Fri, Jun 26, 1998
This Day in Joyce History: In 1888, 6yo James sang at the Bray Boat Club. In 1903 in Ulysses, May Goulding Dedalus was buried.
Too cool: Follow Clinton's visit from China's POV: http://www.china.com/clinton/english/index.html
Brian Redman is rooting for economic apocalypse: [Deja URL]

The bad news is that couch potato America is about to get a rude awakening. But that awakening will at least open some eyes heretofore sewn shut.

GIFs of the Linux protestors at the Win98 release: http://hugin.imat.com/svlug/ [NTK]

The movie industry gambles big bucks on art-school animators: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/6/27/8400.html

Why not turn some of those book characters into animated film? And then make more money from spin-off book sales and merchandising agreements?

Raphael Carter's Honeyguide Weblog is so reliably good I've mostly stopped stealing its links (but will include reminders here from time to time): http://www.chaparraltree.com/honeyguide/

Britain's annual Woodstock is getting underway: [multipage] http://www.glastonbury98.co.uk/history/history.htm

The June Harper's Index is especially great: http://www.harpers.org/harpers-index/listing.html

Change since January in the membership of the U.S. Communist Party : +4,000
Percentage of the poverty level for a family of three earned by a full-time minimum-wage worker : 82
Ratio of the size of New Jersey to the number of square miles of Brazilian rain forest cleared since 1994 : 1:3
Number of people killed worldwide last year by pirates : 51
Year in which all mobile-phone companies will be federally required to be able to locate callers to within 125 feet : 2002
(Question: can't it still find them even if they don't make any calls?)

WWI anthrax attack on reindeer: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/world/062598/world25_11636_noframes.html
More on the Amish drug gangs: http://www.phillynews.com/daily_news/98/Jun/25/local/DRUG25.htm

Hoedowns are typically held on a family farm, in a barn or tobacco shed or outdoors, said local residents. They are traditionally alcohol-free affairs that can resemble a large picnic during the daytime featuring hot dogs and volleyball. At night, it is more of a country and western dance, with music provided live or piped in over battery powered boomboxes or tape decks, some of which are installed in the buggies.
And a non-sensational peek at Amish family values: http://www.detnews.com/1998/metro/9806/26/06260046.htm

The same reason is given for not having a TV, which is universal even among the most liberal Amish communities. The men say besides the fact that the programing is often indecent, TV is a "robber of family time." Instead, most Amish families spend time working and playing together, or just sitting around talking and relaxing. They always eat together, and aren't running in several different directions between meals.

Thu, Jun 25, 1998
This Day in History: In 1891, Parnell married Katherine O'Shea.
TV 2nite: Seinfeld's tribute to Pinter's backward "Betrayal" http://www.xnet.com/~djk/Seinfeld_cur.shtml#ep164
My weblog press release: [Deja URL]

New The Nation includes good pieces on Time's anti-feminism, the new UN ambassador's dismal past, Jesse Jackson's and Billy Graham's pandering over MonicaGate, and Paul Newman's grandson's seeing thru missile defense strategies:

[Jackson on BC:] "I can maybe work with him, but I know now who he is, what he is. There's nothin' he won't do. He's immune to shame. Move past all the nice posturing and get really down there in him, you find absolutely nothing...nothing but an appetite."

A great hate-letter about Win98: http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_2209.html

The Journal estimates the company's gross margin on Windows is 92%. And the operating margin is more than 50%. By comparison, many hardware makers operate on 5% or less. That, my friends, is what happens when a company doesn't have any competition. It gouges customers.

A great, no-nonsense explanation of how to write a press release: http://www.netpress.org/careandfeeding.html [via Whump]

Include a quick, bulleted fact sheet:

What the product is
When it was first released
What platforms it runs on
What the configuration requirements are
How much it costs
And a free list of contact addresses: [40k download] http://www.ping.at/gugerell/media/

Seen in email:

NY Stock Exchange symbol TCI was up 10 percent yesterday, with a trading volume ten times usual for that stock, on news of the merger between TCI and AT&T. The only thing is that NYSE's symbol TCI has nothing to do with the company that is merging with AT&T: NYSE TCI is a realty company, and the TCI these people thought they were buying actually trades on the NASDAQ.

Dreamworks plays games against Disney: http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/news/980624/8.html

New Progressive Review gets this right:

Polls have become an assessment test by which the media determines how well we have learned what it has taught us.
Also:

Amount the Green candidate in the New Mexico special House election spent to get 15% of the vote: $3,500
Amount President Clinton's trip to China costs: $45 million (about $5 million more than the Starr investigation)
Amount proposed 1993 poultry regulations would have cost Tyson Food: $57 million initially and $39 million annually. Amount Tyson Food paid in fines and costs for giving illegal gifts to the agriculture secretary during the time these regulations were under consideration: $6 million.
Percent of voters who cast ballots in the 1998 primaries: 20%

Immortality in norns: [Deja URL]
      > what should i look for in the genetics kit to see that the
      > norn has the highlander gene?
Look at the glucose => glycogen and glycogen => glucose reactions. If these aren't mirror images of each other then one or the other will build up. If glycogen builds up, then the norn is immortal as long as it does not have the Death by Old Age gene.
(I'm starting to think Creatures must be the best science-ed toy ever.)

