Robot Wisdom WebLog Aug-Sept98waxing

Robot Wisdom WebLog for Aug-Sept 1998 (waxing)

Sun, Sep 6, 1998 (Full Moon)

Sat, Sep 5, 1998
Meta: Trying to figure out what Austin Bunn disliked about my page design, I reset my monitor to ~72dpi... and quickly added another CENTER tag to the front matter. Any other suggestions?
Correction: A reader points out Iridium is Motorola's, not Microsoft's (yesterday, below). Bill Gates helped fund Teledesic, the next generation of satellite blankets.

Hitchens on Mailer: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/9/6/20224.html

I noticed, paging compulsively through this intensely pleasurable retrospective, that he had also been inordinately prescient about the collapse of Communism (in 1966) about Nixon's opening to China (in 1968) and about the abject hollowness of Bill Clinton (in 1992): "Billy could cry for others as quickly as another man zips up his pants. Of course, Billy's butt was owned by fat cats. Probably why his other part got inflamed so often."
It certainly must have cost him something to reprint the transcript of the 1971 Dick Cavett Show, on which he appeared with Gore Vidal and Janet Flanner to discuss attitudes towards womanhood. Mailer's subsequent resolution was never again to do TV while flown with drink: a lesser man might have changed his name, undergone plastic surgery and left the country with a Panamanian passport.

Matt Drudge in caps-lock mode: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

IT HAS BEEN LEARNED THAT PROSECUTOR KEN STARR HAS A SECRET WHITE HOUSE SOURCE WHO HAS BEEN PROVIDING A ROAD MAP FOR THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL'S INVESTIGATION OF THE PRESIDENT!

This depressing analysis of the paradoxes of famine relief also clearly explains who's who in the Sudan: http://www.guardian.co.uk/gweekly/toolis.html

The systematic diversion of aid has become part of the standard operating conditions of being in the "field". Agencies work on the principle of "neutralism", treating killers and victims as equals and calling for a ceasefire.
A significant amount of food aid was stolen, and it is obvious to aid workers that some children were receiving triple rations. "Whenever I see a fat kid, a little buddha, come through the line, I want to scream," says one MSF worker.
If our goal really is the relief of the suffering of the people of Sudan, then we might as well be spending tens of millions of dollars on arming the rebels, which might, at least, force the Khartoum regime to the conference table, and so help bring the war -- and thus the famine -- to a conclusion. Or else we should stop pretending that we care what happens in Sudan.

Quantum leap in realism in Tomb Raider 3: [multi multi multi page preview compares 13 TR-style games] http://www.gamespot.com/features/tombrobbers/tomb0032.html

9:30am - 10:30am This is Hell live RealAudio funny progressive radio show (starts earlier than usual because of sports programming). Quotes from last week:

Chuck: What do you think the War of the Week is this week-- would you vote Serbian-Kosovar war, or would you vote the Congolese civil war?
Jeff: I still think it's the class war, as always.
...It is clear that the late Supreme Court Justice Louis F. Powell was certainly biased in one regard-- he was biased in favor of a system of power in which economically and socially privileged white heterosexual men make decisions about how everyone else lives or dies.

I'm reading thru the back issues of the Guardian's millennial history, and hope to follow this interesting project daily. The URL changes daily, but I'll try to maintain a link, above: http://www.guardian.co.uk/millennium/archive.html

Perhaps the healthiest feature of the Anglo-Saxon diet was that it was sugar-free (they used honey instead). Vegetables were puny; bread was often made from grain mixed with poisonous seeds, and few people could afford meat, though fish was more plentiful. Still, the English liked a good feast, and by the eleventh century elaborate rules of etiquette had evolved. Women were even allowed to sit at table
Even by the barbarous standards of the times, the behaviour of Emperor Basil II of Byzantium after his 1014 battle with Bulgarian Czar Samuel, was downright disgusting. The Byzantine forces had surrounded and defeated the Bulgars, 15,000 of whom were taken prisoner on the banks of the River Strymon. Basil then directed that the entire force should be blinded, with one man in every hundred left with one eye to guide the others home. Czar Samuel was so shocked that he promptly died.
[1016] In Cairo, the increasingly odd Fatimid Caliph, al-Hakim, abruptly proclaimed his own divinity. It was not, as it turned out, an act of empty vanity: his followers went on to found the small, mysterious and very vigorous Druze sect, which still preserves and fiercely defends its separate identity in the Levant.
[1016] While Europeans were living in wattle and daub hovels, and struggling with the intricacies of building in stone, the Chandela dynasty of central India was supervising the construction of one of the most breathtaking monuments of all time: the Kandariya Mahedeva temple at Khujuraho. Built in cream sandstone, with a central tower more than 100 feet high, the structure was to soar over all the other temples and shrines in the sprawling religious complex. It was also to be possibly the sexiest artifact of the millennium, featuring hundreds of yards of galleries with elegantly carved representations of the gods, engaged in every variety of sexual athletics known to humanity - and a few more besides.
[1026] Innovations: "Thu our father, thee art on heavenum, say thine name holyod." Saxon, Norse, British and other elements - even the first intrusions of Norman French - were beginning to fuse into the English language.
[1028] In Rome, Pope John XIX, who had bribed and politicked his way to an office for which he was distinctly unqualified, turned out to be quite able. Though he did not pursue the vigorous reforms instituted by his late brother, Pope Benedict VIII, he was something of a moderniser. He summoned to Rome an already famous monk, Guido of Arezzo, who had devised the doh-ray-me scale, and encouraged him to spread his musical knowledge among the clergy.
Throughout Europe there was a rising tide of panic, set off by the somewhat notional 1000th anniversary of the death of Christ, in 1033. The belief that the millennium of the crucifixion would somehow bring about the end of the world was reinforced by dreadful events in France, where spectacular thunderstorms devastated crops and led to widespread famine.
[1034] The chosen heir was Harthacanute, who had inherited all his father's vindictiveness, currently in Denmark resisting the resurgent Norwegians. Harold Harefoot staked his claim in England, upon which Emma denounced him as an impostor - a cobbler's son who had been smuggled into the palace in a warming-pan.
Braised fennel with ginger, griddled trout with herbs, summer fruit, honey and hazelnut crumble... some Saxon recipes sound suspiciously like dishes found in Islington today. But such treats, one imagines, were not for the common folk.

Here's a huge archive of weird documents from the early history of Britain: [multipage] http://britannia.com/history/docs/

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Fascinating (and massive) 52-part account of history covering the years 1 through 1154 AD from the point of view of the Anglo-Saxons. This is the COMPLETE TEXT.
Annales Cambriae, c. 970 The tenth century Annals of Wales containing two interesting references to King Arthur, which have been taken by some to be proof of his historicity.

ZDNet (!?) has a correspondent at Burning Man: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/zdnn_lggraph_display/0,3442,2134777,00.html

By midday Thursday, 71 media teams had arrived, and more people will continue to flood in through the weekend.
Thursday featured a game called FireBall. "The game is not unlike rugby," its organizers explain, "except that the ball is on fire."

Fri, Sep 4, 1998
Dang. The Guardian started a History of the Millennium a couple of weeks back, doing two years per day: http://www.guardian.co.uk/millennium/day1.html [Explorator]

The most authoritative scholars generally agree that at the dawn of the Second Millennium, there were 1.5 to 2 million people in what is now known as Great Britain. The vast majority lived in tiny settlements and London. London, the only city of any significance, had diminished from its Roman heyday (when it had 100,000 residents) to just 12,000 or so.

Sounds pretty cheap to me: http://www.urlwire.com/newsarchive/090498.html

For the last five weeks, Rough Cut.com has hosted the Screenplay Challenge, a ten week online round-robin screenwriting project that allows contributors to continue an original screenplay started by professional screenwriter... Each week, a winner is selected from the submissions and posted online. The winners receives a weekly prize of $100.00 and the opportunity to win a state-of-the-art laptop to continue their screenwriting endeavors.

If you thought Microsoft was ubiquitous before, just wait till Sept 23: http://www.flatoday.com/space/today/index.htm

Charming controversy over Midwestern interactive artists: [multipage] http://www.westword.com/1998/090398/feature2-1.html [OSRR]

Designed by a Utah agro-artist, it's a complex work of wonder, with three miles of trails detailing a stegosaurus, a cursive-script "Colorado" header and a border of head-spinning angles and turns.
The Swets began by planting a dense grid of corn rows instead of the usual parallel ones. Then, agro-artist Brett Herbst staked out the field and marked his pattern with green dye. When the stalks were a foot high, weed killer was applied along the pattern of the dye. The result, after the dead corn is trampled down, is an intricate, orderly pattern.
"I've never been in a corn maze," Pedas admits, "but if you get kids that are somewhat excited about the maze and they become dehydrated, they could become fatigued." And as for traffic issues, he says, "we wanted them to give us a traffic assessment done by a traffic engineer, to tell us whether this would be a problem or not. They didn't give us that information."

Feel the burn: http://www.mirror.co.uk/stories/F0409804.html [OSRR]

The US leader sensed a chance to improve his image with a heart-rending picture of him cradling the little girl born just two days after the bombing. But Nicola and partner Michael Mulholland went on Richard and Judy's ITV show This Morning instead. Nicola told viewers: "It doesn't matter that I have missed Bill Clinton. I'm delighted to be here." This Morning insiders said the parents felt that "dirty Bill" was not the kind of person they wanted their child seen with.

