Robot Wisdom WebLog for September 1998 (waning)

The history of rec.arts.books: [Deja URL, short]

It looks to me like almost all of the core members who were posting regularly in fall of '94 are still here and still posting.

Grannies save (cf 5 Feb below): http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/9/20/22817.html

Grannies were able to forage for roots and vegetables which they could give to their daughters when they were having babies, creating a well-nourished, thriving third generation.

And supermodels rule: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/9/20/22826.html

Castro described the meeting later as "very spiritual", conferring on Kate Moss the highest compliment he could construct. "You started a revolution towards little models," Fidel gushed.

I think RU Sirius is a wanker, but this speculative psychobiography of Clinton makes many interesting points, and his platform for ending terrorism is 100% righteous: http://www.disinfo.com/prop/diss/prop_diss_revolution4.html [This Is Hell]

According to Bob Woodward you exploded in rage that all your programs were captive to the needs and demands of "them." But a few days later, the political survivalist in you took over and you were gleefully dragging conservatives into your administration.

According to Preston: "It turns out that Bill Clinton was reading my book that same week. The book either scared him or captivated him, because he got hold of Newt Gingrich and told the Newt, 'You have to read Cobra Event...'"

9am-1pm CDT: This is Hell extended mix includes live interviews with a Salon editor and a NORML spokesperson [RealAudio]

"Hey, you, hey, John Q Fascist Sixpack American Public! When are you gonna get off your deluded stinky Big Mac cancer-poisoned buttocks, you moron, and figure out that the corporations are setting you up? That when some developing countries finally get it together to nuke the US, for being the hired cops of the multinational corporate rape of their nations, cultures, and very lives, or when enough poor white men and women are demagogued into neo-Nazism by fake Christian libertarians who tell them their problems come not from being used by the rich, and cast aside like garbage, but from Commie unions, and then one of these militias gets it together to nuke a major metropolitan center, when that happens, when our nation has been ruined, milked for all it has, and the corporations just pick up, and go to a new frontier without so much as a thank-you-suckers, well, hey! John Q Fascist Sixpack American Public, don't come cryin' to me!"

"...Next time you're thinking of passing legislation that would single out poor people to be denied access to healthcare, or you're considering taking more of the burden of paying for the social infrastructure off the large corporations and shifting it onto the backs of the working poor, or if you're planning to give your CEO a huge stock option package while paying your workers less than a living wage, or you're beginning yet another day of lobbying for the building of more prisons, or you're fighting against a legal judgment demanding that you clean up a toxic mess on an Indian reservation, or you find yourself trying to get the city to fund your plan to pave over a neighborhood and build yourself a sports facility, or you're poking with your nightstick at a man asleep in the street trying to wake him up so you can order him to move along, or you're about to sentence someone to prison, or you're about to turn off someone's utilities, or you're ready to fire a lot of workers in order to raise the price of your company's stock, or you're operating a sweatshop, or you're about to give a prisoner a lethal injection, or you're about to order the kidnapping and murder of a union organiser, or you're doing business in a country partly because their government orders the kidnapping and murder of union organisers, just think to yourself: what would Jesus do?"

Nerve tempts fate by following up their brilliant forum on female sexuality (4 Feb below) with a new one on children's sexuality. My favorites from this first round are Lolita-screenwriter Stephen Schiff's: http://www.nervemag.com/voicebox/puberty/Schiff_Answer1.html

But strangely, the innate eroticism of children has little to do with gender. It has everything to do with a kind of omnisexual softness, cuddliness, freshness, sweetness.

And Judith Levine's: http://www.nervemag.com/voicebox/puberty/Levine_Answer1.html

What about the flat-chested 1998 nine-year-old dolled up like a Spice Girl and sucking face with the boy (or girl) next door like they do on "Dawson's Creek," but who will wait until she's twenty-six and married to lose her virginity because first she was busy with basketball, then with business school, and then she converted to fundamentalist Christianity?

A lively Intro to Paglia 101: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/9/19/22557.html

She works in the tiny humanities department of Philadelphia's University of The Arts, which registers about nil on the Richter scale of academia.

She loves to see herself as a child of the 1960s, the era of protest and excess, but the 1950s are undoubtedly her spiritual cradle, peopled by lonesome cowboys, simmeringly sexy woman and the odd maverick (like herself) whose non-conformity provides the cultural life force for an otherwise ordered society.

Nicole Kidman gets Very Naked: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/9/19/22636.html

Even for the audience, it can sometimes be a discomfiting experience. "You're afraid to blink," one of the lucky few to get a preview ticket told us. "You blush until you can blush no longer. It's quite an experience."

A lavishly illustrated history of drug-imagery in ancient art: [multipage] http://www.kalyx.com/indexn.htm

Imagine the power of the intellect that could sing The Iliad from memory.

A good overview of the outlook for IP telephony: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/news/trends/t980918a.html

eFusion is currently running trials of its Internet Call Waiting and push-to-talk services with Ameritech, France Telecom, the Netherlands' KPN Telecom, Telecom Italia, Sweden's TelNordia, and U.S. West.

Way cool new pix of Earth; also the Shuttle cockpit: http://www.flatoday.com/space/today/index.htm

(Dear President Gore, Please launch Triana soon!)

At least Jimmy Carter hasn't forgotten Sudan: http://news.stocksmart.com/ss-news/CX1241363.html [Drudge]

The United States argued strenuously against the request, and the Secretary Council shelved the discussion. "Despite early American reluctance to support this request," Carter said in the statement, "this is something that now needs to be done."

Sign o' the times: Training corporate villains to resist terrorist attacks: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/0921/6206184a.htm

"I trained with a bunch of staid executives," says Barry Hughes, an executive director in a Houston law firm. "By the time we started smashing up cars, these businessmen were as excited as little kids."

