Robot Wisdom WebLog Jul98waxing2

Robot Wisdom WebLog for Jul-Aug 1998 (waxing)

Fri, Aug 7, 1998 (Full Moon 21:11 CDT)
This Day in Joyce History: In 1919, Exiles premiered in Munich (James's view: "A fiasco! A flop!")
TV 2nite: Squirrel Nut Zippers on Leno; Tori on Conan
Lisa Rea reviews Private Ryan: [Deja URL]

I do not think that Tom Hank has been cute since he was in Bosom Buddies, but that Ted Danson ... BARRING!!! BROOOF! SPROOOIIIIINGG! YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYA!!!! CHINKADA CHINKADA BRINNNG!!!! ... that Ted Danson is even less cute.

More great stuff from the Progressive Review

A study from the National Marine Fisheries Service says that despite Maine's record lobster hauls, the state is on the verge of a marine disaster. Said one fisheries scientist, "It's an economic powerhouse that is literally one lobster molt away from disaster." The reason: More than 90% of all lobsters caught are barely at the legal minimum which means only about ten percent of all female lobsters caught are sexually mature. . . A group of scientists have also recommended that fishing for Atlantic cod be halted in the Gulf of Maine. The scientists reported that each new generation of cod in the past few years has been half the size of the previous year's generation.

Every day brings new reports in Chicago of the Asian longhorn beetle. Odds are, thanks to free market 'liberalisation', these little beauties will wipe out most of the hardwoods in North America in the next few years... unless somebody discovers an effective pest-control strategy: http://willow.ncfes.umn.edu/pa_ceram/ceramb.htm

In New York the beetle has been attacking maple (Acer) species, including Norway, red, sugar, silver, and boxelder maple and sycamore maple. Horsechestnut (Aesculus) trees have also been heavily attacked. In China, it attacks other hardwoods including elms, poplars and willows.

Meta: Further tests indicate most newspapers keep their URLs around, with only a few exceptions... but a few of these are major, and I'll be cutting back on them for this reason: LA Times, Desnews, SJ Mercury Breaking, AZ Central, LA Times Calendar Live, SF Gate, My Excite (local copies linked from custom headlines page, not NewsTracker in general), Miami Herald, Access Atlanta, Mostly NY. For the list of sources that tested okay, keep an eye on media.literate, which I continue to update several times a day.

From the Game Designers' conference, a list of 19 factors that make for good games: http://headline.gamespot.com:80/news/98_08/04_wizards/index.html

1. Lots of positive reinforcement to keep gamers playing.
2. A framework for social interaction.
4. Authentic decisions with reasonable data and consequences.
16. Tactilicity (stuff to grab and control - pieces in board games/miniatures, for example)
17. Heuristics - a sense of how one is doing and how to become better.
18. A quality of engendering stories about the game or bragging rights.

How Brave New World reached #5 on the top 100: http://www.iht.com:80/IHT/TODAY/THU/FPAGE/read.html

The vast majority of books tied with many other titles - mentioned by four judges, say, or three. Judges were not asked to sort out these ties; instead, Random House brass took all the dead heats and turned them into rankings.

Thu, Aug 6, 1998
TV 2nite: B-52s on Leno
Is it the dude?!? http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/8/7/15084.html

A small piece of slate inscribed with the word "Artognov" has been found at Tintagel in Cornwall, the traditional birthplace of King Arthur.

New The Nation features Jesse Jackson, and an awesome Cockburn on Chiquita - Tailwind - Dark Alliance: http://www.thenation.com/issue/980824/0824COCK.HTM

Despite Gallagher's vilification, and assuming the series is not purged from the historical record by the Enquirer (now acting in concert with Chiquita's lawyers), his stories will stand comparison with the best that American muckraking has produced, whether Puter's Looters of the Public Domain or Tarbell's History of the Standard Oil Company.
In Gallagher's case it was Chiquita's in-house voice mails which Gallagher allegedly stole. (He insists he was given them by a whistleblower.) Chiquita's lawyers lunged at this issue. What choice had they? After all, Gallagher had convincingly charged the company with serious crimes that included use of chemicals that had injured and killed Honduran workers; use of goon squads and army units to evict villagers and intimidate workers; ownership titles designed to conceal illegal corporate control; possible implication in drug running. Chiquita's only shot was to distract attention by hollering about voice mail, which in fact revealed Chiquita executives discussing cover-ups to Gallagher's questions.
...By then, the moment was lost. Chiquita CEO Carl Lindner, one of the nastiest pieces of work on the US corporate-political scene, had his victory
Amid the attack on Smith and Oliver, the fact that the Pentagon had an inventory of 30 million pounds of sarin, some of it in Southeast Asia, was mentioned but never explored.
What Smith and Oliver have faced is an endless raising of the bar of proof, otherwise known as the demand for the "smoking gun." Webb faced the same challenge.
There's a whole journalistic-industrial complex dedicated to keeping newsprint, TV screens and radio waves clean of destabilizing scoops damaging to corporations or the state.
Attack a government agency like the CIA, or a Fortune 500 member like Chiquita, or the conduct of the military in Southeast Asia and you find yourself in deep trouble, naked and often alone.
And John Leonard's riotously upbeat survey of recent utopian literature, from Atlantis to Gaviotas: http://www.thenation.com/issue/980824/0824LEON.HTM

His is the view from Krakatoa, Pompeii and Mount St. Helens, Stonehenge and Glomar, a Book of Numbers and a Book of the Dead. He sees a culture of genius in business for 1,500 years before the roof blew off: thus the first navies and first condos; flush toilets and other technologies not recovered till the Islamic Middle Ages; brave men hunting bulls with ropes, beautiful women drinking the blood of those bulls from gold cups and artists who painted monkeys instead of monarchs.

Spendthrift Zapata re-animates webzine Word: http://www.thestandard.net/articles/article_display/0,1449,1313,00.html

"This has really been amazing, like changing schools but keeping the same major. I'm kind of stressed out. After all, this has to make money."
Where Word was just an experiment for Icon, it's near the center of Zap's strategy. "The danger is in not feeling enough adversity," says Bowe. "We're on a much bigger stage now and the trick is to be more professional and still be as wacky, and to reach out to people who don't know us."

Hey, a new idea: http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/98/Aug/06/tech.life/HARD06.htm

This $39 keyboard for Windows PCs offers 17 extra buttons for controlling World Wide Web browsers. Buttons on the right side of the keyboard, such as "forward," "back," "stop," "refresh" and "print," let you perform these common browser functions without using the mouse. Best of all is a rocker switch for scrolling up and down through large Web pages, sparing you from maneuvering the cursor to click on the tiny up and down arrows at the top and bottom of on-screen scroll bars.

The easy.to/remember story (6 July below): http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/14230.html

The .am domain is actually the international domain for the country of Armenia. The .to domain (for creating a phrase-address like hello.to/cindy) is for addresses associated with the South Pacific island of Tonga.

Meta: I've been meaning and meaning to go back over the archives and see which news sites have persistent URLs, and which expire into uselessness. Some preliminary results, by doublechecking a June weblog:
Persistent archives: Village Voice, Philly News, Nando, Guardian UK, ABC News, Wash Post, Wired, NYTSYN
Non-persistent: LA Times, Desnews, SJ Mercury, AZ Central, Calendar Live, SF Gate, My Excite
(Corrections, extensions, refinements etc very welcome. These will go in media.literate.)

Cockamamie rocket science: http://www.admin.uiuc.edu/NB/98.08/orbitip.html [NASA Watch]

In operation, ferromagnetic balls would be thrown from the primary centrifuge and caught by a second centrifuge mounted on the payload. Coils would adjust the velocity of the balls, which would transfer momentum to the payload while being reflected back to the rotor.

The gay Drudge: http://my.excite.com/news/r/980805/18/internet-gay

Wockner is "a one-man gay AP," says Tom Reilly, chairman of San Francisco-based PlanetOut. Wockner provides the invaluable service of being "an intelligent news agent," Reilly says, a smart filter in an ever-burgeoning datastream.

Wed, Aug 5, 1998
New New Scientist

I guess I'll have to pillage Time-Warner's alt.culture for net.lit items I missed.

Biosphere 2
bisexuality
Black Panthers
bungee jumping
Burning Man Festival, The

Researching media, I find this hilarious, appalling list of 20 reasons to distrust the Wall Street Journal: http://www.fair.org/extra/9509/wsj.html

7. In an editorial on crime (2/11/94), the WSJ claimed "it is very nearly routine procedure for criminals to kill their victims during a robbery to get rid of the evidence." According to FBI statistics, there were 672,480 robberies in 1992, and 2,254 murders associated with robberies--so about 99.7 percent of the time, robbers did not kill their victims.