Statement by the coloring-book author (below): http://ptbo.igs.net/~marginal/_last_ga.htm

"In 1973 I set out to do drawings of women's genitals for use in sex education groups. I wanted the drawings to be lovely and informative, to give pleasure and affirmation. I organized the drawings in a colouring book because a major way we learn to understand the world, as children, is by colouring. As adults, many of us still need to learn more about our external sexual anatomy. Colouring is a way for the child in each of us to revision and reclaim this portion of our bodies from which we have been estranged. The C___ Coloring Book, published in 1975, was immediately and wildly popular." - Tee Corinne
They should acknowledge it's clearly identified it as an adult coloring book, for Christ's sake: http://www.washtimes.com/politics/inside.html

The Traditional Values Coalition, continuing its opposition to the nomination of homosexual activist James C. Hormel to be ambassador to Luxembourg, sent a rather unusual coloring book, along with two crayons, to senators and the news media Thursday. The title of the coloring book, which was copied from the original at the James Hormel Gay and Lesbian Reading Center of the San Francisco Public Library, cannot be repeated in a family newspaper. The drawings within depict female genitalia.
(I'm pretty sure I've heard about this before, in a favorable context. I guess it's called "The C___ Coloring Book" [yep - author profile] ... and I think the world would be much better off if Congress started every day with a half hour of mandatory c___-coloring! And whoever did the nicest job could be Speaker that day...)
(Also: what colors were the crayons???)
Farther down on the same Wash Times page:

Mr. Pierson quoted Miss Lewinsky as complaining, "I never had an affair with the president, but all the others who have get to stay."

Don't miss this argument that RL Stine's Goosebumps series is fetish-friendly: [great links, too] http://www.mouthorgan.com/cgi-mouth/nimue?type=article&date=19980903 [Whump]

The Goosebumps series, on the other hand, though no new titles are being added to it, is still the best-selling series of books in the world. In 1997, Stine had written over sixty Goosebumps books, churning them out at the ungodly rate of two a month, and the series had sold 170 million copies.
There are very few of the regular Goosebumps books, and almost none of the choose-your-own-path books, which do not offer at least one weird transformation or fate for the protagonist. Being turned into a lab rat. Being turned into a statue. Becoming someone's mindslave. Being turned into ooze. Becoming something so scary that you can't tell anyone what happened because they all run away as soon as they see you. My goodness, this is fetish fiction for kids! Don't tell the professional fussbudgets. If they find out about this, there'll be a big to-do.
Being physically tiny is helplessness at its most blatant, but it's also kind of fun to be tiny. You can go places you couldn't fit before, and you get to see the universe from a completely different perspective - assuming the cat doesn't get you. (Cats are common villains in shrinking stories, because, as Stephen King points out, we know the beasts are intrinsically amoral, and no one doubts for a minute that if a cat saw a mouse-sized human, the human would be dinner.)
Amazon.com has the two books we mentioned by title and we're sure they also have a huge selection of R.L. Stine ... but we won't link to them. We're annoyed because they won't let sites with "explicit content" be associates. If you want to use them, though, we won't stop you.
An oddly-underwritten profile of Stine: http://augustachronicle.com/kids/062996/062996stine.html

Started out in the big time, too, penning interviews with the Beatles and the Supremes for fan magazines in 1967. But he never talked to either group. "Had to be fast, creative," he says now of those fan-mag days. "Had Diana Ross leaving the Supremes in one magazine, staying with them in another."
Those books were for an older youth audience. Characters were 17 and 18. Sex and profanity were in some of the books. So he decided to go younger, cleaner and funnier.
His one indulgence are first editions of his favorite author, British humorist P.G. Wodehouse.
(This link makes a good double-feature with the Hardy Boys profile, 10 Aug below.)
Another: [pic source] http://www.usaweekend.com/97_issues/970427/970427talk_rl_stine.html

"I've never written a thing from my heart," snaps Stine.... "Nothing makes me more furious than writers who talk about heart. It makes kids worry, 'Oh, no! This isn't from my heart. I can't write it.' "
Watching TV recently, Stine came upon C-SPAN coverage of a hearing in a small town in Minnesota. One parent wanted Goosebumps off school library shelves. "Kids spoke. Parents spoke. It went on for hours," says Stine, who watched "transfixed." Ultimately, they voted unanimously to keep Goosebumps.
And a brilliant, hilarious dismantling of an anti-Stine critic: http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/r_rant01.htm

[The critic:] "As one 10-year-old girl, a veteran of 40 Stine titles, put it to a Canadian newspaper, 'I like how the creepy feelings and shivers go through your whole body.' And so, reading becomes a crude tool of physical stimulation, wholly devoid of mental, emotional, or spiritual engagement. Does that sound like a working definition of pornography?" [The dismantler:] It sounds more like a working definition of a roller-coaster to me.
Had West read Grimm or Poe (another author she mentions favorably) rather than just toss their names around, she would have found things that make the most horrid of Stine's horrific images look like tea with Squirrel Nutkin.
I see now that Diana West's article was reprinted in full in American Educator, the American Federation of Teachers magazine, Fall 1995, page 39. Where next? Readers' Digest? It's nice to see that she sent her rant to as many markets as she could. What's a bit depressing is that so many of them chose to print it. Will this nonsense never cease?

Thu, Sep 3, 1998
Since Drudge publishes so sporadically, I'll try to link new stuff there more: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

And in a stunning twist, Independent counsel Kenneth Starr's investigation of "Filegate" and "Travelgate" -- thought to be dormant -- are continuing and "in extremely sensitive stages," according to his deputy, Robert Bittman.

Computer Gaming World offers the best reviews I know, and they're finally back, eg this Starship Titanic review: http://www.gamespot.com/adventure/startita/review_cgw.html

Too much of Starship Titanic is gorgeous, but it's neither funny nor playable.
While it is true that you can type in plain English sentences and get some response from the robots, the robots seem to understand very little of what you say to them, judging by how often they dodge your questions, interject non-sequiturs, and generally carry on like first cousins to the venerable natural-language hoax "Eliza."
Some puzzles are easy, some hard, but none are especially funny.

Thumbs up for a thoughtful PBS look at the Internet and education: http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/reviews/1998/09/04review.html

"Net.learning" is a rare artifact indeed -- a treatment of an Internet-related issue that manages to avoid both neo-Luddite technology-bashing and digital revolutionary hype-mongering.
Tom Tomorrow hits the sweet spot: http://www.salonmagazine.com/comics/tomo/1998/09/04tomo.html

"I'm sick of Stephen Glass, sarin gas, the Y2K glitch, and the Dow Jones average. I'm sick of Maureen Dowd..."

GREAT John Sayles piece on his career as screenwriter: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/9/4/19777.html

I'm very comfortable extrapolating animal behaviour into movies. I actually drew a map: X is where the piranha are put into the river, Y is where the people get on the raft to go down the river, and here's the dam where they think they've stopped them, and here's the little stream that goes around the dam, and here's the resort where you have the big finale where they eat a lot of children. Roger Corman said, "We might want a sequel." Poor James Cameron ended up directing Piranha 2, in which they had bred with flying fish.
I realised I could inject social commentary and genre revisionism into the Corman scripts. I had seen Roger's movies before. I liked some of his Poe stuff and his Jackson County Jail funky drive-in movie stuff, and I realised that even in something like The Big Dollhouse, there was some feminist stuff in there. ... As long as you have nudity and the helicopter blows up, you can do anything you want.
For the Howling, I wrote a complicated opening, a 10-minute-long credit sequence. To me the opening of the movie has to tell you what world you're entering and warn you about the rules of that world.
Roger Corman offered me a couple of writing-directing jobs after The Return Of The Secaucus Seven. He wanted to make Mutiny On The Bounty in outer space, which I think would be a really cool idea for a science-fiction movie.
I've written a lot that didn't get made. Basically, the more you get paid, the more you're working with big studios, the less likely it is to get made, because they have the money to develop...
"Toshiro's a little shaky with his Rs and Ls, could we get rid of the Rs and Ls?" So I went through his dialogue taking out as many words beginning with Rs and Ls as I could - which is an interesting way to write.
New British Beach Boys documentary: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/9/4/19771.html

Whatever cool the Beach Boys had is contained in the myths and legends of Mad Brian Wilson: Brian and his piano in the sandpit; Brian's horrified belief that his songs were starting fires in distant buildings; Brian unwittingly hitting on his own daughter at a Hollywood party. Brian the "rock'n'roll Mozart", bringing back mind-melting visions from the far reaches of his deranged psyche.
One particularly affecting sequence pieces together shots of Carl singing God Only Knows down the years with undimmed reverence and humility before the absolute, profound beauty of the song his brother gave to him.
The early clips show happy teenagers in modest bikinis, frugging and twisting around their beach blankets, wholesome as milk. The remarketed Beach Boys came with silicone-enhanced models in high-cut swimsuits, glossy make-up and frosted coiffures. You couldn't find a better example of how the eighties sucked the lifeblood out of early rock'n'roll.