Principles of corn-maze design: http://www.edoc.com/zarf/essays/maize.html [HG]

- Pacing
- The Zen View
- Small Victories
- Rules are Nifty
- Go Find Out
- Dehydration

Miss America drives final nail: http://www.canoe.ca/TorontoShowbiz/ts.ts-09-17-0076.html [Drudge]

"I think Clinton is a very dangerous, manipulative man and I've had to be very careful," she says. "There was a lot of pressure on my family and friends, people were being staked out. I was a little bit afraid for my own safety at one point. It's just not an area where you're safe." She pauses, then says, "I would never have said what I just told you a month ago."

The Economist neatly resolves the MonicaGate contradictions: http://www.economist.com/editorial/freeforall/current/index_ld5167.html [SN]

Mr Starr has piled on the sexual details, to excess; but the details of anyone's sex life, presented to an outside audience, could look similarly comic and dirty.

The long-term effect of this extraordinary inquiry may well be that no future Kenneth Starr is let loose against a sitting president

In any other walk of public life, Mr Clinton's flagrant lying (to say nothing of the sexual dalliance) would have him out on his ear.

At the famous prayer-breakfast on September 11th, at which he spoke of his sin and his "broken spirit", the cameras caught him peeping round in the middle of his prayers, as if to check that everyone was watching. This is a consummate politician who knows exactly what strings, including heartstrings, he must pull to stay in office.

Even those who still respect this president, a dwindling band, no longer have any expectations of him.

Mr Clinton, the Comeback Kid, has seen enough glints of light to persuade him to stay. This is a man who supposes that even after congressional censure he could bounce back grinning.

Kablowie! The NY Post throws caution to the winds: http://www.nypostonline.com/commentary/5616.htm [Drudge]

Since Sidney Blumenthal was behind the Hyde sliming and the McHale defamation, there can be little question of his involvement in exposing the pecadillos of Reps. Dan Burton and Helen Chenoweth.

Drudge has a bunch of interesting UK-commentary links, too: http://www.drudgereport.com/

TV 2nite: Tori on Leno; Grace Slick on PI (I just find PI's signal-to-noise impossibly low)

A nice little note about worm genes: http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_173000/173295.stm

It is made up of exactly 959 cells and we will soon have its genetic blueprint, the first such blueprint for a multi-celled animal.

For over 500 million years humans and worms have followed separate lines of evolution. But biologists have been able to replace a C elegans gene with a human version of that same gene.

New The Nation looks at Clinton, Russia, Indonesia, and LA

You can vote for Julia Butterfly in a Good Housekeeping poll, but the mandatory choices in other categories are ridiculously limited: http://homearts.com/appssurv/98ghma3a.htm

If you've never experienced Kibo's 1000-line sig, here's your latest chance: [Deja URL]

New Computer Gaming World reports the latest X-Com is a dud

More good Progressive Review:

Just a few of the newspapers that have called for President Clinton's resignation:

USA Today
San Jose Mercury News
The Denver Post
The Washington Times
The Orlando Sentinel
The Tampa Tribune
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Chicago Tribune
The Indianapolis Star
The Des Moines Register
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The Daily Oklahoman
The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Richmond Times-Dispatch
The Seattle Times

Year of the list (cont.): The 100 best CD-ROMs: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/100cds98/atoz.html

The XHTML debate has gotten so ugly it's making me nauseous: [Deja pattern]

Bug's vs Antz is also Pixar vs Dreamworks is also Jobs vs Gates: http://www.forbes.com:80/tool/html/98/sep/0917/feat.htm

The bad news for Jobs, and investors in his studio, is that it appears that the competition not only has the drop on them in terms of timing, but might have caught up to them in the animation technology arena, too.

More hidden New Scientist: a great, very clear look at liquid helium by Michael Brooks: http://www.newscientist.com/usa/bayarea/helium.html

When Packard suggested that they take a pair of headphones and listen for the signal, the students were less than enthusiastic. "They kept arguing that there was no point because there was nothing there," he says. He kept at them to try it, but they resisted. "They really didn't want to do it -- in the end they simply argued that they couldn't do it because they didn't have any headphones in the lab."

This wave function depends on, among other things, a superfluid's pressure, which means that the wave functions of the two superfluid pools differ. This leads to a kind of confusion involving the atoms at the boundary between the pools. Roughly speaking, these atoms try to occupy both regions at once and end up doing a rapid quantum dance back and forth between the two.

The group is still working out a complete theoretical model for its whistling superfluid, but that hasn't stopped them seeking applications. Eventually, they hope to incorporate it into the world's most sensitive gyroscope. ... An etched channel spirals around the edge of the chip. At one outer end of the spiral is a relatively large (1 millimetre in diameter) hole, and at the other end is a tiny 1 micrometre hole. When immersed in a superfluid, there is a circular path around which the fluid can flow.

...they are currently working at the limits of their laboratory, and conducting experiments in the dead of night, when no one is around to ruin the results by, for example, flushing a distant toilet.

And a nice attempt to actualise some science folklore: http://www.newscientist.com/usa/bayarea/ghosts.html

Sokoloff was sifting through catalogues of distant galaxies trying to find our own Galaxy. He was looking for us, here, out there -- but in an era long gone by.

I'm starting to really like Forbes magazine. Here's a little throwaway about buying yourlastname.com: http://www.forbes.com:80/forbes/98/0921/6206256a.htm

(What it suggests but doesn't discuss is how the owner of barger.com must become the focus of Bargers worldwide, and offer forwarding. Which implies that the standard form for email addresses may gravitate toward jorn@barger.com.)

I don't trust Little Stevie F as far as I can throw him, but this anti-IMF editorial at least raises interesting questions: http://www.forbes.com:80/forbes/98/0921/6206031a.htm

WITH AN INSENSITIVITY worthy of Marie Antoinette, President Clinton told Russians to "pay their fair share" of taxes. ... Tens of millions of Russians are in dire straits. Countless workers aren't even being paid on time. Russian bailout money has been looted. And yet our President admonishes the Russian people to pay debts they didn't incur and to pay more taxes on poverty-level incomes. Unbelievable.