Meta: I'm slowly tightening up the portal-pages, and ignoring NewsHub, so postings here will be reduced for a while-- maybe even a month, so that the portal will be presentable by September. It's what I call 'entropy work'-- dwelling quietly on a messy set of concepts until it finds a shape. Newest focus: media.literate

Tue, Aug 4, 1998
Thanks to Spike for the link: http://olj.usc.edu/sections/news/98_stories/spike_080498.htm

Email-activism success stories: [Messy URL]

"People were leaving the leaflets up, but they were ripping off the section that had all the city supervisors' e-mail addresses on them." Mueller saw the culmination of those rips when he attended the supervisors' final vote last Monday that stopped the construction of the chain drugstore.

A fine short memoir of Flann O'Brien's Wake: [Deja URL]

There, Mrs O'Nolan had prepared well. There were more crates of Guinness than anyone would care to count. But on this teeming wet day, there was to be no entry to the house. A new carpet is a fine thing, a great thing, something not to be destroyed by scores of soggy feet.

New Village Voice includes a hilarious and brilliant review of the new Cinderella: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/film/32elias.shtml

Director Andy Tennant presents an activist Cinderella, and the movie is so crammed with public-spirited spectacle that it becomes absurdly entertaining, like watching Alec Baldwin pretend he's not campaigning for government office.
And a definitive analysis of the new Lolita: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/tv/32carson.shtml

My pal Dolores calls the result a Merchant Ivory Red Shoe Diaries, which slights how heroically Lyne suppresses his inner Zalman King but is dead-on about his dreary notion of prestige filmmaking.
In the 1962 version, James Mason crackled with hideous energy; you bought him as not only a pervert at once shocked by and besotted with his own cunning, but the book's learned, supercilious "I" -- full of effrontery and traps, less an unreliable narrator than an irresponsible one.
And an uneven fantasia on MonicaGate's unseen documents: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/32carson.shtml

Note scrawled by Sam Donaldson in Cokie Roberts's lipstick on mirror of White House press room men's room: "Martians speak to me through my toupee. Help me."
And a great Austin Bunn on teaching-web-design as social work, etc: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/cyber/32bunn.shtml

After showing footage of scientists ferreting bullets from corpses, a forensic anthropologist for the UN in Bosnia and Rwanda suggested that "perhaps something like the JenniCam [an infamous live camera feed of a woman's bedroom] could be set up at mass grave sites."

A magical 750k thermal-image-looking mpeg of electron-flow in a chip: [multipage, long dark sections in mpeg] http://www.research.ibm.com/topics/popups/serious/chip/html/pica.html [Slashdot]

Each frame is 28 trillionths of a second.

I was hoping this new Eric Raymond piece would be an update on Mozilla, but instead it's his secret media-PR master-plan: [shortish] http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue31/raymond.html [Slashdot]

If we truly desire world domination, we've got to get our LSD into the corporate elite's conceptual water supply and alter the beast's consciousness. That means we need to co-opt the media that shape decision-making at the highest corporate levels of the Fortune 500.
The ugly political reality is this: The techies with day-to-day operational responsibility that are doing the actual switching are quite likely to feel pressure to hide the switch from their NT-brainwashed bosses. Samba is a huge win for these beleaguered techies; it enables open-source fans to stealth their Linux boxes so they look like Microsoft servers that somehow miraculously fail to suck.
(So, is the Mozilla experiment working?)

An actual story about clickpath-analysis, unfortunately somewhat incoherent: http://www.wired.com:80/news/news/technology/story/14175.html

A major goal for the 2000 Olympics will be to provide any piece of Olympic data within four mouse clicks, Iribarren said.
And a nauseating peek at how Hollywood uses such analysis: http://www.wired.com:80/news/news/culture/story/14067.html

"We're getting 32 percent click-through rates on the robot on our Lost in Space site," said Gordon Paddison, director of interactive marketing at New Line Cinema, in Los Angeles. Earlier this month, New Line Cinema licensed technology from toggle this to animate the robot to promote the site.

Now it can be told: Maynard on Salinger: http://my.excite.com/news/r/980803/19/culture-salinger

In 1973, Salinger -- who has not published anything since 1965 -- had completed at least two books and kept the manuscripts locked in a safe as big as a room in his house, Maynard writes.
He liked Jane Austen and vaudeville, and as for movies, his favorites were "The Thirty-Nine Steps," "The Thin Man," "The Lady Vanishes," "From Here to Eternity" and "The Pink Panther," according to Maynard.

Mon, Aug 3, 1998
CNet's portal bows to porn demand: http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/14144.html

A former Snap producer was more succinct: "No tits, no hits."

2600 editor finds revised Mitnick script both better and worse, but mostly the same: http://www.kevinmitnick.com/review2.html [Slashdot]

The plot is tightened by introducing a magical virus that Kevin will almost certainly upload to the net: "You can crash Air Force One with this virus. Hell, you can crash Wall Street with this virus."

New animated feature: [many pix] http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=1761
More Futurama tidbits: http://www.desnews.com:80/tdy/wv0yhog8.htm

And making all those characters fit the overbite mold isn't always easy. "We once had Jay Leno on 'The Simpsons' and do you know how impossible it is to draw Jay Leno with that chin in 'The Simpsons' style?" Groening said. "It can't be done."

Some extracts from a book on feminist close-readings of the Bible:: http://www.usnews.com:80/usnews/issue/980810/10bibl.htm

Only when God takes a rib from ha-'adam are the sexes differentiated, and the change is signaled by new terminology.
The New Testament's Mary Magdalene is another woman whose story has been largely lost--and at the same time greatly distorted. She is identified as a person of means, a follower of Jesus who had once been possessed by demons. In all four Gospels it is Mary Magdalene who discovers the empty tomb of Jesus. She is never identified as a prostitute--the one thing "everyone knows" about her. How did she become a whore? Jane Schaberg of the University of Detroit--Mercy, among others, has exposed an intricate process of conflation culminating in the sixth century A.D., whereby Mary Magdalene acquired the attributes of certain other women mentioned in the Gospels. Such conflation may not have been an accident. As Harvard's Karen L. King has noted, in some early Christian documents, such as the so-called Gospel of Mary, a struggle over women's leadership and right to prophesy finds expression in accounts of struggle between Mary Magdalene and the apostle Peter. Then as now, King observes, besmirching a woman's virtue was an effective way of eroding her legitimacy.

Sun, Aug 2, 1998
A good piece on the fall of Mir: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/8/3/14310.html

There is also a joker in the pack. December 1999 is expected to be a "solar maximum" - the high point in the Sun's 11-year cycle. There should be more radiation from the Sun, which would in turn heat Earth's atmosphere and make it expand. This has already proved a hazard for satellites in low orbit, causing them to slow unexpectedly and fall.
And intruding from the dream world, a mysterious abandoned village in a Welsh forest: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/8/3/14283.html

The villagers had consistently refused to pay rent or rates, and eventually the authorities seized more than 200 pigs and goats, driving them away from their cursing owners, to sell them at Abergavenny's market.

Lisa Rea: [Deja URL]

...The only thing that is stupider and poorer than those old-timey people is YOU, because I can make a television show of some stupid old-timey people trying to find a nickel to buy some SOAP with or something, and YOU will watch it until you DIE!!!
This is pretty much the reason that I am angry a lot of the time.

True life science fact from Kibo: (ark)

Okra, durian, balsa, kapok, cola, and chocolate are close relatives, botanically speaking.

Video search-engine: http://www.wired.com:80/news/news/technology/story/14168.html

A segmentation engine scans through a video clip while it is streaming, and gauges when the pixels in a frame have changed enough to indicate a shift in camera angle or subject. The engine also generates a graphical log of the clip: A series of time-based thumbnail pictures move across the top of the screen, allowing users to hop around the video file like skipping tracks on a music CD.

Sat, Aug 1, 1998
New 'Fast Company': http://www.fastcompany.com/online/16/index.html
Art from Disney's Fantasia 2000: [multipage] http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=1751

Steve Bogart found the New Yorker's online archive... now if only someone figures out which stories are interesting: [multipage, no blurbs] http://magazines.enews.com/magazines/new_yorker/archive/ [SB]

Harper's Index adds July stats: http://www.harpers.org/harpers-index/listing.html

Number of corporate spies in the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals : 6,600
Estimated number of Rwandan households headed by children : 85,000

The Post comes down pretty hard on the US re the ICC: http://washingtonpost.com:80/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-07/31/064l-073198-idx.html

Ironically, by opposing one after another proposed provision on the basis of wildly improbable interpretations, the U.S. delegation diminished its ability to secure safeguards that might have been within reach. It is clear that the U.S. delegation in Rome was not only isolated but profoundly out of touch with the prevailing political climate. Like King Canute commanding the waves to recede, the Americans insisted on special privileges that, however plausible in 1945, were scarcely viable in 1998.