New The Nation includes okay pieces on Yeltsin, bin Laden, and... Andy Warhol
Two free chapters of a new book called "Architects of the Web" cover RealPlayer and Yahoo: http://www.architectsoftheweb.com/ [Feed]

Within minutes of glimpsing both the Netscape Navigator and the Yahoo! hierarchy for the first time (and with little guidance), she had drilled down through Sociology, through Anthropology, through Archaeology, through Fieldwork and Expeditions, to a site that included several pictures that she herself had taken on a dig (and yes, they were appropriately attributed). This was a remarkable find. It may well have been the most personally relevant site on the Web to her. But she hadn't deliberately set out to find it, because she hadn't even known that it existed. Despite this, and despite the fact that Yahoo!'s architects never anticipated her (nor indeed anybody's) interest in the site, the hierarchy's installed wisdom created a path to it that to her was as obvious as a well-marked interstate highway.
By executing more searches than anyone else, the company is uniquely well-positioned to listen to the Web and to learn about its users' interests and fancies, and this helps it develop new sites and services that cater to emerging trends and interests long before they become widely evident. Yahoo!'s proprietary view on the Web's evolution has already prompted it to launch several affiliated sites targeted at specific interest groups and geographies.
And so, almost as soon as they decided that they were ready to meet with them, a long procession of corporations and financiers began to march on Dave and Jerry's humble trailer. The first major media company to come calling was Reuters....
Yahoo! met its competition with an entirely new look in August of 1995. A number of major additions were introduced to the site that month, the most obvious being advertising. Tim Brady recalls that the company "went out meekly" with that change. Just as feared, it was greeted with "a lot of E-mail saying, 'You sold out. I can't believe you're doing this,' " Brady recalls. This criticism stopped after just a few days, however.
Reuters news was followed by weather information in December. Weather was followed by stock quotes in the spring of 1996. ... Not ones to fix unbroken things, Jerry and Dave are still essentially following the same strategy that they have been following since Yahoo!'s inception -- that of continually bidding for more traffic and attention by continually providing more and better service for free.
The [2nd round] financing's strategic investors were Reuters, which had long been an important friend, and a fast-growing Japanese conglomerate called Softbank.
...maintained by a staff of over fifty surfers whose collective efforts are needed for the job that Dave and Jerry handled alone on the smaller, simpler Web of 1995. The surfer staff carefully screens each of the thousands of site submissions that Yahoo! receives every week. Almost all are placed in the hierarchy, although sites that seem to lack original content, or which look like they're just components or repetitions of other sites are rejected.
Surfers are expected to process at least 100 sites per day, but the experienced ones can make it through significantly more than that without breaking a sweat. ... For some reason, several surfers seem to find Regional: US States: Florida: Real Estate to be the all-time creepy category.

The question of whether Yahoo! will then be a more powerful media property than Time is one of definition. If power is a function of editorial influence, than Yahoo! will certainly be the lesser property, as it does not serve editorial content of its own creation.
"I've got a great team. Nobody has left Yahoo! yet. That's a great statement of the people we've recruited."
The RealPlayer chapter is pretty unfocused after the first page: http://www.architectsoftheweb.com/jw/glaser1.html

By summer he was trying to think of a way to bring his technical and political interests together. He figured that there had to be some leverage in such a combination, as it had long frustrated him that people who were "progressive in terms of world outlook" were "often downright Luddite when it came time to use new technology, particularly communication technology." That backwardness contrasted dismayingly with the facility that televangelists and their ilk had developed with new-ish mediums like cable TV. In response, Rob began toying with the idea of "using interactive multimedia technology to create a -- think of it as a cable channel focused on politics and culture."

This interview with Salon's editor gives lots of context to their anti-Starr jihad: http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=93 [AAN, OSRR]

I think Slate's become too meta. Michael Kinsley's analysis is that America is awash in information and news and what is really needed is more analysis and commentary and more sort of insider insights, people making sense of all this information. I think that might have been true, but I think the pendulum has actually swung wildly the other way now. I think what we are now is awash in babble and opinion and commentary. There's not enough hard information for people to make up their own minds with.

New directions in online gaming: (three short reviews) http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/98/Sep/03/tech.life/GAME03.htm

If you enjoyed Goodfellas, you'll like Legal Crime, an underworld simulation from Byte Enchanters, a software house based in Finland. Legal Crime is yet another real-time strategy game, but with an unusual twist. Assuming the leadership of an organized crime family, your task is to increase profits, raise a small army of thugs, and battle other families for territory.

Kibo stoops to shtick: [Deja URL]
      > > Yesterday there was a 15 minute special after B&B.
      > 
      > Bunions and Bagels, the role-playing adventure game for
      > non-adventurous Jewish senior citizens.
Oy, you got these hit points and charisma points and these I don't know what they are points, you got whatever points, let's just forget about it, make with the dice things and stop with the enschlepperance modifier adding so we can get to the part where we meet Henny Youngman already, my character's feet hurt like that time you made me walk in the rain what with it being dark and all, are the dice supposed to be having all these sides, what's with these kids and their crazy dice, they got sides, they got more sides, who knows how many sides they're suposed to have, this graph paper got too many squares.
And you thought a regular D&D game took a long time to sit through.

Now we're talkin': [Messy URL]

Musicians have a new outlet to sell their music while receiving a generous 50% royalty thanks to the Internet and the D.A.M. (Digital Automatic Music) program from MP3.com.

Don't miss: Another great episode of the Progressive Review

[Re Clinton] Characteristics of a sociopath include preying on others without guilt, risky activities to avoid boredom, a need to control others, pathological egocentricity, the ability to lie without concern for the lie's effects on others, extreme defensiveness, blaming all but themselves, and a failure to learn from their mistakes. Because of their charm, cleverness, and outward rationality, the sociopath can be hard to diagnose. One psychiatrist's trick: count the bodies they have left behind. The sociopath creates a trail of injured people, moving through their lives -- as Jim McDougal once said of the Clintons -- like a tornado.

Great Zap Comix gossip in Salon: [multipage, big images with blurry type] http://www.salonmagazine.com/feature/1998/09/cov_03feature.html
I can't find any serious discussion of the net.depression study on DejaNews, either: http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/rose/1998/09/03straight.html

First of all, the statistically significant changes the researchers report are quite small -- like a 1 percent increase on the depression scale for people who spend an hour a week online. (We're not talking about clinical-level, fire-up-the-Prozac style depression here.)
My own critique of the HomeNet study draws from the spirited discussions of it this week on the Well.

Empty niche! I was thinking there ought to be a Net community for "frugal computing"... but AltaVista drew major blanks for all the obvious patterns, so I'm starting a homepage (with no promise of major support): http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/jorn/frugal.html

Lisa ignores Kibo and tells stories about herself: [Deja URL]

Also, I suppose I don't need to mention that I am not really crying, but just got a little ember of hate in my eye.

Big day for gizmos: Creatures 2 preview: http://go2.guardian.co.uk:80/computing/904750998-creatures.html

One fan sent Simpson a particularly intelligent norn whose DNA had mutated into a form that was much better than the original program. It has now been incorporated into future versions of the game.
With Creatures 2, the emphasis is on having fun with the norns. But children will still get involved in the science of the game, says Simpson, citing an eight-year-old fan who, when asked what she'd like to see in the next version of Creatures, demanded that some norns have "recessive genes". "I call it stealth education", says Simpson. "You don't realise you're learning."
"Danger! Danger! Will Ro--bbrrkkkxxxx!": http://www.nationalenquirer.com:80/mod03/mod03-story-1790.html

But evil earthlings stole the [original Lost in Space] robot while the van driver slept in a motel, smashed it into space junk and then tossed it into a creek.

Wed, Sep 2, 1998
Ralph McGeehee is a CIA-critic who's spent decades building a searchable database of (rather terse) nuggets about its operations, and he posts relevant entries to the newsgroups from time to time. Here's his new Bin Laden post: [Deja URL]

In the 1980s, the USSR threw almost every weapon it had at the Afghanistan camps just attacked by the U.S. The Soviets attacked the camps outside the town of Khost with scud missiles, 500-pound bombs, barrages of artillery, flights of helicopter gunships and their crack special forces. But nothing drove the Afghan holy warriors from the mountains. The camps, hidden in the steep mountains and mile-deep valleys of Paktia province, were the place where all seven ranking Afghan resistance leaders had underground headquarters.
Samuel P. Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order." ... proposed that the war of ideologies and interests was over and that the war of cultures -- Western, Eastern Orthodox, Latin American, Islamic, Japanese, Chinese, Hindu and (possibly) African -- had begun.

New New Scientist has a special feature on intution, including this researcher on hunches: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980905/intuit.html

A few years ago, Schooler and his wife Tonya Engstler-Schooler showed a video of a bank robbery to a group of people, some of whom were asked to describe the robber's face in as much detail as possible, while others occupied themselves by naming the US states. In the recognition test that followed, those who described the robber's face were about 26 per cent poorer at picking out the target from seven similar photos than those running through from Alabama to Wisconsin. "Verbalisation has a very specific effect," says Schooler. "It impairs judgment based on intuition."
To arrive at even a simple truth, the British mathematician and philosopher George Spencer Brown wrote in 1969, can require years of contemplation: "Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behaviour of any kind."
(That G. Spencer-Brown quote, from "Laws of Form", is one of my favorites!)