(Notice SF doesn't mention how he also lectured them on income inequality!)

Another piece by Forbes' Russia-expert: http://www.forbes.com:80/forbes/98/0921/6206070a.htm

Voiding the crooked privatizations and doing it again honestly and openly could bring in more foreign exchange than all the money that the IMF could ever lay its hands on.

George Soros's discouraging words: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/9/16/22108.html

The Asian crisis reversed the direction of that flow, Mr Soros said. Capital began to flee the periphery, at first to the benefit of the financial markets at the centre. The US economy then enjoyed the best of all possible worlds as cheap imports helped to keep inflation in check and stock prices moved to new highs...

TV 2nite: Grace Slick on Tom Snyder

A great, heartening profile of the PalmPilot folks: http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/09/17feature.html

"The thing that disappoints me the most about Bill Gates and Microsoft is not so much their ethics as the fact that they have no class."

The bottom line is, consumer electronics guys don't get it because it's a platform. Microsoft doesn't get it because it's a consumer electronics device. It's effectively a crossover of multiple worlds that has created a new kind of category...

In a sense, Hawkins redefined it as a window to the data on your PC, then built the software around a synchronization strategy between the device and the PC, and nobody else had done that before.

And a bleak look at the prospects of adjunct faculty: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/it/feature/1998/09/17feature.html

...she tells me that in her spare time she's writing a script called "The Adjunct," a horror movie about an unstable part-timer who one day decides she's had enough and "goes adjunct."

With declining budgets and escalating costs, overproduction of Ph.D.s and an embattled professoriate clinging to its privileges, no one is predicting changes any time soon.

Massive new Drudgeness: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

A senior staffer in Hyde's office told the DRUDGE REPORT late Wednesday that the congressman is convinced that the White House is behind the hit. "Mr. President, Call off your Goons!" declared the well-placed staffer, who asked not to be identified. "Drudge, there is no doubt here that this is coming from the White House."

Unabomber psych report: [multipage, but page one is best by far] http://www.unabombertrial.com/documents/psych_report1.html

The examiner also reviewed the complete set of writings obtained from Mr. Kaczynski's cabin in Montana. This included a series of journals spanning the time period of 1960 to present; extensive correspondence by Mr. Kaczynski and to Mr. Kaczynski; and detailed records of scientific experiments conducted by Mr. Kaczynski.

He was viewed as a bright child and was described by his mother as not being particularly comfortable around other children and displaying fears of people and buildings. She noted that he played beside other children rather than with them. Her concern about him apparently led her to consider enrolling him in a study being conducted by Bruno Betleheim regarding autistic children.

Following his visit to Dr. Goren [1991] and his belief that perhaps the potential of an ongoing relationship existed with her, he made the decision to acquire a more conventional career. He decided to attend school at the undergraduate level to obtain a degree in journalism.

The autobiographical notes completed in 1979 provided a much more detailed account of Mr. Kaczynski's view of his history. This is divided into various age periods and separated into the periods zero through age nine; age 10 to 15; age 16 to 20; age 20 to 24; age 24 to 27; and then from age 27 on (to age 37).

During that time period, he made an effort to live off the land and over a period of years, developed increased sophistication with identification of edible plants, gardening, food preservation, hunting, and game preservation, and developed some necessary skills in the area of tool making and sewing. The cabin was not equipped with any plumbing and his water supply was provided by a creek located near the cabin. ... He estimated that it generally cost him less that $400 a year to live, after he became established in his routine.

At times in his writings, he focuses, in an extraordinary amount of detail, on passing or short lived relationships or potential relationships with females. This is illustrated by his discussion of his relationships with (REDACTED) when he was 10, (REDACTED) when he was 16, (REDACTED) when he was 17, (REDACTED) when he was 32, "Ms. Z" when he was in graduate school, and (REDACTED) when he was 36.

Mr. Kaczynski claimed in his writing, that during his college years he had fantasies of living a primitive life and fantasized himself as "an agitator, rousing mobs to frenzies of revolutionary violence."

He describes a vivid memory of a nightmare in his senior year at Harvard wherein he saw his trombone teacher standing in a room looking like a noble old man, he then saw a mist and heard angels, and when the mist cleared the teacher had been transformed into a bent, senile, old wreck.

"And so I said to myself why not really kill the psychiatrist and anyone else whom I hate. What is important is not the words that ran through my mind but the way I felt about them. What was entirely new was the fact that I really felt I could kill someone."

Near the end of his autobiography in 1979, Mr. Kaczynski describes his motives for writing, to include that he intended to start killing people and that when caught, he was concerned people would perceive him to be a "sickie." His writings were an effort to prevent the facts of his psychology from being misrepresented.

After solidification of his ideas in the fall of 1966, it appears that he organized his life and behavior around his belief system. He reacted against individuals in the area by ruining equipment, stealing things, or attempting to harm individuals through use of wires and traps.

She described him as extremely polite, quite and soft spoken, although she initially found his appearance as somewhat frightening. She described his ability to identify with her young child, whom she indicated shared some of the kinds of problems that Mr. Kaczynski may have had himself as a child. She noted that he patted her son on the shoulder twice, which is the only physical contact she ever saw him display over the 13 years of their acquaintance. ...She does indicate that over the years, he occasionally helped around the Library by boxing books, shoveling snow, cleaning up, or painting. At one point the Library planned an open house and Mr. Kaczynski came to that function.

He had developed conflicts with his attorneys which he viewed as impossible to resolve. He perceived that he would not be able to represent himself or obtain alternate counsel and decided to kill himself instead of proceeding to trial with a defense strategy that he did not want.

Eye contact was good, although when asked a question that he perceived as difficult, or one to which it appeared he was not sure how he should respond, he tended to look down and avoid further eye contact until his answer was prepared. During those times, he would also at times clench his hands together and pat them on the table, and appeared to be actually in some distress in his efforts to formulate a response.