New Boardwatch includes an okay overview of Iridium: http://boardwatch.internet.com/mag/98/jul/bwm57.html

Iridium's original system was to have 77 satellites, so it was named Iridium an element with the atomic number of 77. The number of satellites was reduced to 66 but the company decided to stick with Iridium rather than rename itself Dysprosium.
Motorola expects a retail price for its handset of about $3,000 and the paging product to retail for about $500.
Iridium signed 185 roaming agreements with a third of the world's cellular providers and will have access to 56 million subscribers and 3.1 billion points of presence. Originally the system was meant to connect remote areas of world that lack communications infrastructure. But one phone number and one bill in your home currency anywhere in the world is too good a prospect for the business road warrior market.
And a silly Dvorak piece on Gates's Pepsi analogy: http://boardwatch.internet.com/mag/98/jul/bwm33.html

Doug Adams, the fiction-writer, was on my ZDTV panel discussion and came up with the only analogy to top Microsoft's and which better explained the DOJ perspective. This wasn't like Coke having to give away three cans of Pepsi with each six-pack. It was like a monopolistic liquor store owned by Coke being forced to carry Pepsi.
And in a piece on bureaucracy vs wireless tech, some major multimedia-overkill for education: http://boardwatch.internet.com/mag/98/jul/bwm25.html

...the high point for many was the Tour de Force presentation of the 7th graders in tiny Lewistown, Montana who ... fetched, wirelessly from Big Spring Creek, miles away, scientific data readings of the water quality coming into their classroom computers operated by the students, which then appeared immediately via the Internet on the big auditorium screen in DC.
...it is the policies of these agencies, or the Catch-22 laws, that are the greatest obstacle to the flowering of these new and incredibly cost effective technologies.

10am-noon CDT: This is Hell funny progressive radio show: http://homepage.interaccess.com/~saaf/ [RealAudio]

"...Now, out of these four crooks-- Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton-- if Clinton is the only one who is successfully impeached and punished in the US legal system.... well, justice ain't just blind, she's math-phobic."

Portal-page: I've posted all the sorted-best-of-weblog portal pages, including this new idea: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/smart/history.html

Veggieburger visibility: http://www.abcnews.com:80/sections/business/DailyNews/veggieburgers980731/index.html

"Veggie burgers used to just be for hippies and beatniks, but now just about anyone eats them," he says. "There are still only 12 million vegetarians, but now it's OK to eat them even if you're not."

African dance and censorship: http://my.excite.com/news/r/980731/19/culture-dancing

Olimide himself served a prison term under Mobutu for singing the phrase "Etutana yango na yango," which in local Lingala means "we need closer contact" but can be interpreted in a more metaphorical sense as "don't use condoms."

Hacking without a computer: [Messy URL]

The next day he called those new hires and, posing as someone from IS, tricked them into giving up their log-ons, user IDs and, ultimately, their passwords. Seventy-three people took the bait.

Fri, Jul 31, 1998 (First Quarter)
This Day in Joyce History: In 1906, James, Nora and Giorgio moved from Pola to Rome.
TV 2nite: JenniCam Jenni on Letterman (Oops. She'd been bumped up to Thurs!)
11th hour miracle: July Boardwatch arrives in July!
New Science News looks at tsunamis, sharks, and Martian kidney stones

Competition for the Hollywood Stock Exchange: [Messy URL]
                           Hist   Hist
Name               Open    High   Low   High    Low   Last   Volume
Joan Allen         48.56 1434.73  7.26  68.98  35.41  57.70 2027714
Gabrielle Anwar   128.66 1173.13 10.00 139.98 128.66 136.37  129000
Patricia Arquette 258.06  551.25 10.00 273.85 257.51 269.35  226000
Great interview with Gary "Dark Alliance" Webb about Mike "Chiquita Eavesdropper" Gallagher: http://www.citybeat.com/issue/coverarticle2.html [OSRR]

"Gallagher should have been proud of his voice mail scoop. That's very aggressive reporting. I would have crowed about it. But there's a line between aggressive and illegal, and I'm not sure where it is. This case will help define that line, I suppose."
"It's all about making the powers that be feel more comfortable. If they change the rules through lawsuits and intimidation, they think, maybe journalists will stop investigating them. "
And a funny profile of over-the-edge black-humorist Mr. Mike: [multipage] [Obscene URL!] [OSRR]

"If you attack people even as an act of faith -- just assume they're scum because I'm scum, you're scum, we're all scum -- just attack on the assumption that something's there somewhere, we'll get to it. History will bear you out. The guy will die, they'll find a door that's never been opened and all those dead cheerleaders are inside... And I haven't been wrong yet. We're human beings, that is to say, assholes."
(They'll sell you an obscene email address for $25... but they don't make any claims about how long it'll last:) [Graphics only]

Thu, Jul 30, 1998
This Day in Joyce History: In 1933, Lucia entered a sanitorium in Nyon.
TV 2nite: Morcheeba on Conan.
An old piece on Terraserver and international spies: http://www.msnbc.com/news/175243.asp [NASA Watch]

The partners behind TerraServer say they came under no government pressure to block out the images, which come from a USGS aerial survey as well as Russian satellite photos. The software is set up to block access from nations such as Iraq, Cuba or North Korea, but Pike said "I don't know that it's going to do any good. You're going to block out the North Korea domain, but there's no way you're going to block out North Koreans living in Japan," Pike said.

Competition for DejaNews: http://www.supernews.com/ [CopperSky]
Yahoo's hidden text interface: http://www.yahoo.com/text/ [CopperSky]

That's frothing! OJR rips CNN (et al) a new orifice, over Tailwind (and Chiquita, etc): http://olj.usc.edu/sections/departments/98_stories/citizen_073098.htm

The consensus among reporters and commentators seems to be that Gallagher & Co. were bad little children who deserved a good beating, and maybe one day the profession will recover if we all remember to always kneel to the military, the multinational corporations and our own amoral publishers.

Meta: I made huge progress on my portal drafts today. With luck I will post the betas tonight or tomorrow, comprising mainly the best weblog links sorted by category.

A closer look at the 'Black Orifice' hacking attack: http://slashdot.org/features/980730/0928237.shtml

The CULT OF THE DEAD COW (cDc) is the most influential group of hackers in the world. Formed in 1984, the cDc has done everything from publish the longest running e-zine on the Internet to diddling military networks around the globe.

Jerry Carroll does not disappoint: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/07/30/DD15389.DTL

"...America's Most Scandalous President." That would be Warren G. Harding, who made Bill look like a piker in the illicit affairs department. He sent his mistresses love letters and erotic poetry and sometimes communicated about intimate matters in code.

Good stuff in HoneyGuide

Great new Progressive Review:

In my own experience, Mr Starr is a trimming, limp-wristed procrastinator with the zeal of a plump sheep, who works part-time on the job, craves approval and bears the imprint of the last person who sat on him. .... But after years of ineffectual dithering, Kenneth Starr has at last got the bit between his teeth. Something must have nettled him...

I fell asleep before Drudge on PI the other night, but Obscure Store's linked the transcript already: [not real readable] http://www.abc.com/pi/forum/xscripts/980728.html

Matt: I waited two months. I went to knock on her door. She wouldn't talk to me. Finally -- [ Laughter ]
Eartha Kitt: Lewinsky's door?
Matt: Yeah.
Bill: She lives next to Bob Dole. [ Laughter ] Who's using Viagra. [ Laughter ]
Eartha: Wow!
Edie McClurg: Look out.
Bill: Did you see how high that leg went?
Edie: I saw. [ Laughter ]

LeCarre's best-of-the-century: http://www.suntimes.co.za:80/1998/07/26/news/news04.htm

Making his choice in The Telegraph, writer John le Carre asks: "When this terrible century is finally dragged bombing and polluting into the graveyards of history, what excuses will it make for itself along the way?" He finds the best answer - and his best book - in Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower (1966), a portrait of the world from 1890 to 1914. Le Carre describes Tuchman as a poet of history, an impassioned humanist whose breadth of understanding enabled her to kick down the arbitrary barriers between academic disciplines.

The Rats that dreams are made of: http://my.excite.com/news/r/980729/21/people-archerd

Tom Hanks is Scorsese's choice to play Dean Martin, John Travolta as Sinatra, Hugh Grant as Peter Lawford, Adam Sandler as Joey Bishop and Jim Carrey as Jerry Lewis.

Wed, Jul 29, 1998
This Day in Joyce History: In 1904, Gogarty's tender to rent the Tower was dated. In 1909, James (w/Giorgio) arrived in Dublin for the first time since 1904.
The subversive art of defacing baseball cards: http://www.abcnews.com/sections/us/DailyNews/baseballcards980729.html

"It's beyond graffiti. It's an attack on commerciality, it's an attack on the sports establishment and at the same time a tribute to all of that."