Raphael found a moderatedly detailed report on net.depression: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/09/980901024936.htm [HG]

Greater use of the Internet was associated with statistically significant declines in the social involvement that Kiesler refers to. Decreases in social involvement were indicated by a drop-off in communication within a participant's families, the size of a person's social networks and reports by participants of increases in loneliness and depression, psychological states associated with reduced social involvement.
(Could one argue that the depression reflects increased awareness of the real state of the world...?)
Here's the relentlessly academic original paper: http://homenet.andrew.cmu.edu/progress/HN.impact.10.htm

iRadio progress update: Still no female-alternative heaven, but Carl Rudorf sent some good starting points among which the clear leader is GoGaGa: http://www.gogaga.com/gogaga_schedule.html

Infinite Spins: Eclectic experience for the musically unsatisfied. Diverse freeform music just like mom used to hate.
What I want is the female-oriented equivalent of 3WK: http://www.3wk.com/chart.htm

Beastie Boys... Garbage... Liz Phair... Smashing Pumpkins... Tricky

Battle of the Netnews Titans: Kibo replies to Lisa Pea's declaration of war: [Deja URL]

Hey! My guts aren't in typeover mode, they're in insert mode. And they have "smart cut'n'paste" too so that when you try to paste a slice of bread into my stomach when there's already another slice there it automatically inserts a slice of luncheon loaf between the two.
...But we hope that this will not discourage you from submitting further unsolicited, unagented manuscripts to our honored slush pile here at Highlights For Nobody, the magazine that dentists throw out instead of putting it in their waiting rooms when they get it for free.
And demonstrates his mastery of quantum theory, to boot: [Deja URL]

WRONG! An observer is REQUIRED to mess around with things. This is the Uncertainty Principle, which is the same thing as The Prime Directive!
You can't see or detect an atom, according to Ed Wood, but you can explode one -- and exploding it is a form of OBSERVING it because you'll hear it pop.
You cannot state The Uncertainty Principle without altering it. Therefore don't try to change the subject because it only changes when you don't want it to, and at the moment I've decided the subject will be MY definition of The Uncertainty Principle which will be rigidly enforced by Occam's Razor, the deadliest weapon in all metaphysics!
Except for that box Schr�dinger made with the half a cat in it and B. F. Skinner improved it so that the cat had to simultaneously push a button while not pushing the button to receive a kibble.
(Actually, he had a pretty good morning, in general.)

A Wash Post media column features the obscure "Funny Times": http://washingtonpost.com:80/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-09/01/064l-090198-idx.html

The September issue is typical. It's got News of the Weird, the Harper's Index, a column by Dave Barry and cartoons by Matt Groening, Jules Feiffer, Lynda Barry, Nicole Hollander and the delightfully demented soul who signs his work "Mueller." Other recent issues have included works by Andrei Codrescu, Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower.

I haven't seen much detail on the Suffragette tour (the 'other' Lilith): http://www.clevescene.com:80/980827/live0827.htm

Siberry fronted "Fisherman" - a low, tribal beat set to the story of the storm and sea. Smith's guitar wailed in pain, adding to the background illustrations at the pick-up. The chant repetitions set the groove for Siberry's soothsaying song.

Tue, Sep 1, 1998
This Day in Joyce History: In ?1876, Harriet Shaw Weaver (patron) was born. In 1888, James started Clongowes (and Dante moved into his parents' house). In 1914, Portrait was finished.
Chicago stories: The School of the Art Institute and the police here are on very strained terms! Several years back there was the portrait of much-loved mayor Harold Washington (widely rumored to be gay) in lingerie, which was baldly confiscated by city officials. And then the exhibit that invited you to stand on the American flag as you signed the guestbook (pictured here, disrupted in various ways). And now the cops have been spitting on a painting of cops with KKK hoods, by a black artist. (WGN-TV news)

Truly dismal long report on sexual harrassment in women's prisons: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/mwt/feature/1998/09/cov_01feature.html

One might ask why men are hired as correctional officers in female facilities at all. Ironically, one of the reasons cited most often is equal opportunity employment. If men were forbidden from working in female institutions, would that limit women's employment in the men's prisons, which make up 94 percent of all prisons nationwide?
In 1996, 23 percent of state prison inmates and 60 percent of federal prison inmates were drug offenders.

AJR's long overview of the Chiquita fiasco fills in a few details: [multipage] http://www.newslink.org/ajrlisasept98a.html

"What people are saying about what he supposedly did does not strike me as something he would do. All reporters go as far as we can to get information, but I never knew Mike to do anything illegal and improper. I'd love to see him get out there and talk. But probably his best defense is to sit back and say nothing."
"Each time Gallagher engaged in an unauthorized invasion of a legitimate user's voice mail box, he caused a record of his unauthorized voice mail session to be placed on Chiquita's storage box," the suit alleges. Chiquita's voice mail equipment includes an internal tracking device that operates like caller ID and indicates where calls are coming from.
As a result of the series, a handful of stockholders filed suit against Chiquita for, according to one suit, damages "caused by pervasive and on-going course of illegal conduct designed to artificially inflate the earnings of Chiquita" reported in the series.

In light of this Sudan-fiasco report, Slashdot wonders what Clinton might do to websites that use BLINK: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/FRONT/t000079562.html [Slashdot]

But the officials said they did not believe that the plant actually produced such medicines, because they saw no evidence of such an output when they accessed a Web site for it. Web sites for five other pharmaceutical plants in Sudan listed the medicines produced at those plants.
An official acknowledged that "some of this is indirect, some of it is inferential. It's hard to hang your hat on any one nugget of it."

A very clear backgrounder on the many flavors of free Unix: http://www.computerbits.com/archive/19980900/lnx9809.htm [OS]

As you might have guessed, of the three freenix BSDs, you're likely to get your best x86 performance out of FreeBSD. Not having to concern itself with portability, the FreeBSD project has been more innovative and has tweaked the OS to the hilt for x86 performance.

Doonesbury started a series on Internet-IPO silliness on 24 August: http://www.uexpress.com/cgi-bin/ups/search.cgi?search=db
(I still haven't found any less-inconvenient URL. Maybe because I kill most cookies?)

In the Progressive Review, Sam Smith digs out his 1991 advice to Russia:

Perhaps it has dawned on you that to do it right you're going to have to replace both communism and capitalism with something better. Again you'll have to do a lot of looking. The Swedish model has much to offer -- although it, too, as the Swedish voters have suggested -- has its excesses. There is the cooperative system of Mondragon, Spain, and the mini-industries of Bologna. Even in this country, you'll find ideas worth considering. There are big consumer cooperatives like Land of Lakes Butter and the United Services Automobile Association that thrive happily amongst the conventional capitalists. The town of Green Bay, Wisconsin, holds its professional football team in community ownership. As a result, it's about the only professional sports team in America that we know won't be moving to someplace else. And, of course, in any small communities the farmer's coop is taken for granted as a major economic unit. These are, I hasten to say, real consumer-owned coops where real people rather than party bureaucrats make the decisions.

Yikes! Lisa Pea declares war on Kibo: [Deja URL]

Ssssh. Ssssssh. Ssssshhhh. I am not the enemy of you. I am the enemy of Kibo. I am the friend of you. I have the loves on everybody...

YAY! I got a link in the new Village Voice: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/cyber/36bunn.shtml
(Waah! They think I'm still not pretty...)
And a great Press Clips covers Russia, and Mumia: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/columns/36ledbetter.shtml

During the 1996 Russian presidential election, an American journalist who suggested that a Yeltsin victory meant probable collapse of the Russian economy would have been laughed off the op-ed pages.
Maybe she can't act (Sat below), but the Voice says she can still rock: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/music/36weisbard.shtml

Nobody can stand her and everybody has to love her; nobody loves her and everybody has to stand her; nobody can stand to love her every body; everybody who loves her has to stand, a nobody -- tearing the petals off of Courtney Love is the sport of millions.
And some thoughtful hand-wringing about anti-PC movies: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/film/36lim.shtml

And by flouting the tyranny of liberalism-gone-amok, we're returning to the glory days of . . . what exactly? Porky's?
The Times found Deconstructing Harry "bracingly nasty" and In the Company of Men "fearlessly cruel." The New Yorker capsule review for There's Something About Mary celebrates its "refreshing mean-spiritedness"... "One of those in-your-face comedies that has audiences laughing, ducking, and not believing their ears," warned delicate flower Roger Ebert.

More sexy biotech: http://www.nikkei.co.jp:80/enews/TNW/np/tnwnp0099.html

A commercial product that sparkles based on the enzyme that fireflies use to give off light has been developed by Kikkoman Corp. The company is using a gene-splicing technique to mass-produce the enzyme, which forms one component of a "glow powder" that emits light when sprinkled on ice or moist paper or when mixed with sufficient water in a cup. In a darkened room, the effect resembles stardust.
Price: 700 yen ($4.90) for a package containing 0.5 gram.
The Virtual Japanese Garden: [multipage, Java] http://www.jfpinc.com/acg_eng/index_e.html

We are developing a computer system to give "gentle and peaceful feelings " and "longings for paradise" to human minds.

First peek at "My Favorite Martian" movie: (no spoilers) http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=2021

This flick is fast-paced, the excitement of the climax builds and builds until, guess what? It actually pays off! Very satisfying.
Wallace Shawn plays the agent out to find the Martian and prove that they do exist, and ya know? I'm hard pressed to think of role I haven't enjoyed him in.

Ken Layne of OJR accepts the depressing-net hypothesis: http://www.ojr.org/indexf.htm?/sections/departments/98_stories/citizen_090198.htm

It was a good party. ... Then somebody asked to see the World Wide Web. The party died a half hour after the screeching modem made its connection. Guitars were put aside and a half-dozen people stood silently around the Macintosh, watching crude dull Web pages slowly appear.
(I think if it's true, it's due to flame-culture-- a phase we have to pass thru.)

Righteous! The 'micronations' movement: http://www.execpc.com/~talossa/patsilor.html [Whump]

Micronations, microstates, imaginary countries, countercountries, unrecognized nations, or ephemeral states, are all terms for countries which have been declared independent by (usually eccentric) individuals or small groups, but unlike other such attempts, fail to achieve widespread diplomatic recognition.
There is a Usenet news group, alt.talk.hypothetical, which has been "taken over" by folks interested in Micropatrology (the study of micronations). More recently a new group, alt.politics.micronations, was set up.