There is evidence of ideas of reference in review of Mr. Kaczynski's history over an extended period of time. Incidents within the environment involving noise or human activity are perceived by him as personally directed and he responds with extreme rage and a wish for revenge.

Although he demonstrated the capacity to use humor within the interviews, he could not interpret light comments or attempt at teasing within the interviews and needed to have an explanation to clarify the meaning of such interactions.

He also demonstrated a propensity to focus on passing comments in regard to his self-image and to utilize those comments and incorporate them in an unusual way into his thought processes. An example is referencing a comment made by an older Italian woman when he was 15, that he was beautiful boy, especially his eyes. It was not until 1994 at the age of 50, that he further explored this issue and asked another woman, whom he did not know well, whether he was physically attractive. He indicated she responded he was "run of the mill" and at that point in time he no longer wondered why he had never developed a successful relationship with a woman.

He did not like the idea of talking to a psychiatrist because he believes that "science has no business probing the workings of the human mind."

He claimed that his attorneys were subjecting him to the same type of punishment that his parents had.

He indicated his own goals were to also receive the least penalty possible and to be acquitted if possible, but he could only pursue this goal through something like a mental illness defense if he had an 80% chance of succeeding and being released.

He expressed a preference for death over life in prison, but at the same time denied having an interest in being put to death.

After much consideration he was able to respond to the question of what image he wished to present of himself during the trial. Initially he had only been able to protest against the image to be portrayed by the defense attorneys. It took him some time to be able to determine that he wanted to present himself as rational; a person having a valid point to make; a decent person who felt cornered; as socially vulnerable; in some ways a victim personally and vis a vis the system; an individual who had his back against the wall; a person who lived a beautiful way of life in the woods and a person whose psychiatric disorder could serve as a mitigating factor.

He indicated he would prefer not to testify and denied any interest in using the courtroom to espouse his views.

Smells like scorched earth: http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/09/16newsc.html

Recent stories in which our Washington correspondent, Jonathan Broder, quoted White House sources threatening to employ a so-called sexual "scorched earth" policy have only increased the misconception that there is some sinister, or, to use the term of art, "inappropriate" relationship between the White House and Salon. Therefore, it is important for us to state: The White House had nothing whatsoever to do with any aspect of this story...

New Progressive Review has a dynamite rant on local DC politics:

Anthony Williams is no accident. He comes out of a politics of what in Latin America is called "savage capitalism." Trained at Yale and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, coddled along his way by elite protectors, he is a prototypical aparatchik of the new world order, in the spirit of Clinton and Guiliani but writ small. We have seen his ilk before: the smart Harvard boys telling Russia just how to build an economy; the financial gurus hawking the "Asian miracle" and the Clinton's brain trust busily creating a gated society built on avarice as its own justification.

A funny obscene rant on Clinton and Caligula: http://www.nervemag.com/Lipsyte/caligula/

The lady at the counter told my father I should pick another book. She said it was "inappropriate." I could tell my father secretly agreed, but there was another, more profound issue at stake than whether his son got his hands on a smutty book based on a bloated, misguided movie. It was a question of free speech. I have never been so proud of my father as when he lectured the lady on this topic in loud, abrasive tones, and then paid for the book.

New MicroTimes (no illustrations?!)

Typewriter collectors are cool: http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/etc5.html (afc)

Ian Fleming's gold-plated Royal typewriter sold at auction in 1995 for $84,000 (actor Pierce Brosnan was the high bidder). A few years ago, the machine on which Adolf Hitler wrote "Mein Kampf" sold for over $30,000. Not too long ago, a Blickensderfer which belonged to journalist Eric Sevareid sold for $1400 (although this was just one of his possessions, not the typewriter on which he wrote).

New New Scientist includes a great piece on 'behavioral economics': http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980919/greed.html

Conventional economics cannot gracefully explain the drivers' irrational choice, says Camerer. But behavioural economists can by the simple expedient of "assuming people open a mental account at the beginning of the day, close it at the end, and hate closing an account in the red".

And a short item on net.music marketing: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980919/nmusic.html

Great idea: a (benign) egosurfers' trap: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ches/oldfriends.html [Jargon Scout]

We put your names here where the popular Web search engines could find them. Later, you came along and looked yourself up on the Web. This page popped up, and here you are.

Jargon Scout has a good ear for net.neologisms: http://www.tbtf.com/jargon-scout.html [via Whump]

I scare myself: This George Will editorial actually impresses me: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-09/16/011l-091698-idx.html

So, at this White House, a cigar in an intern and oral-anal contact are as unsurprising as gambling in a casino. That is something to ponder while awaiting the next presidential sermon on the V-chip.

An overlong but interesting shaggy dog 'investigation' of an expert on lying: [multipage] http://www.sfweekly.com/1998/current/feature1-1.html [OSRR]

Ekman has cataloged 7,000 subtly different facial expressions that now serve as a standard template for computer animators.

While it didn't seem so at the outset -- I first learned about Dr. Ekman from a Scientific American review of the new Darwin book -- the more I spoke to him and his law-entranceway disciples, the more it seemed he might be ripe for journalistic seduction and betrayal. ...And there are fewer things more delightful for a journalist than pulling one over on a self-promoter.

Newberry instructs us to gain the trust of a subject, and then to determine what he is like when relaxed and telling the truth. The next step is to make him lie. Ask him to tell his story, then tell it backward, then tell it frame by frame, all the while looking at his face, shoulders -- or any other instrument of Darwinist emotional expression -- for the true story.

...After re-reading Ekman's book on lying, talking to several more law enforcement officers, and interviewing Ekman one last time, I've come to believe that his assertion is essentially correct: Charles Darwin, the greatest sleuth of the modern era, is now helping police officers solve crimes.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1885, Marthe Fleischmann was born. In 1903 in Ulysses, Milly Bloom got her first period. In 1904, James departed the Tower.