Geoff Duncan has tried to rethink email-list-archive design: http://db.tidbits.com/tb/tbtalk/ [TidBITS]

New New Scientist looks at a wild new rocket design: [study the 1000*700 gif linked at the bottom, first] http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980801/features.html

Even Goldin, one of Hudson's most vocal supporters, is not convinced that his Roton will succeed. But if it does, NASA would buy the Roton's launch services, he says. "It's going to shake up this aerospace industry that's been too dependent on the federal government."
And the need for appropriate highway design in the third world: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980801/forum.html

Yet, says Mohan, most Indian roads are still built for cars and have a lane system based on the width of a car. They are designed for motorised vehicles, which need clear roads for uninterrupted traffic flow, he says, rather than cyclists and pedestrians who need shady trees, kiosks offering drinks, food, bicycle repairs and so on, at shorter distances.

Multimedia-overkill fun: http://www.techserver.com/newsroom/ntn/info/072998/info12_18781_noframes.html

The software allows a user to select from a cast of characters created by 7th Level and insert the animation into other programs. The user can then then add dialog simply by recording a voice track with a microphone plugged into a PC.

Stephanie Tai on rec.arts.books: [Deja URL]

Hey, here's one person who wouldn't have read the Bible if it hadn't been for Gideon. :) Background: my parents are really really not religious. For weird reasons too (because it would take away from studying/working.) Till age 7, I hadn't read a peep of it, only knew there was this Bible thing that everyone else seemed to know about. So on every trip we went to, I would sneak the Bible into the bathroom and read it, bit by bit accumulated over various trips (all of which were parents' business trips.)
I remember coming across all the begat parts and thinking "Hey, maybe this was why my parents didn't want me to read this." Oh, reading the Bible was such an illicit thrill. The sex! The violence! The sneaking away in the bathroom!
Not sure this was the appreciation that they intended when distributing the Bibles to hotels, though. It was a remarkably similar feeling to sneaking away reading my father's Mad magazines.

A B-movie connoisseur's best-ever list: http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/news/980727/2.html

Evil Dead 2, Big Trouble in Little China, Ghostbusters, The Killer, Aliens, Predator, The Terminator, Road Warrior...

Overheard: caffeine drinks on hot days are okay-- you still get half the water in a cup of coffee, for example.

AtNY has smart stories but non-persistent URLs: http://www.atnewyork.com/viewpoin.htm

1. The Web drives prices down relentlessly
2. The Web creates killer consumers
3. The Web eliminates location advantage
4. The Web destroys traditional business relationships

Big business tries gimmicks to increase online sales: http://www.stlnet.com/postnet/news/pdtoday.nsf/Business/0063d82e7abe9c46862566500004393e?OpenDocument

Start bidding for a set of golf clubs at $400 "and people would bid it up to $440. But start it at $1 and hundreds of people will bid and it goes up to $500. It's the psychological element. They're not shopping, they're winning," said Kirk Loevner, Internet Shopping Network president, also at the conference.

Great-sounding antiquarian study: http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/paper/1998/0728/fea5.html [Explorator]

One can see immediately why everyone interested in the cultural history of 18th century Ireland must consult this book. It is as complete, as accurate and as entertaining a guide to the Dublin book trade as one could possibly need, particularly valuable because of the author's meticulous use of primary sources.
Nazca "UFO pix" damaged: http://augustachronicle.com/stories/072898/tec_124-6520.shtml [Explorator]

"We hope that time, wind and blowing sand will cover over the tire tracks on the lines," said Daniel Mantilla, director of Radio Sport in Nazca.
(Explorator is a daily archeology ezine posted to sci.archaeology.moderated.)

From the Progressive Review, anticipating a Starr-report floodgate:

In short, TPR's friendly tip to harried hacks: get off the White House lawn and into your clip files. The story has been there all along. . .

Something different: http://www.zdnet.com:80/pcmag/issues/1713/325692.htm

Simple, accessible, and effective, Catch The Web is absolutely essential if you're researching information for delivery to others. But even if you're organizing content for your own use, $39.95 is an incredibly small price to pay to organize your Web ramblings and to avoid searching again for information you remember you saw--but just can't remember where.

A rare voice condemning Powerball hype: http://www.desnews.com:80/edt/wu0z2l8k.htm

Eighty million one hundred thousand to one. Those are the odds of winning the $250 million prize. By comparison, the odds of freezing to death are only 3 million to one...

My original goal for the weblog project was to find good writers on the web. I've found tons of great writing, but very few writers whose names left an imprint. Jerry Carroll looks like a smart gossip columnist to me, though: [Archive URL, no fixed daily URL]

"Bill Clinton may be just a confession away from being the play-by-play guy for the Dallas Cowboys," says Argus Hamilton.

Lilith's little sister: http://www.mtv.com:80/news/headlines/980728/story9.html

Lisa Germano, Jane Siberry, Heart's Ann Wilson, Luscious Jackson's Kate Schellenbach, The Breeders' Josephine Wiggs, Mecca Normal's Jean Smith, Come's Thalia Zedek, Lourdes Perez, and Gail Ann Dorsey ... will all be on board for the 12-date tour, which kicks off on August 19 in Portland, Maine.

Meta: I'm feeling a need for a weblog/newspage maintainers mailinglist or chat forum. I will post some topics in our empty Deja forum, and if this is inconvenient for you mail me: http://www.dejanews.com/group/dejanews.members.soc.jorn.rw-weblog

Ginsberg annotates yesterday's match: [Deja URL]

I have no idea why Zia opened 1N here; I think he forgot that he and Michael had agreed to swith from their usual variable NTs to strong throughout. Anyway, Michael doesn't pick up on it and they stagger into 3H - which can't be touched. GIB1's bizarre play of the SQ is based on assumptions about Zia's strong NT (won't it ever learn?), but Zia doesn't know what to make of it and decides to just take a pitch on one of dummy's diamonds. GIB1 ruffs, however, and the defence gets a club, two diamonds, and a trump.

Burning Man preview in SF: [detailed!] http://www.sfgate.com:80/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/07/28/DD20440.DTL

"We're not trying to get 50,000 people out there; we're trying to get the right 15,000 people."
"People were handing money out their car windows at the site, after the event was over," says Harvey, "and that's not normal."

A slightly longer (?) summary of John Bayley on Iris Murdoch: http://www.smh.com.au:80/news/9807/28/text/features2.html

Bayley believes his wife's modesty and lack of narcissism, visibly manifested in her lack of care for her personal appearance, has prepared her ideally for her present condition.

Patrick O'Brian vs Forester/Hornblower: http://www.boston.com:80/dailyglobe/globehtml/209/Briny_bestsellers_prepare_to_do_bat.htm

To a far larger extent than with the Hornblowers, the O'Brians have attracted women readers - for the same reason, Lawrence said, "that they read Jane Austen." There is the same interest in the social customs and conventions of the day, and it's not surprising that O'Brian considers Austen the greatest English writer.

A book review of "Hubble Wars" about the chaotic Hubble-telescope infighting sets off an interesting flamewar arguing the book is full of errors: [Deja URL of full thread] [Deja URL of original review]

The net effect is that Hubble made useful observations for only 9% of its orbital period, and pointed much less accurately than its specification. Since longer exposures were also needed, the STSI found itself in the unenviable position of having allocated about ten times more observing time than Hubble could deliver: the world's astronomers were not impressed...
"...the TDRSS network is not owned and operated by NASA but by the shadowy Contel Corporation, a DoD contractor from whom NASA leases use of TDRSS (and whose CEO was reportedly killed in a little- publicized car bombing in Northern Virginia some years ago)."
One followup enumerates links between CIA satellite efforts and NASA, etc: [Deja URL]

-- US radioastronomy programs everywhere received operating funds from DoD and CIA to enable snooping on Soviet communications and radar
-- a reconsat was used to assess damage to Skylab
-- reconsat photos were used by the Ag Dept. to assess Soviet crop yields and advise US farmers on how to price their export crops
-- the Deep Space Network has occasionally been turned over to DoD use for communicating with both its own birds and snooping on Soviet ones
-- a CIA camera was used by a DEA aircraft in the mid-70s to search for pot

Tue, Jul 28, 1998
TV 2nite: Drudge on Politically Incorrect
Someday I'll figure out Lingua Franca's publication schedule. Here's a brainy book review about Roman sexuality: http://www.sevenbridgespress.com/lf/9807/inside.html [via Feed]

"Roman sexuality was a structuralist's dream," Parker asserts, and like all good structuralists, he's got a chart to prove it: His comes complete with an x-axis dedicated to orifices ("Vagina - Anus - Mouth") and a y-axis that consists of persons and attitudes (Male/Female, Active/Passive).
And the world expert on authorial attribution (eg Primary Colors, Unabomber): [long, brainy] http://www.sevenbridgespress.com/lf/9807/crain.html [Feed]