I guess I have to start reading the Wash Times: http://www.washtimes.com/politics/inside.html [OSRR]

"There have been decent people working for Clinton -- Dee Dee Myers, Leon Panetta, et al.," writes Christopher Caldwell in the latest issue of New York Press. "But once Mike McCurry goes, the only human being left in the whole operation will be Paul Begala, who has himself behaved appallingly since the scandal broke."
What accounted for the aggressive tone of President Clinton's Aug. 17 speech? "When you follow a strategy based on lying, you have to limit your circle of advisers to those who don't mind lying. So the stonewall strategy naturally brought forward the most radical people in the whole Clinton bestiary, the True Believers, the power-mad maniacs like Leonid Ickes, Lavrenti Blumenthal and Vyacheslav Carville."
"I've been trying to hide it from myself for years, but the American left truly is in dreadful shape. It's even forgotten how to enjoy a good sex scandal," Alexander Cockburn writes in the Wall Street Journal.
"The public is less inclined to kill the messenger when they find out the message is true," Robert Giles, executive director of the Media Studies Center, which conducted the survey, told the Associated Press.

Web-wide search engine for multimedia offers thumbnails: http://www.scour.net/
(This doesn't filter porn, so will no doubt become very popular and controversial.)

The new month brings the old month's Harper's Index: http://www.harpers.org/harpers-index/listing.html

Estimated number of firebomb-wielding live bats that the U.S. considered dropping on Japan in early 1944 : 1,000,000
Minimum number of times per year that a car's engine should be steam-cleaned, according to Martha Stewart : 1
Factor by which Cuba's percentage GDP growth last year exceeded that of Russia : 12
Ratio of highway spending Congress passed last May to the cost of gold-plating one lane of the U.S. interstate system : 2:1
Percentage of Americans who have watched Seinfeld who say they will miss it "not very much" or "not at all" : 51
Factor by which the 1915 birth weight of Frank Sinatra exceeds the average weight of a baby born in New Jersey today : 2

A clever application of genetic engineering: http://www.foxnews.com:80/js_index.sml?content=/scitech/083198/landmines.sml

By inserting a gene borrowed from certain jellyfish, Burlage has engineered a strain of the bacteria Pseudomonas to glow under ultraviolet light when encountering one of the most common ingredients in land mines, TNT.

Mon, Aug 31, 1998
One of my fave obscure directors gets a rave from Salon: http://www.salonmagazine.com/ent/movies/tayl/1998/09/01tayl.html

Now 70 and one of the giants among living filmmakers, Jacques Rivette has never wavered from his madly ambitious determination to preserve and poeticize the most fleeting moments of life in his films.

Request: I'm way under my ISP's max-hours for the last quarter, so I hope to splurge on a little Internet Radio for the next week. Does anybody know a good page of radio links, given that I mostly like Lilith type stuff, and trip-hop? So far I've tracked down: http://www.netradio.net/earthbeat/
Reflections and tips after 100 days of using Excite Newstracker: [Deja URL]

The greatest thing about NewsTracker is how it restores the 'serendipity factor' to search/browsing. Eg, I should start a template for strange adjectives, etc, that I like, on the theory that articles that use those words will likely be interesting to me.

Sun, Aug 30, 1998
This Day in Joyce History: In 1866, Alfred Hunter was born (Bloom prototype). In 1900, James sent his play, "A Brilliant Career" to Archer of the Fortnightly Review (who'd paid Joyce ten pounds for an Ibsen review in March). The play (lost) was dedicated:

To
My own Soul I
dedicate the first
true work of my
life.
(Archer called it "wildly impossible... for the commercial stage")
New Republic bails: http://www.thenewrepublic.com/magazines/tnr/current/sullivan091498.html

Clinton is a cancer on the culture, a cancer of cynicism, narcissism, and deceit. At some point, not even the most stellar of economic and social records is worth the price of such a cancer metastasizing even further. He should go. And it is a measure of the damage he has already wrought that this should even be a question.

The Guardian pursues the trendy-math story: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/8/31/19059.html

The Monster is a purely mathematical and unimaginable object which lives in 196,883 dimensions, and it has 808, 017, 424, 794, 512, 875, 886, 459, 904, 961, 710, 757, 005, 754, 368, 000, 000, 000 symmetries. Some mathematicians had spotted that numbers associated with the Monster group appeared in an apparently unrelated area of mathematics called number theory.

Is this so new it isn't even on the Web yet? [Deja URL]

President Clinton put his marriage and presidency at incredible risk because he fell in love with Monica Lewinsky - and even told her he wanted to be with her when he left office.

A nice meditation on Unix as literature: http://www.performancecomputing.com/features/9809of1.shtml [Slashdot]

For UNIX enthusiasts, the language becomes second nature. Once, I overheard a conversation in a Palo Alto restaurant: "there used to be a shrimp-and-pasta plate here under ten bucks. Let me see...cat menu | grep shrimp | test -lt $10..." though not syntactically correct (and less-than-scintillating conversation), a diner from an NT shop probably couldn't have expressed himself as casually.
In a literary light, if UNIX is the Great Novel, Perl is the Cliffs Notes.

Salacious gossip department: [Deja URL]

When Sharon Stone is sexually attracted to someone she is working with, or reads about, she rents a hotel room, tells him exactly when and where to show up, and makes it clear that it is a one-time take-it-or-leave-it opportunity. She's made the move on some major names.

A long list to help you get the Eponymous-Spice meme out of your system: [Deja URL includes even more]

Marianna - "Bulk Spice"
Jude (judesavage) - "Savage Spice"
Leslie (EmeraldEyes) - "Snarky Spice"
Pat (Patranoid) - "Paranoid Spice"
Walt (Uncle Waltie) - "Cheesy Spice"
Julie (jrevellben) - "Saucy Spice"
Jack (JackPar) - "Troll Spice"
Trish (bigwater) - "Mo'better Spice"
Reets (Reetswh) - "Jungle Red Spice"
Kat (icekatice) - "Toxic Spice"
Michele (Michele317) - "Cynical Spice"
Tara (FEMBOT66) - "Cranky Spice"
pammcc - "Succulent Spice"
Stephanie (sbensong) - "Smarty Spice"
Julie-Louise (whiggrrl) - "Anal-retentive Spice"
Jay (Kid_Miracle) - "Slacker Spice"
Sher (sherbaker) - "Brazen Hussy Spice"
Lora - "Generic Spice"
mickeyct - "Retro Spice"
dbvelveeda - "Smokey Spice"
BroSteve - "Miami Spice"
Doogie (grnbrier) - "Fluffer Spice"
Debora (Debora1111) - "Skanky Spice"
Kristin (krlolita) - "Amish Spice"
RSilver - "Moron Spice"
Bill (tkf1) - "Bitter Spice"
Chris (kparsons) - "PMSpice"
crobin4564 - "Tuft Spice"
Pat (Beaud4) - "Bawdy Spice"
Oberon - "Horny Spice"
Mesha Nova - "Sleepy Spice"
Robert Lee Horine Jr. - "Spastic Colon Spice"
Leah (FlowerLeah) - "Bratty Spice"
CzarCasm - "Spice T"
Penny - "Hypo Spice"
Rob (syvyn11) - "Irritable Bowel Spice"
Roseanne Roseannadanna - "Honeybunny Spice"
Snake 142 - "Psycho Spice"
gretzkygrl - "Lesbian Spice"
Anna Elise: "Vanilla Spice"
Hiyachick - "Mentally ILL Spice"
Linde - "Kick Ass Spice"
loislane - "Perky Spice"
Italia - "Billy Bob Spice"
ZombDet - "Kajun Spice"
RaInEy - "Goofy Spice"
Glyn - "Precise Spice"

Semi-plausible, detailed Diana theory: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/mod03/mod03-story-1764.html

According to the experts, fanatically pro-royal elements of the British intelligence community were so opposed to the deepening love between Di and Dodi Al Fayed that they wanted to snatch them in the tunnel and terrify them into calling off their Christian-Muslim romance.
The attempted kidnapping was far from the first time that British agents have interfered dangerously in Di's secret love life. They bugged her scandalous "Dianagate" cell phone call to beau James Gilbey -- then kept re- transmitting the intimate conversation until it was picked up by radio scanner freaks.
(The assassination theory never fit the facts, but kidnapping does, sort of.)

Some amazing good sense from the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-08/30/128l-083098-idx.html

Terrorism's best asset, in the final analysis, is the fire in the bellies of its young men, and that fire cannot be extinguished by Tomahawk missiles.
My hunch is that the next time we call for help (from Pakistan, for instance, whose very competent police work was evidently vital to the investigation of the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam bombings), the officials of that country's intelligence service who are responsible for discreet liaison with the CIA or the FBI will be conveniently "out to lunch."
In our understandable frustration, are we resorting to a modern form of the same "gunboat diplomacy" that proved so counterproductive for the dying European empires at the end of the 19th century?
The ludicrous image of four-star American generals emptying their pockets of coins and keys before passing through the metal detectors at the Pentagon seems to me starkly symbolic of the futility of retaliatory violence. What have we done to ourselves?
(Recommended by Ralph McGeehee on alt.politics.org.cia.)