Meta: Feh. Newsday's URLs, eg via 7am.com, only last a day.
Here's a really clear delineation of the major media giants (eg, TCI pre-AT&T): http://www.fair.org/extra/9711/gmg.html

The first tier is rounded out by TCI, the largest U.S. cable company that also has U.S. and global media holdings in scores of ventures too numerous to mention. The other three first-tier global media firms are all part of much larger industrial corporate powerhouses: General Electric (1997 sales: $80 billion), owner of NBC; Sony (1997 sales: $48 billion), owner of Columbia & TriStar Pictures and major recording interests; and Seagram (1997 sales: $14 billion), owner of Universal film and music interests.

Privacy standard strains designers' limits: http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/13242.html

When a user arrives at a Web site, a P3P-powered browser will receive a privacy "proposal" from that site, explaining what information it would like and how the data would be used. The browser will check the proposal against a P3P "rule set." Based on those user-defined rules, the browser will accept or refuse the proposal.

Wed, Jun 24, 1998 (Man, am I glad that pink is gone! ;^)
This Day in Ulysses: In 1904, Stephen's period of mourning ends (one year one day).
This long profile of Gwyneth Paltrow is sickly sweet, but gorgeously designed: [multipage] http://www.premiere.com/paltrow/index.html

Tamagotchi-oid sex-ed: [multimedia page] http://btio.com/btioprop.htm (Pacifica)

The Baby Think It Over infant simulator

Lifelike vinyl body, 21 inches long, 6.5 to 7 pounds
Anatomically correct, male and female
Recording of a real infant crying
Tamperproof electronics monitor neglect and abuse events
Easy, Normal and Cranky temperament settings

Premiere has a witty movie reviewer, here Sphere and Wedding Singer: http://www.premieremag.com:80/libby/index.html

On the poster for Sphere, the copy line reads, TERROR CAN FILL ANY SPACE; this sounds like a particularly demented decorating tip from Martha Stewart, if you ask me.

Disney's search-portal for kids: http://www.disney.com/dig/today/
(An advertiser's delight! ;^)
Another lovely chapter on Joyce Maynard's hippie daughter: http://www.joycemaynard.com/wwwboard/

"You worry too much," she said. "More than anybody else, you're the person I wish I could take into the mountains with me. I wish we could just walk in the redwoods together."

New New Scientist
Unabomber Manifesto sequel: http://www.mostnewyork.com:80/NEWS/062498/SCANDAL/SCANDAL_.htm

The proposal sent to Simon & Schuster said the manuscript was already written and was being typed -- most likely on the outside, since Kaczynski does not have access to typewriters or computers.

The razor is mightier than the pen: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/074251.htm

Turkish men wear their moustaches not only to show off their manhood but also to express their political ideology: long and pointy for the right wing, scruffy for the left and beard-attached for the Islamic.

More Virtual Metaphysics: [Deja URL]
      > Ok so if the air is hot, the norn gets hot but has no
      > reinforcment of this fact leading to it just standing
      > around saying im hot or doing nothing.
That's correct. Otherwise the norn would get punished when the air temperature changed.

Nice page design for India's #1 business newspaper: http://www.economictimes.com/today/pagehome.htm [Slashdot]
(Amazing how much personality comes across via the very limited vocabulary of HTML!)

Strange bedfellows: http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/news/980624/4.html

[Secrets and Lies director] Mike Leigh's current project is Gilbert and Sullivan biopic. It's currently in rehearsals, and will shoot in about six weeks. The budget, I think is around $30m -- by far his most expensive to date -- it's also his first period film and first film with music. ... Jim Broadbent plays one of the writing duo; Timothy Spall an opera singer who performed in their production of The Mikado. The story -- although with Mike Leigh no-one really knows the story but him, is about the writing and performing of The Mikado.
(He must identify with them... as feuding collaborators?)
And a nice tribute to Maureen O'Sullivan: http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/news/980624/1.html

He asked my parents what I did during the convention and they told him, I stayed in the film room for 72 hours. He thought that was a bit scary and volunteered to look after me with his lovely wife. Now, there I was a scant three feet off the ground staring up at TARZAN, telling my parents that he and JANE were going to look after me for the weekend. OH MY GOD, my 4 year old brain whirred, JANE IS GONNA BE MY BABYSITTER.

The secret Amish-biker connection! [Deja URL]

Eight members of the Pagans gang sold the drugs to the Amish men, who then distributed the drugs to members of youth groups known as the Crickets, the Antiques and the Pilgrims at dances between 1993 and 1997, according to the indictment.

Tue, Jun 23, 1998 (New Moon 22:51 CDT)

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