In this book, Foster argued that W.S.'s language was Shakespearean in its verbal quirks -- its unusual diction, frequency of certain words, choice of rhymes, high use of enjambment, pattern of word length, and habits of hyphenation.
When Oxford University Press rejected his manuscript on the elegy, the anonymous reader's report noted that it was axiomatic that authorship could never be proved on internal textual evidence alone, and external evidence was lacking. Foster thought he recognized the reviewer's biting style, so he wrote back. "Not only can you tell something by internal evidence alone," Foster averred, "but if this isn't Sam Schoenbaum, it's a very good imitation."
Foster believes that his Shaxicon database offers a new kind of evidence. The theory behind Shaxicon is that it's not only an author's common words that are beyond his conscious control. If studied as a set, his rare words, too, will mark him.
On closer analysis, it turned out that when rare words from an older play returned they tended to come from one or two speaking parts. Foster thinks Shaxicon pinpoints the roles Shakespeare himself performed.
Adapting a term first coined by Foster, Elliott and Valenza defined a badge as a word Shakespeare used more often than his contemporaries--sometimes only slightly more often. A fluke is a word he used less often. ... The test BoB5 counted the badges "the," "is," "to," "you," "he," "his," "your," "we," "him," "as," and "an" against the flukes "a," "sir," "I," "now," "I'll," "'tis," "all," "come," "her," and "she." The odd-sounding result: the elegy had too many of these badges and too few of the flukes. Its diction for these common words was too pronouncedly Shakespearean to be Shakespeare's.

A nifty design for picking the closest mirror site: http://www.mimesweeper.com/
(Sorry, service is not yet available to Kamchatka or Irkutsk! ;^)

Great issue of Obscure Store includes this guide to used-book shopping on the Web: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1998-07/28/039r-072898-idx.html

Secondhand booksellers love the Internet because it broadens their customer base enormously.
And Jim Jubak ties himself in knots trying to measure portals' real value: http://investor.msn.com/prospect/articles/jubak/774.asp?ID=774

Without including the cost of the Netscape deal, Excite spent $14.9 million on sales and marketing in the quarter and added 3 million new registrants, a 50% increase. Cost per new registrant: $4.96.

New today: My Netscape ...is a big yawn: [no newstracker equivalent] http://my.netscape.com/index.html

New Village Voice shows how USA Today prostitutes its logo: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/columns/31ledbetter.shtml

For the rest of the weeklong conference, USA Today's medical reporter, Steve Sternberg, had to endure colleagues and sources thrusting the "newspaper" at him and asking him whether his paper had sold out.
And Hentoff is furious at Clinton about China: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/columns/31hentoff.shtml

Soon after Clinton left China, the government arrested nine members of the fledgling Democracy Party. ... There is no indication the president will send these prisoners a message saying he feels their pain.
And websites spinning off books, movies, etc: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/cyber/31bunn.shtml

Duncan, known for her CD-ROM games for girls, like Chop Suey and Zero Zero, had already spent a month prepping Glamour for her usual format when she was offered cash from an enthusiastic investor to blow it up into a feature film.
And what Ben Stiller is up to: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/film/31lim.shtml

"When you parody something, you have to be interested enough to want to spend the time figuring out its nuances." Laughing, he quickly adds, "But I don't know how I'd feel if someone was making fun of me and saying that parody was a form of tribute. I was definitely the kid in high school who would dish it out and then freak out when somebody gave it back to me."

Old Science News on GIB, Chinook, Deep Blue, etc: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc97/8_2_97/Bob1.htm

To overcome the limitation imposed by incomplete information about card distribution, Ginsberg has programmed GIB to simulate play by dealing out a large number of potential hands for the other players, none of them containing the cards it holds. GIB then selects the playing strategy that works best on average.
Zia reneged on big bet in 1996: http://www.imp-bridge.nl/articles/The_GIB2Zone.html

...Then he is accosted by a man he's never seen before. "Mr. Mahmood, my congratulations; and incidentally, may I ask you something?" "But, of course," replies the always amiable Pakistani, "what's it about?" "It concerns a one-million-pound bet." The Pakistani grows pale. "What is your name, sir?," he immediately asks. "Matthew Ginsberg," says the man. Suddenly there's little left of the great Zia with his aura of invincibility. He cringes, and mumbles, "The bet is off!," and walks out of the room.
Ginsberg's pre-match evaluation: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=374974765

I spoke to Zia last night, and I have to tell you there was fear in the great man's eyes.
And all his latest posts to rec.games.bridge: [Messy Deja URL]
Details of today's play (no analysis yet): http://www.desjardins.org/david/gibmatch3/hands.txt
Stop press: Human slaughters computer despite "sexy play": http://www.cirl.uoregon.edu/ginsberg/gibnews.html [better URL when/if I find one]
I don't know the game, but I watched the match. World champion Zia won six of the first nine hands, but the computer GIB came back with four (3?) of the last five. Some notes and dialog:

It was reported that in a practice session yesterday, Zia had played "like a madman" to test the computer, and that Matt Ginsberg did some debugging afterwards. The screen display shows GIB1 and GIB2 as the Star Wars robots.
      zia: gib prepare to meet your maker
 
      zia: gib you are really ugly
 
      mattc [for gib]: ok, may the better lifeform win
Zia makes ca 1960s jokes about ugly dates, ugly mothers-in-law. The humans make two typos, requiring undo's which slow down GIB. Zia complains GIB has a screw loose.
      gib1: I think I've hung.  If so, skipping this hand might
         fix me.  You can say "simon says skip" to make us skip.
Zia frequently asks GIB to resign, but GIB persists (hoping for a human error, no doubt). In the tenth hand, GIB plays especially well:
      zia: sexy play gib
 
      zia: good defence by gib
And after his victory:
      zia: long live the human race
      zia: see you next year add a few more screws matt
      gib1: thanks for the game
(Apparently you can play against GIB anytime at OKBridge.)

Dull backgrounder on Excite doesn't mention My.Excite or NewsTracker! http://www.upside.com:80/texis/mvm/story?id=35ae3ef40

Dubbed the Web's "We try harder" portal, Excite might better be termed the "We spend more" site.

I've never surveyed NASA sites, but here's their news-for-just-folks site, I guess: http://www.ssl.msfc.nasa.gov/

New Metropolis (design zine) looks at knicknacks, motorcycles, color names, urban heat patterns, etc

Cool profile of cartoonist omits OK Soda story: http://www.sacbee.com:80/news/beetoday/newsroom/scene/072798/scene01.html

In the "Ghost World" movie, Cristina Ricci will play Enid Coleslaw (whose name is an anagram for Daniel Clowes). [Pic source]

US News's table of movie and tv versions of the 100-best novels: http://www.usnews.com:80/usnews/issue/980803/3books.htm

Internet as hologram: http://www.upside.com:80/texis/mvm/story?id=35a519d00

The central idea is to ask us all -- you, me and some hacker in Tibet -- to designate a portion of our hard drives as a safe haven for a sliver of the world's knowledge. In return, we get to deposit some of our own data into the Intermemory. Hard disks, floppies and other backup strategies are vulnerable to local disasters such as theft and fire, not to mention cataclysmic events. But the Intermemory should outlast almost anything, short of global annihilation.

Paradoxes of open-source success: [long, great overview] http://www.forbes.com:80/forbes/98/0810/6209094a.htm

"So let me get this straight," one IBM lawyer said. "We're doing a deal with . . . a Web site?"
Finally, the blue-chip giant scraped together a handful of the only currency that interested Apache's developers: a technical advance for the software - in programmer parlance, a hack. IBM programmers had figured out how to make Apache's software run faster on Microsoft's NT operating system. They offered to show their hack to the Apache gang and agreed to share future hacks as well. Done deal.
...at the same time, IBM scored huge coolness points with programmers writing software for the Internet.
[Mozilla:] Other improvements to the original poured in from all around the world over the next two weeks. In less than a month, a new version of the browser was posted on the project's Web site, ready for downloading.
Thinking back on those days, Stallman says: "It was a bit like the Garden of Eden." His eyes, intense and youthful as a college freshman's, shine out from behind a thicket of tousled hair and a bushy black beard. "It hadn't occurred to us not to cooperate," he recalls.
Freeware folk are simply people who chose to accumulate prestige rather than money.
"Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?"

Game-demo with CIH virus reformats many drives: [Messy URL]

As of Monday afternoon, Oltyan said eight to nine victims had identified themselves to him.

More XML-trials: http://nt.excite.com:80/news/bw/980727/lexmark-intl

The scope of this pilot is to demonstrate the use of a single customer interface for government purchasing agencies to access catalog information from several government catalogs. Lexmark's participation includes leading the development of common printer descriptions and specifications, providing database content about printers, and testing the completed system.
Lexmark and five other companies will also test and implement Smart-Card technologies to enhance user authentication, proper access and security.