Instant flame-classic: [Deja URL] (rec.arts.books)
      > ...If anyone has a summary or knows where I can get one
      > (on the net), I'd really appriciate it. I have read these
      > books, I just desprately need these to review the few days
      > before the test...
...What I suggest you do, since you can't possibly read these in less than two or three months (Ethan Frome alone must run to 90 pages), is drop out of school and enlist in the French Foreign Legion...

Don't miss: Sam Smith's wide ranging and inspired Sunday morning sermon in the Progressive Review:

Clinton also knows he can count on the sycophantic support of the most disappointing bunch of black leaders this country has seen in decades. ... African-American leadership, like that of the women's and environmental movement, has given the president a free pass, which he has used to dismantle social programs and civil liberties protections on which black Americans could at least sometimes rely.

Plain oops: http://nt.excite.com:80/news/pr/980828/va-clinton-indict

Kincaid said, "It appears that Clinton Administration claims about this factory were a pack of lies from the beginning. First, they said the plant didn't produce civilian products. That was false. Then they said it produced a chemical used in VX gas. That now appears to be false. They also said terrorist Osama bin Laden had invested in the plant. That turns out to be false. It's no wonder that Sudan is preparing a criminal indictment of Clinton over this whole affair, possibly to be sent to the ICC."

An okay book review about Greek values: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-08/30/117l-083098-idx.html

In Courtesans and Fishcakes he shows how subtly and pervasively the fear of akolasia, the loss of self-control, permeated Athenian culture.
Throughout these pages resound the romantic names of famous courtesans: Lais, Gnathaena, Aspasia, Naera and, above all, the dazzling Phryne, who, according to Hermippus of Smyrna, was almost never seen naked: But "at the great festival of the Eleusina and that of the Posidonia in full sight of a crowd that had gathered from all over Greece, she removed her cloak and let loose her hair before stepping into the sea..."

Present at the Creation: The inventor of Kibology was not Kibo: [Deja URL]

"It would be about the worship of Kibo as a GOD!" proclaimed Todd, stabbing futilely at a green pea with his single chopstick.

Sat, Aug 29, 1998 (First Quarter)
This Day in Joyce History: In 1929, James proposed to James Stephens that he take over the writing of Finnegans Wake. In 1904, James wrote a confessional letter to Nora:

"My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity-- home, the recognised virtues, classes of life, and religious doctrines."
Oops: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/8/30/19011.html

Sudan's Interior Minister raised questions about the source of the soil sample. He said most of the area around al-Shifa was paved with only a tiny amount of open land used for the cultivation of rose bushes. "The American claim is totally unfounded," the Minister said. "If you look around, you will not see any soil in the immediate vicinity of our factory premises."
US credibility has been further dented by Western scientists who have pointed out that the same ingredients are used for chemical weapons and beer, and that mustard gas is similar in make-up to the anti-clogging agent in biro ink. It has also been pointed out that the cherry flavouring in sweets is one of the constituent parts of the gas used in combat.

My reply to Sabren about XML got replied to by Bill Humphries and I just posted a reply to our weblogs Deja group: [Deja URL]

New Science News looks at the new Precambrian-Ice-Age hypothesis: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/8_29_98/bob1.htm

The key, they propose, is carbon dioxide. The atmospheric concentration of this heat-trapping greenhouse gas dropped so low in the Neoproterozoic that the planet froze over completely for 10 million years, killing off most life, which at the time consisted primarily of microbes and algae.
Seen from space during the Neoproterozoic glacial periods, Earth would have looked like a well-packed snowball, according to the new hypothesis.
By measuring the ratio of the two carbon isotopes, geologists can calculate how fertile the oceans were and how much of the ocean crop got buried beneath the seafloor.
Genetic experiments using fruit flies suggest that such extreme swings prompt new species to arise. "You have a severe restriction which only allows select organisms to survive, and you take that genetic material and you allow it to expand to fill all the niches, which doesn't take long," Hoffman points out.
"Even if it's wrong, it will stimulate a lot of interesting research."

10am-noon CDT: This is Hell [live Realaudio] Last week April Oliver read this anonymous letter:

"Dear Miss Oliver, Regarding Tailwind, you will never guess how close you were to the truth. You made the mistake of assuming that a coverup that kept the public in darkness for more than 20 years would miraculously disappear. Nerve gas is not just another kind of weapon, its use is forbidden by international law. In your haste to assemble the story, you lacked sufficient facts to back it up. Rest assured that such facts do exist, and without them the potential for maximum deniability became possible. Impatience is a dangerous trait both in war and in news reporting. Now, even with the truth, your credibility is lost. And that is too bad. There has not been a story like this since Watergate and the plumbers. Signed, a friend."
Jeff's Question From Hell: "April, now that you've blown your big mainstream media opportunity, do you ever wake up in a cold sweat from a nightmare about not being able to be hired by anyone but a little rad lefty rag like Z Magazine?" April: [laughs nervously] "You know, it's one of those things I'm doing it one day at a time. I can't think of the big picture, y'know, in terms of the big future, because right now it's just one day at a time..."
Gary Webb: "The pressure on the Mercury News I think came less from the government than from the organized mass media. This is a story that the mainstream press was not supposed to do, and actually there was a quote from a guy named Terry Eastland on one of these CNN news shows, saying that this is not the kind of story the mainstream press ought to be doing. You know, we ought to be doing like really safe, whitebread boring stuff..."
Is there going to be a Dark Alliance movie? Webb: "People are talking about it."

Sneak peek at "200 Cigarettes": http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=1996

the jig is up on [courtney] love: she just can't act. forman knew how to use her; here they have no idea.

Fri, Aug 28, 1998
More on Hammarskjold: [Deja URL]

One letter says: "It is felt Hammarskjold should be removed." It also details an alleged meeting between British spies and SAIMR employees.The undated letter says: "Allen Dulles [CIA head] agrees and has promised full co-operation from his people."

An expose on the 'CEO' of Feng Shui, Inc: http://www.sfweekly.com/1998/082698/feature1-1.html [AAN]

The octagonal map looks ancient, mysterious, and impressive, but in fact was invented by Lin Yun about a decade ago, enraging many classical feng shui practitioners.
The temple gift shop, for instance, sells a set of three Lin Yun videos for $300. But ... the spine of each tape displays a series of stiff warnings...:
Label 1: "MAKING COPIES OR LOANING TO OTHERS CAN PROVOKE UNLIMITED CALAMITIES."
Label 2: "DIVULGING HEAVEN'S SECRETS IS DONE AT YOUR OWN RISK."
Washington City Paper tracks coverage of the cigar story: http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=91 [AAN]

The reason that editors all over Washington are working on euphemistic descriptions for something you usually have to pay big bucks in Tijuana to see is that the stories keep turning out to be true.

A belated (valedictory?) Press Clips column from James Ledbetter: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/columns/35ledbetter.shtml

"The CIA paid for [bin Laden's] camps, and trained the people who trained the troops in the camps, but they did not set them up," Weiner told the Voice, insisting that this was a distinction worth maintaining.
(I'd heard he's moved to The Industry Standard...?)

A thoughtful Spalding Gray piece on adultery: http://www.nervemag.com/Gray/monogamist/

I have to tell you that the freedom of choice is almost unbearable for me. I often find myself thinking more about the road not taken than the one I took. As a result, I am a very messy chooser.

My FX account has been piling up $50/wk (virtual) for the last five weeks, so I went on a spending spree today, betting that Clinton won't last till 2001, that a frozen mammal won't be revived before 2005, that the Dow will drop below 7000 before y2k, that HIV will be cured by 2005, that Yeltsin will be gone by 2000, that terrorists will have nukes by the end of 1998 (risky, but cheap), and that a terrorist act will kill 200+ people in the US by 2005: http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/ListClaims

Kaboom minus 80 seconds: http://www.flatoday.com/space/today/index.htm
http://www.flatoday.com/space/explore/uselv/delta/delta3/d259/259fla07.jpg

Summary of a Stallman talk: http://cantua.canterbury.ac.nz/~mpt26/stuff/rms/ [Slashdot]

Referring to 'Linux' instead of 'GNU/Linux' is damaging to the free software community, because it belittles GNU software (which makes up far more of any GNU/Linux distribution than the Linux kernel itself does).

Request: I'm having no luck finding a critical analysis of the various pollsters (Gallup, Harris, Pew, etc), and their funding.

New Dag Hammarskjold 1961 CIA assassination conspiracy theory: http://www.freep.com/news/nw/qdag20.htm

The letters carried the letterhead of the South African Institute for Maritime Research, said to be a front company for the South African military. They included references to the CIA and the British MI5 security service.

Sabren disagreed with my XML-putdown (Monday below), so I replied within an ongoing comp.text.xml thread: [Deja URL]

And any hacker with any shred of professional pride should be embarrassed by the wastefulness of tagging every line with <LINE></LINE>. What are you guys thinking?!?
(I used my red-flag-to-a-bull style here, because I've been debating with this sgml-html-xml crowd for years, and find their spokespeople to have very thick heads.)

More good Progressive Review:

"Had this been the law a few years ago when our government called the African National Congress a 'terrorist organization,' it would have been a crime for an American to make a $10 contribution to a speaking tour for a representative of Nelson Mandela."

Kibo applies netnews shock therapy: [Deja URL]
      > When a person is framed and destroyed__the result is
      > life on the streets__escape is only through the suburbs__
      > escape is only through the suburbs? 
Okay, who's been giving the insane homeless people WebTVs so they can post conspiracy theories to alt.supermodels?