New Village Voice includes a disappointingly dismissive 'reality check' on various conspiracy theories: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/38ridgeway.shtml

Protocols of the Elders of Zion; Big Business Plot to Kill JFK With the Help of Nazi Scientists; Bilderbergers; Dixie Mafia; Christian Identity; The Illuminati; Oklahoma City Bombing; David Rockefeller, Ultimate Powerbroker; The Reorganization of the Federal Emergency Management Agency; The Death of Princess Di; The Insiders; New World Order; Flight 553

And a detailed historical analysis of the home run derby: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/sports/38stjohn.shtml

Again, this is an expansion year, which means that McGwire and Sosa got to hit against about 10 pitchers who would've been in Triple A a decade ago. Then again, they also had to hit against at least 10 pitchers who would've been in Japan, Cuba, or Korea a decade ago.

AnchorDesk offers Deja links for sampling the Net's Starr-reactions: http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_2535.html

Question: Have any pollsters broken out the views of people who've read the Starr report?

A new newstracker based on the Northern Light proprietary textbase: http://www.northernlight.com/news.html [CopperSky]

(Only 75 sources, mostly very odd. Also, these URLs don't look linkable at all.)

This Day in Joyce History: In 1912, James composed "Gas From A Burner".

Decent profile of Usenet and its usurpers: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/09/15feature.html

Michael Ginn, president of Realize, postulates: "Our hope is over the long term we can help catalyze a shift in Usenet from a completely anarchistic system that sometimes does or doesn't work to a system that naturally and organically tends to address the interests of people within the group."

Avant-fashion tips from Lisa Pea: [Deja URL]

I would like to just explain, first off, that I am pretty beautiful and glamorous because I am a girl who wears a lot of fancy clothes and cosmetics. I am going to be getting a tiara in about twelve days now, and I am going to wear it all of the time. I will get a little dirty halo on my scalp from NEVER taking it off. I have some yellow cowboy pajamas and I would like to have also a feather boa and some cha-cha heels...

Progressive Review includes this offensive-hacking tidbit:

According to a Washington Post article on Osama bin Laden, the US government now has the ability to hack into bank accounts and remove funds. Deep in the August 28 story, John Mintz reported, "Some US officials also suggest they could drain his accounts using highly classified means of information warfare involving electronic networks."

A decent intro to the XML/HTML dilemma: [Messy URL]

Is XML an irresistible force and HTML an immovable object? How can the stability of HTML accommodate the fast-appearing XML-based tag sets like CML or MathML?

Ancient-historian horserace: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Times/timnwsnws02004.html?2177977 [Explorator]

"It was thought that the earliest writing system was invented by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia towards the end of the fourth millennium BC and that the idea was borrowed by the Egyptians at the beginning of the First Dynasty, around 3100BC. However, recent discoveries at Abydos have shown that the Egyptians had an advanced system of writing even earlier than the Mesopotamians, some 150 years before, between 3000BC and 3350BC."

The White House expert on impeachment is... Hillary! http://www.house.gov/barr/i_ltrhill.htm

You noted in 1974 that "high crimes and misdemeanors" did not denote criminal offenses in the sense that prosecutors employ such terms in modern trials. Rather, in your well-researched memorandum, you correctly noted that the phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" as substituted for George Mason's less precise term in an earlier draft of the Constitution: "Maladministration" (page 12 of your report). Not only that, but your further research led you to quote Blackstone's "Commentaries o the Laws of England" in support of your conclusion that "high crimes and misdemeanors" meant not a criminal offense but an injury to the state or system of government (page 12).

Recommended: A web-based monthly version of the archeology 'weblog' Explorator: [email semi-daily also available] http://web.idirect.com/~atrium/commentarium.html

New Progressive Review tallies the accuracy of the Starr-report forecasters:

BEST SO FAR: Bill Sammon/Wash Times, Fox News, Washington Post, Lisa Myers/NBC, WABC, Newsweek
WORST SO FAR: Matt Drudge, Lucienne Goldberg, William Safire, John Crudele, Daiov Bresnahan

Lost with SwissAir? http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/nws7.htm

Knappik also said nearly 110 pounds of cash and 4? [sic] pounds of diamonds were aboard the flight. [Pic source]

Weird Donald-Sutherland gossip: http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/4802.htm (agc)

Further evidence of Sutherland's all-consuming relationship with directors is the names of his children. With the exception of daughter Rachel, each bears an auteur's name. (Kiefer is an homage to Warren Kiefer, director of Sutherland's first film, Castle of the Living Dead. Roeg is for Nicolas Roeg of Don't Look Now. Rossif is for Frederick Rossif of To Die in Madrid. And Angus Redford's first name is that of Sutherland's late cousin, a World War II vet, while the middle name references Redford and Ordinary People.)

Weird video-on-demand strategies: http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/ctd463.htm

For a small monthly charge, about $10, the TiVo service will search the airwaves 24-hours a day and automatically capture those programs or types of programs that their subscribers say they want. The programs will be stored in a VCR-size box connected to the TV for replay.

TiVo's start-up equipment costs are expected to be $300 to $500... [and store] up to 20 hours of programming on a magnetic disk.

(Could they be doing analog recording, to achieve that capacity?)

And Motorola's Blackbird settop box: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/tc/story.html?s=v/nm/19980914/tc/motorola_2.html

"We're capable of watching video from a broadband network, from cable, or from a satellite, or from a DVD disc. If you'd rather play a game, we turn the same engines into game playing engines, and will outplay the latest, greatest game console," Reinhart said.

Insurance adjustor's nightmare: http://www.flatoday.com/space/today/091498a.htm

The insurance claim for $219,250,000 was filed through EchoStar's insurance broker, J&H Marsh & McLennan.