Style games: http://washingtonpost.com:80/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-07/26/020l-072698-idx.html

To console himself, win her back, or perhaps make her jealous, he writes her 26 letters, each describing an affair with a well-known woman from literature. The letters, which make up the 26 chapters of the novel, are written in the style and mood of the source that inspired them

Airplanes with 'airbags': [pic from their site] http://my.excite.com/news/u/980727/19/tech-science-planechute

Mon, Jul 27, 1998
This Day in Joyce History: In 1905, Giorgio Joyce (son) was born.
TV 2nite: Tori on Dave (raccoon eyemakeup, dull performance)
After a too too long hiatus, Lisa Rea/Pea/Higgins reappears on ark under her own name (more or less): [Deja URL]

Also, in your chest cavity, right across from where your heart is, do you think that's only meat in there? No. Pirate. A small throbbing pink pirate, all blustery and mean.
A LisaPea fan archive: http://www.angelfire.com/la/carlosmay/LisaP.html

Feminist-factors engineering: http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,24648,00.html?pfv

The first projects the institute will likely tackle are personal digital assistants, such as 3Com's PalmPilot. "None of these devices address that women keep track of many people's lives, not just their own," Borg said.

McLibel update: http://www.foxnews.com/js_index.sml?content=/news/international/0727/i_ap_0727_68.sml

The appeals court will try to get an old copy of the transcript from the trial judge, a spare copy from McDonald's and then get the defendants to pay a much lower sum - about $1,650 - for a third copy on computer disk.

For $149.99 you can live just like Bill Gates: http://www.x10.com/quicktour.htm

6:00 AM: Joe's radio turns on to wake him up. The radio is controlled by a Mini Timer that automatically turns on the bedroom light and turns on the radio. The temperature in the room is 65 degrees thanks to his Thermostat Set-Back control that started to warm the room 15 minutes before Joe woke up.
8:30 PM: Joe, sensing the need to reassure Stacy, comes upstairs and starts his ActiveHome "Romance Macro." Details about this Macro are private to Joe and Stacy.
(I hear they bought an X-10 AESOP! (Sat, below) ;^/

Here's a group that seems to be kickin' major XML ass: [nice table at end] http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/news/0727/27rose.html

Within two years, RosettaNet developers hope to define everything in the computer industry's supply chain -- from the technical specifications of the components in a laptop computer to spare parts and the size of the boxes in which products are shipped.

We already glow in the dark!?! http://www.warwick.ac.uk/news/pr/97

If, by unlucky chance, one of these microwave pollutants matched one of the key microwave patterns of the human body the resultant resonance effect may be quite dangerous. In Russia, where this knowledge of biophysics is more widely known, manufacturers of microwave emitting devices (such as leaking microwave ovens) have safety precautions 1000 times more stringent than those in the UK and US - just in case such an effect could occur.

Same old Futurama preview, but with a jpg: http://www.mrshowbiz.com/news/todays_stories/980727/groening072798.html

Conglomerates co-opt fan sites: http://www.adage.com/interactive/articles/19980727/article4.html

One of Knight-Ridder's biggest successes so far was developed by Alice Sky, Web editor at The Wichita (Kan.) Eagle, after someone gave her a Beanie Baby doll in 1996. ... "I asked someone if this was too cheesy for Wichita Online and was told nothing was too cheesy," Ms. Sky said.

Nader to Gates: http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,24628,00.html?st.ne.ni.pfv

"Warren Buffett, possibly the world's No. 2 rich person, is your dear friend and fellow card player," the letter continued. "Let me suggest that you team up with him to sponsor, plan, and lead a conference [with] billionaires and multibillionaires on the subject of national and global wealth disparities and what to do about it."
Gates had indicated at that time that he was open to communications with Nader -- by email "he smilingly suggested," according to the consumer activist. (Nader had offered a snail-mail address with a post office box.)

Grrr: I think easy.to/remember (6 July below) has started selling my name to spammers.

New "NY Review of Books" looks at Whitewater, Nixon, Indonesia, American Jews, Nietzsche's final days, Lani Guinier, more TWA800, and this great essay on playwright/actor Wallace Shawn: [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998081318R

The two aspects of his public persona seem absurdly incompatible, almost as if Samuel Beckett had made regular guest appearances on The Brady Bunch or The Lone Ranger.
Shawn's whole point is that the darkness is inextricable from the popular entertainment, that wrapped up in the smooth consolations of prime time is a core of utter cruelty.
"And the faces that waited inside that blank face [the teevee] pulled me toward them, pulled my hand toward the knob to turn on the screen, and then toward my lamp to turn out the light."
...much of what he has to say is broadly similar to the currents of thought that sprang from the New Left thirty years ago. What matters in Shawn's work, though, is that he has found a way of giving those concerns dramatic immediacy.
Wallace Shawn, his father, and his grandfather could be the subject of a trilogy of novels, telling the story of America from the thrusting energy of the self-made man in the first generation to the absorption into the East Coast establishment in the next and finally to the rage, disgust, and disillusionment of the third.
"I grew up on the Upper East Side, and when I was ten years old, I was rich, I was an aristocrat, riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music."
Shawn implicitly acknowledged the failure of the political avant-garde theater from which he emerged. He dropped the pretense that those presenting the play are smarter, less compromised, less deeply implicated in the structures of injustice and exploitation, than those who have come to watch.
Iago is perhaps the strongest example of how an audience's moral impulses and its theatrical instincts can be set at odds with each other.
...he had, for the first decade of his playwrighting career, "generously shown on the stage my interior life as a raging beast, but my exterior life as a mediocre human being and dilettante of normal intelligence remained unchronicled."
"The photograph contains its history - the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all those people - the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer - who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked."
More effectively than any other contemporary political playwright, Shawn grapples with the problem of an audience that already knows all about exploitation and violence but that needs, for its own well-being, to maintain a civilized distance from that knowledge.
And one quote from the piece on American Jews: [p4 of 5] [Messy URL]

"It is immoral to proclaim the Palestinians to be interlopers in the land that God gave to the Jews. Those who act on this assertion have forgotten that God gave the Holy Land to the Jews on condition that the stranger be protected, "for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt."

Online-gaming sites change direction: http://www.atnewyork.com/feat346.htm

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the golden age. As it usually does, the collective Internet consumer audience resisted conventional wisdom and hesitated, not buying into high, per-minute fee based games playing as quickly as the fast money hoped and forcing companies with high expectations to re-engineer their business models.
No single kingdom has all the tools to conquer the virtual world easily so players will have to cooperate with one another through chat or e-mail. And although players can play simultaneously, each player takes a turn so there are less problems with scale and no problems with latency.
Dang, I gotta start charging for this log! ;^/ [1st story on inconvenient mutistory page] http://www.atnewyork.com/news344.htm

The five-year-old company, headed by former ABC exec Alan Ellman, amasses news and information from sources like UPI, Business Wire, and PRNewsWire, then custom filters, formats, and distributes it...
A company taking 10 stories a day from IC's wire services would pay an average of $1200 to $1600 a month, according to Morgan.

I knew the band's name came from mythology, but I never paid attention to why the Dead were Grateful until I read this book review: [Deja URL]

Thur glanced up, then his gaze was riveted by what lay in the shadows above the rafters... the nude body of a gray-bearded man, close-wrapped in the same sort of gauze as the sausages... His skin was shrivelled and tanning in the smoke. "Pico was right," Thur observed after a moment's stunned silence. "Your wife does smoke the most unusual hams."

I guess "atnewyork" goes on my check-daily list: ttp://www.atnewyork.com/
(NYC seems to be a whole different net.culture!??)
If you have Win95, this RealPlayer helper-app sounds like a genre-killer: http://www.atnewyork.com/news345.htm

We have slogged through the logs to find the most popular stations. Here are the top three:
1. NASA TV
2. Bloomberg TV
3. NYPD Police Scanner
A spectacularly hip (but surely incomplete) timeline of the ancestors of webcasting, by JM Hobbs: http://www.atnewyork.com/view345.htm [via Contentious?]

In 1986, Pauline Oliveros used a massive ham radio setup to send the sound of her accordion to the moon and back.
In 1995, I transmitted the voices of David Hykes and the Harmonic Choir, performing at The Kitchen in New York, to Le Thoronet Abbey in France, and brought the reverberation of the Abbey back to New York in real time, essentially transporting an acoustic space. ... the 70-millisecond delay inherent in the phone transmission ... closely duplicated the natural pre-delay of the Abbey itself.
Hobbs's diy multitrack audio experiment is way cool: [lo-tech, surprisingly lo-bandwidth] http://www.artswire.org/~jmax/phaseframe.html

Public subsidies for nonprofit websites? [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/07/27feature.html

The fact that the Web Development Fund's first round of funding drew more than 500 proposals, says Weiss, is evidence that a certain type of content is no longer being commercially subsidized on the Web.
In the longer term, he hopes to steal a page from the portal playbook and aggregate all of the indie sites to create a supersite for Web auteurs.
And here's a nicely idealistic essay by the WDF's founder: http://www.atnewyork.com/view346.htm

...Who spoke these idealistic words? Howard Rheingold, the virtual community guru? Stacy Horn, the founder of Echo? Al Gore? None of the above. It was David S. Pottruck, President and Co-CEO of The Charles Schwab Corporation, accepting this year's GII Award for innovation in Web commerce.