An angry inventory of more than 100 US acts of 'terrorism' since 1890: [Deja URL] (link fixed)

JUGOSLAVIA/1992-94/Naval/Nato blockade of Serbia and Montenegro.
BOSNIA/1993-?/Jets, bombing/No-fly zone patrolled in civil war; downed jets, bombed Serbs.
HAITI/1994-?/Troops, naval/Blockcade against military government; troops restore President Aristide to office three years after coup.
Complied by Zoltan Grossman (revised 1/1/95)

Thu, Aug 27, 1998
Grrr. It took me over an hour to grab this pic thru their tiny slow-pipe-from-China, and it doesn't even look that cool: http://www.palmax.com/pd1000.html [Slashdot]

Palmax PD-1000 Mini-Notebook PC is a Windows 95 based hand-held Personal Computer that integrates powerful and advanced notebook technology in its design. PD-1000 incorporates a Pentium equivalent processor, fast hard disk drive, high-speed EDO DRAM and a 6.1" TFT active matrix color VGA display. Other than offering a reasonable-sized keyboard for real typing, the most innovative breakthrough is an intuitive Touch Panel pointing device that can be used with either its stylus or even a finger.

Lucianne Goldberg speaks: [Messy URL] [Drudge]

There is already one feline casualty in the Lewinsky wars. Kathleen Willey, the White House volunteer who has accused Mr Clinton of grabbing her breasts in the "wiggle room" off the Oval Office, says her 13-year-old, Bullseye, vanished last year at the same time that 6in nails were driven into the tyres of her car.
"We're the vast Right-wing conspiracy: two middle-aged broads who got angry and said enough's enough," said Mrs Goldberg.

A phenomenal index of literary mailinglists: http://www.ramsaybooks.com/littera/lists.html

Since 6 August (at least), Brenda Starr has been parodying "Rat Sludge": [multipage, 7 day delay] http://www.ctoons.com/static/brenda/19980806.html (asg)

Narcissa Silverspoon: "Proof is so like overrated! And isn't the definition of a journalist a jerk with a computer?"

Why I love the Voice: (very-strange-dance review) http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/dance/35hannaham.shtml

When Dream Analysis played the Joyce Theater in January as part of the 1998 Altogether Different festival, it garnered raves from The New York Times, surrogate brain of the bourgeoisie, which called the company "brilliant."
...She burned a replica of the Branch Davidian compound onstage at P.S. 122.

Sig quote of the week: (alt.tv.tv-nation)

"I would have enjoyed Jonathan Swift's 'A Modest Proposal' much less if it had ended with ;)." --Penn Jillette

Next-generation OS speculation: [Deja URL]

What's needed, imho, is an OS built around a highly refined toolkit that combines the best of Emacs and HyperCard and ResEdit and Frontier and Netscape, plus all the little indispensible utilities for memory management and clipboard management and key-command management, etc etc etc.

Witty analysis of buzzword population dynamics: http://www.techweb.com/internet/news/features/1998/08/buzzwords.html [Whump]

Agents, Boutique Portals, Channels, Collaborative Publishing, Convergence, Community, Portals, Post Content, Post-Portal, Post Y2K, Push, Transactive Content
(I've never heard half of these!?? Where are they published? ...The Well, probably?)
(Also, where are Java and network computers and open source and ISDN...? This topic really deserves a website!)
(Also, why the f___ isn't the Well readable from the web, and Deja-searchable? If it were, buzzword dynamics could be quantified.)

Humorless aftermath of UK art-students' masterful hoax-project (18/19 May below): http://www.chumba.com/_comment.htm [Whump]

Leeds Student Union's press officer said : "The Arts Society can't expect any funding for a good while. The 13 have probably ruined it for a lot of other students who will want to do something constructive with our funds."

More great links at HoneyGuide (Raphael, I suspect that Toronto Star link is going to tank by tomorrow, sad to say.)

Security concerns about Alexa in Netscape 4.0.6: http://www.interhack.net/pubs/whatsrelated/

The logs of this data, when used in conjunction with cookies, could be used to build extensive dossiers of individual web users, even including their names, addresses, and telephone numbers in some cases.

Wed, Aug 26, 1998
Salon has a very level-headed argument that bin Laden is innocent: http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/08/27news.html

Instead, it seems to have been motivated by a public call to arms against Americans that bin Laden published in the London Arabic newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi last February. Issued as an Islamic Fatwa, or holy order, even though bin Laden has no religious authority whatsoever, the broadside by bin Laden and other signers from various Islamic groups called for Muslims to "kill Americans and their allies, civilians and military" wherever they find them.

Alt.showbiz.gossip has been debating the "Worst On-screen Chemistry Ever" [Deja thread]

Among the many runners-up:
Bill Pullman & Ellen DeGeneres in "Mr Wrong"
Jodie Foster & Matthew McConaughey in "Contact"
Clint Eastwood & Meryl Streep in "Bridges of Madison County"
Bruce Willis & Milla Jovovich in "The Fifth Element"
...But the clear winner is:
Lily Tomlin & John Travolta in "Moment By Moment"

Onion does Lilith: http://www.theonion.com/onion3404/lilithfair.html

According to McLachlan, the synchronized ovulation, sponsored by Volkswagen, Starbucks and Biore Pore Cleansing Strips, was successful because of the "incredibly supportive atmosphere" of the concert.
"I've never been around so many people who share my interest in women's issues and social justice," Jewel said. "It makes me want to ride my horse bareback through a forest stream."

Okay, maybe it wasn't just a false alarm: an inspiring story of an LA whistleblower: http://www.laweekly.com/ink/archives/98/39lede2-082198-ciotti.shtml [AAN]

In Earnest's office in her Long Beach townhouse, large calendars cover two walls, documenting every major and minor incident of her career for the last eight years. On a nearby table are four long boxes full of files, and next to those are the tools of her whistle blower emeritus trade - a fax machine, copier, computer and heavily used telephone.
Earnest began making phone calls to distributors, asking them for the Material Safety Data Sheets on the products they were selling. "And they would say, 'Well, we never had to do it before.' And I would say, 'Well, you're having to do it now.'"
The "third-grade" childishness of it all brought out Earnest's (naturally subversive) sense of humor. Once she put on a raincoat and a fake Groucho Marx nose and glasses and melodramatically began peeking around corners. "I made myself a hall pass, too," she says. "It said something like, 'I, Political Prisoner Amelia Earnest, promise to not pillage the 12th Floor Bolshevik Procurement files and turn copies over to Procurement's enemies in the Inspector General's Office.'
And a Dayton weekly looks at the Chiquita-Gallagher fiasco: http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=71 [AAN]

In other words, the Enquirer would only do the story if no mention was made of Lindner's big campaign contribution to the judge (Lindner gave the judge $7,500; Evans gave $2,500).
Chiquita officials understand very well that proving Gallagher committed criminal acts in order to obtain his information gives them their best shot at rendering that material both legally inadmissable and journalistically unreliable.
It also seemed clear to me that, in the person of Mike Gallagher, the Cincinnati Enquirer was grooming an "attack journalist" to go after management's favorite targets, such as the Clinton Administration.
And a critical review of the coverage of Gary Webb's new book: http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=77

Of the three major dailies, only the Washington Post has reviewed Webb's book.
"...My old paper [the Mercury News] hasn't said a word about the book either," he says. "I'm not surprised by it. It's not in their best interests to make the story legitimate. The Reagan administration had a hold on the mainstream press -- which was the absolute worst thing to have."

New New Scientist
More detail on fault-tolerant hardware design (12 June below): http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/98/0907/6205210a.htm [OS]

Since flawless disk drives are costly, it is cheaper to supply highly reliable mainframe storage via arrays of inexpensive redundant disks.
First, the software spent a week of processing time to find, map and catalog the 220,000 defects that sullied the hardware. For most computers, a single one of those defects would have been fatal.

From the sluggish Premiere site, another funny movie review-- City of Angels: (spoilers) http://www.premieremag.com/libby/index.html

As she pedals with her eyes shut, her head thrown back, and her arms stretched out rapturously, the entire audience began chanting, "Truck! Truck! Truck!" And, lo and behold, Meg gets totalled by a semi, but Nicolas arrives just in time to cradle her only mildly battered head and send her off to meet Patrick Swayze in the next world. Stacy was thrilled. "It's perfect," she said with a sigh. "Now they'll never have a fight!"

Tue, Aug 25, 1998
Jerry Carroll has two interesting tidbits: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/08/25/DD7.DTL

Phil's Harmonic Orchestra is making a new kind of music. Not jazz, not classical, not rock or any other standard category. Instead, it blends them all...
As she took a $20 bill for a $4.35 purchase, she entered that amount. In response, her computer displayed a detailed picture of a cash drawer, together with pictures of each coin and bill she was to give to the customer.

New Village Voice
Chomsky on the missiles: [Deja URL]

If the US is entitled to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan on suspicions that people there are involved in terrorism or preparation of chemical weapons, then, obviously, Cuba is entitled to bomb Washington. That's only the first of a long list.