Meta: I've started a new discussion in our weblogs group, addressed to the NTK folks, about a noxious flamer named Lloyd Wood: [Deja group]

Not my day: I got flamed by Joyce Maynard, too! http://www.joycemaynard.com/wwwboard/messages/1359.html

Yet another Dvorak cache turns up this very on-target look at MS Innovation: http://www4.zdnet.com/pccomp/opinion/opin0898/dvor0898.html

Product or Function     Target
 
Internet Explorer       Netscape Navigator
WinPad, WordPad         QEdit, Zedit, etc.
Built-in networking     Novell and many small-timers
Direct cable-to-cable   LapLink and many small-timers
Outlook Express         Eudora, Netscape
Exchange Fax Transport  Various
Microsoft Network       America Online
Disk compression        Stacker
Windows Explorer        Norton Commander, XTree
TrueType fonts          Adobe PostScript
Backup                  Various
 
Additional Function     Future Target
 
Virus checking          Symantec
Zip encoding            KZip, etc.
Photo/image editing     PhotoDeluxe

Ahh, free enterprise! http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/health/091398/health2_2148_noframes.html

Just eight months earlier, B.A.T. scientists had laid out some basic assumptions about cigarettes. An Aug. 28, 1979, memo reads: "We are searching explicitly for a socially acceptable addictive product involving: A pattern of repeated consumption; a product which is likely to involve repeated handling; the essential constituent is most likely to be nicotine or a 'direct' substitute for it."

More evidence of communications-pathology in the XML community: http://www.infoworld.com:80/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?980911.whxmlie.htm

"The direction Microsoft appears to be going is XML will only be supported through HTML documents and scripts," said Simon St. Laurent... "Anytime you're sending HTML, you're sending dead information, because you can't do anything with it."

Clinton's mystery date: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

According to a Clinton spokesman, the young woman captured on video is an old family friend from Arkansas who lived next to the Governor's mansion. The White House refused to give further details, including a request for more specific information about the identity of the young woman. However an official did confirm that the video is authentic and was taken in early August, 1993.

Another Starr-quote that gives pause:

According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President had a lengthy conversation that day. He told her that he suspected that a foreign embassy (he did not specify which one) was tapping his telephones, and he proposed cover stories.

(Gives you great confidence in our intelligence agencies, don't it?)

TV lastnite: Goodfellas on the small screen is still one of the very best.

More from Joyce Maynard: http://examiner.com/980913/0913secrets.shtml

He told me I would have a beautiful life, and I came to believe, without question, that I would be spending it with him. We would have a child, we agreed. We would write and act in plays together. We would reach a state of enlightenment unimaginable to others.

Picture a painter told he cannot use the color blue, or put a brush stroke in a certain corner of the canvas. That was how I wrote, for years.

But when I showed it to a friend, some time later, he described it as sounding "like the narration to one of those PBS documentaries."

One day a package arrived from my sister. She had kept the letters I'd written to her, over the course of the year I was with Jerry Salinger. Reading at 43 the words of my breathless, hopeful, desperately in-love 18-year-old self, I felt as if I were discovering a message in a bottle, washed up after years at sea.

I reread all of Salinger's work, just as my son Charlie was studying Catcher in the Rye at school. One day he came home to report the discussion question of the day was, "Would Holden Caulfield make a good boyfriend?"

I realized, as I was standing on Jerry Salinger's doorstep, that it was the whole first 44 years of my life that had brought me to this place, able to stand there as I was, with my heartbeat steady and my voice oddly calm as I spoke to his pleasant-looking young wife. "I've come to see Jerry," I said. "Would you tell him Joyce Maynard's here?" ...I was not afraid to tell him I was writing a book. He was very angry that I was. His wrath no longer had the effect on me it had for so long.

Hot rumor, supposedly left anonymously on an answering machine: [URL pending]

"I'm calling in regards to the accident on Wednesday involving the Vortex classified satellite being launched by the Titan. I'll make this very brief. I'm a project engineer and I think the public needs to know that was an RTG [radioisotope thermoelectric generator] power device. When the Air Force issued the destruct command after the initial explosion, they did so to reduce the possibility of the public determining that there was, indeed, a plutonium fuel cell. They reduced everything to particulate matter when they issued the destruct sequence. Which means the twenty pounds of plutonium went airborne at 20,000 feet off the coast of Florida on Wednesday during a failed Titan launch of the Vortex. That plutonium has now passed over the majority of the East Coast..."

Kibo's Sticky Spectrum: [Deja URL]

 Krazy Glue
   Sane Glue
     Super Glue
       Mortal Glue
         Rubber Cement
           Mucilage
             Library Paste
               Those Gummed Looseleaf Rinforcements You Have To Lick
                 Post-It Notes
                   Static Cling
                     Air
                       Lubricants
                         Explosives (While Detonating)

CJR blasts the decline of radio news: http://www.cjr.org/html/98-09-10-grossman.html

What's happening to radio today is likely to happen to television tomorrow, as radio-style managements bring to the nation's television stations the same cost-cutting techniques that succeeded in generating record-breaking profits from the older medium.

Egypt counters Hollywood: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/NATION/t000082916.html

What's interesting about all this is the reaction of the Egyptian moviegoers. They identify totally with the saidi, a person from rural southern Egypt, who is played with verve by Egyptian comic actor Mohammed Hineidy. They jeer the upper-class Egyptian university students who wear Western clothes, dance with the opposite sex and speak English rather than Arabic among themselves. And they applaud when the Israeli flag and the American university officials eventually get their comeuppance.

Canadian dope trade: http://www.abcnews.com/sections/world/DailyNews/BritishColumbiaGold980910.html

"There are so many foolproof ways of getting marijuana into the U.S.," he says. "One guy put four pounds into his kayak and just paddled to the San Juan Islands [in Washington state]. The U.S. Coast Guard isn't going to check a kayak."

The intern on the grassy knoll? http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

The tape runs slightly more than 10 minutes and was obtained by the DRUDGE REPORT in Washington late Friday on condition that its origin and owner not be disclosed. The video will air Saturday and Sunday night exclusively on FOX NEWS CHANNEL'S DRUDGE [9:00 PM ET/6:00 PM PT].

This Day in Joyce History: In 1926, Alfred Hunter died (Bloom prototype).