Alex Suter on ark:
      > But what about your colon?  One of the kibologists has
      > a Starbucks in his, so it must be well over 100 degrees.
That would be me. It's currently a steamy 101 degrees in my colon, which is a thousand year record temperature. The upside is that my rectal Starbucks is now selling many more Frappacinos. The downside is the vibrations from the blender is making it hard to concentrate on work.

Here's a NewsHub-like page for breaking Internet news: [annoyingly frequent refresh] http://www.newslinx.com/ [via Contentious?]

I hacked a nice local-newspaper search-form for my new media.literate portal-page: [messy draft] http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/smart/media.html#local
(Feel free to View Source and clip these embedded forms for your own pages.)

The search engine "Ask Jeeves" gave me a very odd set of answers to the quesion, "online newspapers listed by state" [Messy Jeeves URL]
(And then it hid the URL of the one I picked, under an obnoxious ad-banner frame.)

Resource for media-research: Vanderbilt's searchable summaries of network news for the last 30 years are only ten days behind: http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/cgi-bin/all.cgi?YEAR=98&MONTH=7&DAY=17
      1998.07.17 CALIFORNIA / WHALE WATCHING
      5:55:50-5:58:30 . . . . . Friday . . . . . NBC 
 
      (Studio: Tom Brokaw) Report introduced. 
 
      (Los Angeles: Mike Boettcher) Large numbers of whales off
      California coast reported; explanation for appearance of
      whales given; whales shown surfacing off Santa Barbara.
      [Fisherman Fred BIKO - says there are more whales than he
      has seen before.] [Whale watchers Christine ANDERSON,
      Veronica MASTERS - describe seeing whales.]
Don't miss: Behind the scenes at Nerve: [very upbeat interview] http://olj.usc.edu/sections/features/98_stories/qanda_field.htm

We have 30,000 [non-paying] members, and are hopeful that a good portion of them will join our community space, the NerveCenter, when it launches this fall.
Nerve's book will be published this September, and we're launching the Nerve Boutique this fall -- in it you'll find a range of stuff that any good hedonist should enjoy, like sheepskin rugs, flasks, Twister sets, silk pajamas and pipes disguised as lipstick cases.
When Word [the webzine] was shut down, the press corps got so excited because they had this new -- albeit depressing -- angle. I read about it in the New York Times. I'd never read about Word in the Times before (though there was a helluva story in their agenda to proletarianize the essay).
Still, it's absolutely true that the tech-news-search sites are making all the advertising dollars. Now that we've figured that out, we simply don't rely on advertising to be our sole source of income.
We've managed to attract a fair number of mainstream advertisers, like Hearst New Media, Bantam Doubleday Dell, CBS Sportsline and CD Now, but we still don't have a liquor advertiser. I think the combination of naked people and the Internet is still scary for them, but I dare them to prove me wrong.
Yes, I love Richard Kern's glam girls. They definitely have the Nerve sensibility. We even chose a Kern shot for cover of our book. They're probably the closest thing to soft porn we run on Nerve, but they're so damn good, they transcend wankability.

Decent detailed look at how Amazon works: http://www.seattletimes.com/news/local/html98/amzn_072698.html [OSRR]

Although Bezos incorporated his fledgling business as Cadabra.com, he quickly discovered that people thought he was saying "Cadaver.com," and changed the name to Amazon, the Earth's longest river.
Each book contains a bar code that is scanned by hand, and then placed on a bookshelf.
The people who buy CDs generally make less money than book buyers, and are less likely to use credit cards, said Rick Ayre, Amazon.com's vice president and executive editor.

Autistic woman builds a better abbatoir: http://www.forbes.com:80/forbes/98/0706/6201086a.htm

Grandin believes that her condition has made her more aware of suffering in other creatures and of behavioral principles and quirks that have eluded formally trained engineers.
Instead of running a straight line to the slaughterhouse, Grandin's chutes curve and circle to take advantage of the cattle's natural herding instincts.

Sun, Jul 26, 1998
This Day in Joyce History: In 1907, Lucia Anna Joyce (daughter) was born.
New Science News does greenhouse effect, and heart muscle

Book review of world poetry anthology: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/enter/072698/enter11_19581_noframes.html

These wise words about art and artists come from an anonymous 15th-century Mesoamerican poet: "...The carrion artist: works at random, sneers at the people, makes things opaque, brushes across the surface of the face of things, works without care, defrauds people, is a thief."

IMAX moves mainstream: http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,3360,00.html

Responding to the growing number of IMAX-capable theaters, studios are looking into ways to capitalize, with stars like Jim Carrey and Danny DeVito reportedly showing particular interest

How the Vatican investigates purported miracles: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/7/27/13098.html

For miracles today - and the current Pope John Paul II has endorsed a thousand sainthoods, more than all those endorsed by his predecessors this century combined - tend to be strictly medical in nature, involving recovery from symptomatically eccentric conditions, and the consultant's laboratory is the new arena in which the battle for the hearts and soul of believers is fought.

I've done a lot more polishing to my literate-fun page: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/smart/fun.html

Language Watch: Some female readers of alt.fan.unabomber call themselves "Unabombettes" [Deja URL]

Upside looks at net marketing for music: [multipage, this link is to p3] http://www.upside.com/texis/mvm/story?id=35b384a10

Not only did that give Bowie great free publicity for his Web site, but the company came away with an invaluable asset, one that gives the Internet a huge advantage over retail stores--the names and e-mail addresses of 200,000 David Bowie fans.
The RIAA has responded aggressively to this new piracy threat, asking universities to crack down on students who are taking advantage of their high-speed Internet connections to swap MP3 music files. The organization is also taking offenders to court and using an automated Web crawler and a team of investigators to conduct regular surveillance of the Net.
One [watermarking] technique is even retributive--if you were to illegally post a song on the Web, you'd also be posting the credit card number you bought it with.

Brill's controversial review of MonicaGate coverage is online in full: [multipage, anti-Starr] http://www.brillscontent.com/partner/pressgate1.html [OSRR]

From: http://anacam.com/analogs/analogn.html

"Ms. Voog's breasts are round, high and firm looking." --the New York Times

Sat, Jul 25, 1998
This Approximate Day in Joyce History: In 1898 (100 years ago), James saw the bird-girl wading (Portrait)

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures, of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like featherings of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither: and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.
--Heavenly God! cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy.
He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.
Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!

The revenge of the Club of Rome strikes back: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/7/26/13026.html

This time, however, the warnings are being sounded by a small group of international petroleum geologists who have built new mathematical models to predict peak production and ensuing decline. Their model is based on a formula devised in the Fifties by geologist M. King Hubbert and used with extreme accuracy throughout the oil industry to predict peak yield in individual fields.

How Greenpeace almost joined the Nuclear Club: http://cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9807/25/RB002069.reut.html

But the plan to take possession of the nuclear bomb in East Germany in 1991 fell through when the officer, who had sought payment of $250,000, was posted away from the area after a security shake-up, a Greenpeace spokesman said.

Observation: The reason portals aren't like tv channels is that nobody has much loyalty to a channel, only to a show. So portals are more like tv shows ...with infinitely many niche-markets possible.

A cool quote on an overheated page: http://deoxy.org/pc.htm

"What Reagan did was he lowered the taxes on upper income people, and then he didn't stop spending for the Pentagon and what-have-you. So he went back to those same rich people, and borrowed the money back, and paid them interest on their loans, where before he got the money for nothing in taxes. So that's just the way the rip-off works." Jerry Brown

Two dozen 8-minute Michael Parenti RealAudio clips are now available: [He's way more impassioned than Chomsky.] http://www.vida.com/parenti/peoplesRadio.html

We hear a lot about terrorism, but the greatest purveyors of terrorism today are the CIA and the national security state, agencies that train, equip, and finance some of the most repressive right-wing regimes in the world in order to make the world safe for global investors and the free market.

CIH virus scheduled to destroy Win95 machines tomorrow: http://www.msnbc.com:80/news/182929.asp

"This bug kills machines dead," said the firm's product manager. The company's machines had been infected by the variant that activates on the 26th of every month, alternatively referred to as W95.CIH.1909 and W95.CIH1.4.