That commentary I quoted Thursday has spawned the world's most extravagant Lolita-thread: [Messy URL]

Joyce Maynard on dollhouses: http://www.joycemaynard.com/wwwboard/messages/649.html

It cost $400 (even in 1982). The month I saw it was the month my father died. My inheritance from him (besides his real legacy -- paintings) was almost exactly $400. My husband said I was crazy, and we definitely needed snowtires, but I got Audrey the dollhouse. [Pic source]

SmartCard open sesame: http://www.nikkei.co.jp:80/enews/TNW/page/cypage0019.html

The experiment, started by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's transit bureau in late June on the Toei No. 12 line, uses an integrated-circuit card the size of a credit card, with a built-in communications device. The card stores such information as the stations for which the pass is valid and its expiration date. It automatically transmits information when it comes within about 10cm of a special sensor. Since the information exchange can be done even when the card is inside a bag or a wallet, users do not need to take it out each time they pass through a ticket gate.
More Japanese ingenuity: http://www.nikkei.co.jp:80/enews/TNW/np/tnwnp0087.html

The device can detect fish up to 20 meters deep when placed on the surface of the water. It provides a readout on the Game Boy screen. ... Price: 14,800 yen ($103).

Search nightmare: I wanted a map that showed both Kenya and Iraq to confirm this report that the CIA was using the Kenya embassy to monitor Iraq. (They're over 2000 miles apart.) I never use maps online, so I tried typing "world maps" into Yahoo, resulting in a worse-than-usual mess of junk, plus a prominent targetted banner ad for world maps. Foolish me, I clicked on the banner, and got lost in an endless stream of hype for maps that seem not to be online. Which seems a strong argument against pay-for-placement search engines...

The UK Guardian has a huge special report on the missile attacks: [multipage] http://reports.guardian.co.uk/sp_reports/usbombs/index.html including the increasingly outrageous Gore Vidal: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/sp_reports/usbombs/430.html

The CIA's demonising process is fascinating, swift, unvarying. Each demon admires Hitler. Keeps a copy of Mein Kampf beside his bed. Is a poofter - red silk knickers are found in his closet. He also has mistresses and takes cocaine.
Madeleine Albright, due to some configuration of her handsome lips, seems always to be extruding snakes and toads and scorpions.
Also, a matter of some relevance to the recent troubles in Washington, should something unfortunate explode on American soil, under the Constitution the President assumes wartime powers and is beyond the reach of all law and custom...
More to the point, as the eloquent Spiro Agnew once said: "The United States, for all its faults, is still the greatest nation in the country."
And a great dissection of the complex threads of mid-east responses: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/sp_reports/usbombs/362.html

The US no longer has any credibility as a would-be world policeman. All its actions are viewed through the prism of its relations with Israel. Pax Americana is viewed universally as the cynical pursuit of self-interest.
Saudi Arabia's rulers may secretly rejoice if Osama bin Laden's mountain guerrilla force has been damaged, as in the long term the Saudi millionaire-militant posed as great a threat to the conservative monarchy as to US interests in the Gulf. But the Saudi government is one of only a handful of states to have recognised the Taliban regime, and the Taliban have been humiliated by these strikes.

New Fast Company features 20-somethings vs 40-somethings: http://www.fastcompany.com/online/17/index.html [via OSRR]

The Boardwatch redesign is great except that they now break up every article into a zillion pages. Dvorak on portals includes more detailed criticism than others: [four pages, last two the recipe] http://boardwatch.internet.com/mag/98/aug/bwm33.html

The irony here is that I think Netscape originally assumed that people would use the HOME button to go to their own HTML links page. I say this because the company did nothing, it seems, to make money from the millions of hits it was receiving everyday. Originally the site had no banners or any advertising.

Kibo explains:
      ...That's not an analogy, that's a metaphor, because it
      doesn't contain "like" or "as".
 
      I like gumdrops.  <--  SIMILE
 
      I hate gumdrops.  <--  METAPHOR
Mon, Aug 24, 1998
August Boardwatch features major redesign
Invisible Hand Electronic Market takes a different approach to the Foresight Exchange: http://www.myhand.com/
       Top 10 most popular contracts:
       Mark McGwire          Less than 62 Home Runs   $0.25 
       Spice Girls           Spice Girls Finish North
                              American Tour           $0.90 
       Mark McGwire          More than 61 Home Runs   $0.98 
       PGA Top Money Winner  Not Tiger Woods          $0.86 
       Beastie Boys          Top 200 Greater Than 30
                              weeks                   $0.95 
As does Fantasy Futures (sports, stocks, politics, entertainment): http://www.fantasyfutures.com

The Examiner site returns after a day offline, with a decent NetSkink on net investing: http://www.examiner.com/980823/0823skink.shtml

In April 1996, Iomega's price broke $50 a share, baffling Greenberg. "The events surrounding Iomega have made me wonder whether there really is a new order out there," he wrote in an April 24, 1996, column. Two years later, however, the stock plummeted to $5, vindicating Greenberg at long last.

A long, clear, technical survey of recent developments in nano/ chemical engineering: http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/cenear/980608/shape.html [via Slashdot]

Two weeks ago, Smalley and coworkers at Rice reported that they had found a way to chemically cut single-wall carbon nanotubes into relatively short pipes that behave as individual macromolecules. Their idea is to use these fullerene pipes as connectors and components for nanoelectronic devices.

This XML version of Hamlet may look cool, but I think people will quickly realise it's utterly useless markup-for-the-sake-of-markup: http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/u/relander/XML/hamlet.xml [SN]

Meta: Is there a site that links to international editorials by topic? I'd like to see what the world is saying about Clinton's hi-tech temper tantrum. US News has lots of quotes but no links.
Obscure Store adds a world-class index-page for tv transcripts: http://www.obscurestore.com/transcripts.html

Sun, Aug 23, 1998
Good stuff in the Progressive Review

"...According to the US logic, China need simply declare that a certain blast in Xinjiang is the handiwork of terrorists based in Kazakhstan to rain bombs down on Almaty. And India -- which was urged restraint by the US when there was irresponsible talk in New Delhi of 'hot pursuit' of militants beyond the border -- can presumably feel free to attack Muridke or any other suspected terrorist base camp in Pakistan. By the same token, Pakistan, which accused India of engineering a train blast in June, can claim the right to hit targets in India that it feels are connected with the bombing. It is precisely because of these dangerous implications that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has expressed his discomfort with Washington's action." -- Siddharth Varadarajan, The Times of India

An interesting corporate history of bioterrorists Monsanto: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/8/23/17759.html

In the next month or two, it is expected to unveil its latest weapon in the propaganda war: an advertising campaign in which some 49 representatives of countries around the world exhort Europeans not to be selfish by resisting biotechnology. The line of the campaign is "Let the Harvest Begin". Liz Hosken, of the Gaia Foundation, a non-governmental organisation that promotes bio-diversity in the developing world, said: "I see it as emotional blackmail."

Last chance to own your own underground missile silo: http://www.missilebases.com/properties/index.html

Carlton, KS. 18.5 acres, full stairs and floors in LCC, some structure still hanging in missile silo tube, excellent hilltop view, access top Salina, Topeka, & Wichita. Eager seller - price negotiable, contract possible. Price $69,500
(Tomahawk not included.)

Witty cynical response to Doctress Neutopia (Friday below): [Deja URL]

The Golden-Light District : A Play
Act 1: The Doctress Neutopia and Igor are walking thru the red-light district in Amsterdam...

Cool spooky nude-of-the-day: http://www.nervemag.com/photoday/
The cutting edge in nutra-ceuticals: http://www.iops.net/phyto-bears/

Now for the first time, parents can give their children the vegetables they need every day in the form their kids will Love at a fraction of the cost! ... Unlike other vitamin and mineral supplement products designed for kids, Phyto-Bears contain freeze-dried juice from raw fruits and vegetables, providing the added benefits of "whole foods."

The Oxford English Dictionary was the work of an unharmless drudge: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-08/23/089l-082398-idx.html

Minor had already complained to Scotland Yard about nocturnal disturbances, a continuation of the paranoia that had begun to envelop him in America, where strange men tried to get him to eat poisonous, metallic biscuits. The police investigation revealed that Minor had a strong affection for Lambeth's plentiful brothels; Broadmoor authorities discovered that Minor had been bedevilled by sex ever since his boyhood in Ceylon, where his parents ran a mission and girls ran naked on the beaches.
("It was many and many a year ago...")
A great tribute to Kingsley Amis: http://washingtonpost.com:80/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-08/23/086l-082398-idx.html

Lucky Jim also contains the single most vivid sentence ever penned to describe how one feels when waking up with a hangover: "His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum."

An okay survey of commercial robot projects: http://www.herring.com:80/mag/issue58/robotics.html

LunaCorp, a company in Arlington, Virginia, is seeking investment to finance the launch of a rover robot, designed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, to be stationed on the moon. In a commercial twist, LunaCorp plans to transmit images back to amusement parks, where people can experience a simulation of traversing the lunar landscape.

Sat, Aug 22, 1998
The news in Latin: http://www.yle.fi/fbc/latini/trans.html [Explorator]

Praesidens Bill Clinton iudicibus iuratis confessus est se cum Monica Lewinsky consuetudinem minus decentem habuisse. Negavit tamen se peierasse aut cuiquam suasisse, ut de illa consuetudine mentiretur. Idem recusavit, ne singula de rebus ad Monicam pertinentibus narraret.

10am-noon CDT This is Hell funny abrasive progressive radio show [RealAudio, live] Interviews with Gary "Dark Alliance" Webb (Contra-crack-CIA) and April "Tailwind sarin" Oliver scheduled.
Meta: I've been spinning my wheels pretty badly for the last week on the NetLit portal-pages, trying to write top-down overviews rather than bottom-up summaries. To break out, I had another RSI-party today, mechanically hiding all the URLs under straight anchor-text.

Fri, Aug 21, 1998 (New Moon at 21:04 CDT)

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