Sunday Guardian includes an interesting chimp-DNA story, an okay Mailer interview, and this long profile of Sinead O'Connor: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/9/13/21515.html

O'Connor views those years now with distaste. "Between 1990 and 1997," she says simply, "I was going through a major f___ing dark night of the soul."

She has bought her family house in the suburbs. John is "loving and nurturing" and her day is a simple routine revolving round the kids -- "I'm a mother first, pop star second". They eat dinner at home. She is in bed by 10 most nights. "And now," she says, "I'm writing lots of love songs, which is nice. I've never done that before. I'm working on an album for release next July. It's going to be joyous. I can write songs now as if I were someone else."

Chicago's PBS station is saluting Orson Welles tonight, starting with a brilliant look at his battle with Hearst over Citizen Kane: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/amex/kane2/ [includes transcript]

"He created for his audience the same kind of tension and overwhelming dread that Shakespeare's audience had when it saw the original production. That production of Julius Caesar is still regarded as the single most important production of Shakespeare ever done on the American stage."

Good overview of the MP3-audio challenge: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/zdnn_smgraph_display/0,4436,2136956,00.html

While a minute of CD music can take up as much as 10MB of memory, MP3 reduces the size to less than a MB a minute, making music distribution over the Internet feasible. In addition, the shrinkage comes at little cost to quality. Listening over speakers or headphones, there is little noticeable difference between CD music and MP3 music.

Pic of the week: the Unabomber cabin is in jail, too [Source] [OSRR]

I'm finally getting curious about who is Kenneth Starr: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/980921/21star.htm

...even Democrats on Starr's staff came to believe administration officials were acting like people with something to hide.

Hidden in the footnotes: (agc)

25. Id. at 17. After the sexual encounter, she saw the President masturbate in the bathroom near the sink. Id. at 18.

28. Id. at 19. They engaged in oral-anal contact as well. See Lewinsky 8/26/98 Depo. at 18-20.

9:30am-10:30am CDT This is Hell live RealAudio funny progressive radio show, abbreviated pre-football edition (next week will be 9am-1pm)

Stereotypes of the late British empire: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/Sep/cultdiff.html

Americans: Drink weak, pissy-tasting beer.
Canadians: Drink strong, pissy-tasting beer.
Brits: Drink warm, beery-tasting piss.
Aussies: Drink anything with alcohol in it.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1900, the real Henry Flower was arrested for murder. In 1912, Maunsel destroyed their entire edition of "Dubliners", while James left Dublin for the last time.

TV 2nite: Nick Cave on Letterman

Foresight Exchange: I noticed Clinton-futures were still priced at better than 50-50, so I sold most of my other holdings and bet $250 virtual against his lasting thru the next two years: http://www.ideosphere.com/fx/main.html

Starr Report impressions: It doesn't sound like Monica was one of many interns, and if there were others, she was likely the first. But it doesn't sound like he was in love with her in the slightest, nor that he seriously talked about being with her after his second term ended.

Quotes:

...she performed oral sex on him... "...And then I think he made a joke ... that he hadn't had that in a long time."

Earlier in his marriage, he told her, he had had hundreds of affairs; but since turning 40 [1986], he had made a concerted effort to be faithful.

The President responded that the harassment allegation was ludicrous, because he would never approach a small-breasted woman like Ms. Willey.

"...he talked about that there was some issue . . . to do with Kathleen Willey and that, as he called it, that there was something on the Sludge Report, that there had been some information."

She also showed him an email describing the effect of chewing Altoid mints before performing oral sex. Ms. Lewinsky was chewing Altoids at the time, but the President replied that he did not have enough time for oral sex.

Question: Who among the media keeps making the decision that Dan Quayle's opinions (on anything) are newsworthy?

Here's a convenient link to the frame-less text for Ptolemy Tompkins's flakey-Sixties memoir, from the newly revived Word: http://www.word.com/habit/cosmic/text.html [Spike]

It was during these unpromising days that a new fellow traveler made her entrance at the Barn. One evening a slim, tan, dark-haired woman wearing white, baggy pants and a white cotton vest that made her look like a sort of holistic genie came to dinner. Upon learning of all the space available, she asked if she might stay for a while. Radka had a broad, finely-featured face, a clean-but-not-so-clean-I'm-worried-about-it appearance, and the unsettling habit of looking whoever she was talking to dead in the eye for unnaturally long periods.

New Science News looks at the health benefits of honey

OJR has a whole mess of timely Starr links: http://olj.usc.edu/indexf.htm?/sections/news/98_stories/ojrnews_starr_report.htm

Spike looks pretty good today too: http://olj.usc.edu/indexf.htm?/sections/news/98_stories/spike_091198.htm

Starr report: (CNN has broken the long ones up into smaller bites)
http://CNN.com/starr.report/ (table of contents)
http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/starr.txt (local text conversion) http://www.mcs.net/~karl/icreport/ (MCS HTML mirror)
http://www.mcs.net/~karl/icreport/6narrit.htm (full narrative-- best reading)
http://www.mcs.net/~karl/icreport/7grounds.htm (full grounds)

The President said that by receiving oral sex, he would not "engage in" or "cause"(94) contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of "any person" because "any person" really means "any other person."

Commentary: Isn't the critical issue, not the sex, not the coverup of the sex, but the perjury wrt the Paula Jones case? Why is her name coming up so rarely?

I never realised CNN offers audio-only feeds, that work pretty well even today: http://www.cnn.com/audioselect/

The dirt on Codex DIRT (yesterday below): http://www.tscm.com/FNJspyking.html [via feedback board above]

He continues to fleece victims to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because the nature of the devices people are attempting to purchase are illegal, the victims cannot pursue legal recourse when they are cheated (Frank relies on this).

Nightmare scenario: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9809/10/starrbandwidth.idg/

"Obviously if it's in electronic form, we can just put it in HTML and throw it up there," she said. If not, then Hammersla said the document will have to be scanned and put into Portable Document Format (PDF). She said her system is able to scan 30 pages per minute so that will not take too long, but trying to set it up online will be more difficult.