The Interface Hall of Shame salutes Win95: [long, brilliant] http://www.iarchitect.com/msoft.htm [Slashdot]

While we are on the subject of the logo requirements, we found a number of examples in which Windows95 itself fails to act as a "good Windows citizen", and might just fail the logo requirements.
The fact that Microsoft has made an unwieldy cascading menu the centerpiece of their new operating system convinces us that their Usability Lab no longer employs interface designers or human factors engineers.

The chocolate info-war: http://nt.excite.com:80/news/pr/980723/dc-safe-moral-food

"The only shortage among cocoa producers is a shortage of the truth -- and the sad truth is that cocoa producers are public enemy number one for the world's rainforests."

12th century nun hits charts: http://www.mostnewyork.com:80/NOW/072598/CULTURE/63960.htm

A trancelike reworking by vocalist Jocelyn Montgomery and filmmaker/performer David Lynch, "Lux Vivens," will be out Aug 25.

A peek at Windows2002: http://www.zdnet.com:80/anchordesk/story/story_2348.html

Digital Nervous System
Total Cost of Ownership
Deeper Intelligence

A little more on Futurama: http://www.post-gazette.com:80/magazine/19980725owen5.asp

"I love 'Star Wars' and 'Star Trek,' however I wanted to do a TV show in which the problems of the universe are not solved by militarism guided by New Age spirituality,"

Ouch: http://www.smh.com.au:80/news/9807/25/text/pageone10.html

Aesop (Automated Endoscopic System for Optimal Positioning) is fitted with the latest in voice-recognition technology, and follows the surgeon's instructions.

10am-noon CDT: This is Hell funny progressive radio show: http://www.wnur.org/content.html [RealAudio, live]
And their This is Hell homepage: http://homepage.interaccess.com/~saaf/

Raconteur extraordinaire Jeff Dorchen frankly delivers "The Moment of Truth." The Dorch insists that this is the only time during the broadcast day in which the truth is actually heard.

A huge compilation of showbiz gossip, sorted by stars' names: [Messy URL]
John December has been a portal for years: [smart, bland] http://www.december.com/web/top.html
My net.wisdom section (which is what's been preoccupying me) will be rather like his: [new name, new URL] http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/netlit.html
First section is "fun": [vanilla-formatted draft] http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/smart/fun.html

Fri, Jul 24, 1998
This Day in Joyce History: In 1886, Charlie Joyce (brother) was born.
Open-source Mozilla facing rocky road? http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/news/0720/24emoz.html

"I'm hoping ... outside ideas will start making their way into the product, rather than all of us only working on ideas generated out of Netscape."

One-size search-engines don't fit all: http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980724S0012

"Local is one of our top three search categories," Melcher said.

Andy Warhol's unbleached roots: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/7/25/12800.html

Helena Bosnovickova is now Andy Warhol's closest living relative in Mikova, a village of 200 souls. She and her forester husband, Juraj, still live in the wattle and daub house where Andy's mother was born.

A simple overview of the Chernobyl robot: [incl video] http://www.abcnews.com:80/sections/tech/DailyNews/pioneer980723.html
Dan Strychalski on MS Word's toolbar: (chf)

A tiny misstep with the mouse and the toolbar disappears. Put the toolbar back and commands in it disappear from the menus. Put the commands back in the menus and a key sequence that previously called up a dialog box via a menu now lands you on a drop-down list on the toolbar.

Thu, Jul 23, 1998 (New Moon at 8:45 CDT)
This Day in Joyce History: In 1901, James finished translating Hauptmann's "Before Sunrise". [Info]
Surprising 60s rock gossip about Byrd Gene Clark: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/7/24/12593.html

Signing up with Asylum, he began work on No Other. It cost $100,000 to record, which in 1974 was a vast budget even for a top-selling act, let alone a singer-songwriter who hadn't had a hit record in an eight-year solo career. It brought together two of the great grass-roots musical forms of America, country and gospel, mixing them with soul, funk and rock to produce a breathtakingly fluid and complete sound.

Drudge's editorial on Fox Files showed great promise!

Something I never knew about the Well: http://www.examiner.com/skink/skinkJuly13.html

The Well is the best resource for effective television watching. You can search its database for conversations about your favorite shows and, even better, see who's on-line and available to discuss in real-time what you're watching in TV time.

Finally a detailed review of the GameBoy camera: http://www.streettech.com/todaysTech.html [Skink]

Photos can be modified by painting them with a brush or pencil tool and adding white, gray or black pixels to the image. Painting is like using an Etch-A-Sketch, but not enough control is available to get very good results.
Like the Fisher-Price PixelVision camera, which was released as a toy, but eventually adopted by artists for its funky low-res appeal, the Game Boy Camera and Printer might interest adults with similar sensibilities.

New The Nation (finally) has zillions of essays on the politics of sports, eg equal opportunities for women:

It has been my generation's great good fortune to grow up in the era of Title IX. Never before has a single law made it possible for so many previously disfranchised people to have so much fun.

The Skink's latest column has a great list of anti-portals: http://www.examiner.com/980712/0712skink.shtml

In a new Guardian Online this piece on activist ISPs: http://online.guardian.co.uk/theweb/901178042-amnesty.html

Christian Aid became the first well-known charity to become an ISP, six months ago. SurfAid, operated by Global Internet, an ISP based in London, earns the charity �12 a year per Net member, with �7,000 made so far.
And some tidbits about Salon's managing editor: http://online.guardian.co.uk/theweb/901178238-weir.html

For the past three years, until a few months ago, he was in charge of Wired magazine's electronic content. Shortly before the new age publisher decided to slim down its staff late last year, Weir was headhunted by Netscape ... which offered him a telephone number salary to manage news content on its redesigned Web site, Netcenter.
And three short CD-ROM reviews (cricket, EB, and voice recognition): http://online.guardian.co.uk/reviews/901178718-revcd.html

However, inquiries to Britannica revealed that another edition, without sound and video clips, was being prepared to run on all the common operating platforms, from Mac System 7.5 to Windows NT. And here it is.
And an actual intelligent commentary on portals: http://online.guardian.co.uk/theweb/901179958-portals.html

"The cold, hard truth is that portals serve no purpose beyond collecting a set of links to information you may or may not care about."

The preceding quote is from Net Skink, who has a huge archive of topnotch writings: [multipage] http://www.bossanova.com/rebeca/clips/index.html

Me2Hoo: I'm still trying to diddle the tables and fonts for my portal page by hand. Netscape's display-logic is ridiculous!

The transcript of Koko the gorilla on AOL chat is really interesting: http://www.envirolink.org/kokotranscript.html [HG]

HaloMyBaby: What does "fake" mean to her?
DrPPatrsn: She knows that what I'm saying hasn't happened yet.

Cringely's post-mortem on "Plane Crazy": [multipage, dumb en-passant links] http://pbs.org/cringely/main2.html

I was trying to design an airplane, build it using untested techniques, and power it with an untested engine. To perform one of these feats would have been enough.
(The show has stuck with me rather strongly. When I was 12 I tried to build a complex model plane, and it was also a disaster that I ended up smashing pathetically. I was only 12, though...)

A skeptical look at portal design: [follow the link to Derek Powazek's portal!] http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/13679.html [SN]

Nielsen is not a fan of the directory model. "In the attention economy, there are two philosophies: You can either act as a colonial power who treats the users' time as an exploitable resource that should be strip mined, or you can treat it as the ultimate ... resource ... to be conserved."

Groening's new toon, Futurama: http://www.accessatlanta.com:80/life/news/1998/07/23/surfer.html

He said the new series will be filled with the pop culture of the future, just as "The Simpsons" is in the present. "The No. 1 show on TV is called `The Mass Hypnosis Hour,' " he said. "It's on Fox, no doubt."

How Hollywood Stock Exchange makes money: [short] http://www.variety.com/article.asp?articleID=1117478722

The Web site also produces a revenue stream for its owners by selling what amounts to powerful market research data to movie studios and other interested buyers, said Burns. The patterns of investment by the thousands of players provide useful information about public awareness levels for new films as well as anticipated box office takes.

A long, thorough review of Mitnick's situation: http://www.msnbc.com/news/178825.asp

In July, Mitnick sat down in front of the laptop, inserted a CD onto which the first batch of data had been transferred, and flipped the "on" switch, his first encounter with what was formerly the centerpiece of his existence -- a computer -- since he was imprisoned in early 1995.

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SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: The Robot Wisdom Pages include far more text than anyone could be expected to read online, so within the next few months we hope to offer most of it in a $20 hardcopy edition-- some two megabytes of text in a 240-page, large-size format, divided four ways between James Joyce, artificial intelligence, internet culture/ hypertext design, and miscellaneous topics. If you'd like to be informed by email when this becomes available, please send me email with the words 'hardcopy list' as the subject or in the body. [More on the hardcopy edition]