(And 1 Mb becomes 100 Mb... Ascii! Ascii! Ascii! Even HTML would be ridiculous-- are we talking 450 separate URLs???)

AnchorDesk has an excellent webguide for StarrDay (StarrDate?): http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_2529.html

The infamous Drudge Report. Yes, he sometimes gets things wrong. Yes, he's a gossipmonger. But he's the best gossipmonger on the Web.

Lively edition of Obscure Store: http://www.obscurestore.com/

Yay! Ralph McGehee offers a righteous response to a netnews flame: [Deja URL]

Now by inflaming the emotions of Islam's one sixth of the world's population -- we may find ourselves in another, or multiples of other Vietnams -- simply because we refuse to hear or credit what they are saying about themselves. Let us this time at least "hear" what they say and not dismiss those who do, by claiming they are "slipping over into the deep end."

Don't miss: Forbes talks to EO Wilson about economics: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/0921/6206110a.htm

"Civic egalitarianism suggests that the government should buy more seaside property and convert it into parks and other cultural and recreational areas, taxing people to pay the cost. That way everybody, not just the rich person, gets the nice view and cool breezes."

"To the extent that you have multiple nationalities battling for their fair share, you inflame ethnic or tribal rivalry and diminish what gets devoted to civic egalitarianism."

"...there is an ideal grouping size from monkeys on up to apes and humans that seems to relate to the size of the brain. The larger the brain, the larger the group. The ideal size for humans is about 150. Hunter-gatherer groups get up to about that level before they split."

"At a university nothing gets done -- because you're loaded with competition but there's little cooperation. Universities are not organized to encourage both."

A big step forward for the military-industrial complex: http://www.flatoday.com:80/space/today/091198b.htm

The microrover will be small enough to be easily carried and deployed by a single soldier, yet rugged enough to survive impacts when tossed over fences, window sills and other barriers. It will be able to climb stairs and other obstacles quickly, and be capable of conducting detailed surveying and mapping of indoor and outdoor environments, and detection and localization of hostile forces.

(Scene for a movie: the Resistance has a squad member specializing in capturing these bots, and reprogramming them...)

This Day in Joyce History: In 1888 in Ulysses, Bloom and Molly had sex for the first time. In 1904, Eveline was published in the Homestead. In 1912, the Freeman published James's letter about hoof and mouth disease (cf Ulysses).

Diagnostic breathalyzer hullaballoo: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/9/11/21255.html

As with most good ideas, the concept is old. In medieval times, odours were used in diagnosis. But it took the inspiration of the man they now call "the father of the electronic nose" to turn ancient wisdom into a potentially stunning 21st century breakthrough.

The first clinical trials are expected within two years and the first devices ready within five years.

The archeology of witches: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/9/11/21111.html

She died horribly, some 2,400 years ago. The archaeological evidence suggests that she was buried alive, wearing a unique lead collar which may have been a symbolic weight to keep her in her grave.

New The Nation includes a look at Groucho Marx's FBI file

An okay piece on keystroke-spying utilities includes this incredible claim: http://www.techweek.com/articles/9-7-98/paranoia.htm

There is another powerful tool for surreptitiously intercepting data, but it is only available to law enforcement and the military. Called DIRT (Data Interception and Remote Transmission), it was released in June by Codex Data Systems. Investigators need only know your e-mail address to secretly install the program. Once they do, investigators can read your documents, view your images, download your files and intercept your encryption keys.

(They have an unhelpful webpage:) http://www.thecodex.com/dirt.html

Watching Janet Reno lie inspires a new phrase:

The Animatronic Presidency

Some savvy predictions about future PDA-style gizmos: http://www.pe.net/~scotta/digitalconcepts/index.html [Slashdot]

The WristTop basic list of features:
- Voice command interface and real-time voice recognition
- Color touch screen
- PIM features include appointment calendar, address book, to-do list, and voice memo
- Alpha-numeric pager
- Cellular telephone for voice and data
- E-mail access, limited Web access

I'm not sure I've ever seen this admitted to be a mystery before: http://www.flatoday.com/space/today/g091098a.htm [NASA Watch]

Astronomers analyzing data from NASA's Galileo spacecraft will announce they have solved a long-standing mystery, the origin of Jupiter's rings, at a news briefing on Tuesday, Sept. 15, at noon, EDT, at Cornell University... [Preview of ring-images]

Breaking news: (asg)

Warner Bros. announced on Wednesday that Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, billed as a tale of sexual jealousy and obsession with Cruise and Kidman reportedly playing married psychiatrists, will hit U.S. screens July 16, 1999, with an international release to follow shortly after.

Last summer, the driest wit on alt.showbiz.gossip-- Matt Lupo-- was making up 'real names' for celebs: [Deja query]

Steve Martin = Irwin Gallywag
Billy Bob Thornton = Tal Ivanhoe
Keanu Reeves = Egbert Bizzariz
RuPaul = William Bendix Sherbert
Eddie Murphy = Howser Metcalf
Shannen Doherty = Ethyl Metzler
Winona Rider = Dorothea Winslow
Tori Spelling = Frederica Urgot
Drew Barrymore = Alice Crumb
Brian Austin Greene = Isaac Bimmel
Ted Shackleford = Theodore Shirtcoat
Sylvester Stallone = Stu Wannamaker
Ike Turner = Gelman Biggins
Humphrey Bogart = Dexter Morrison
Tom Brokaw = Felix Dangel
Barbara Walters = Walter Jane Simmons

If you started the Brenda Starr 'Rat Sludge' series (27 Aug below), here's the next batch: http://www.ctoons.com/static/brenda/19980820.html

This Day in Joyce History: In 1904, James began his week with Gogarty in the Tower.

Drudge must be getting billions of eager hits, but so far he's produced only small change on the Starr report: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

The Guardian's year-by-year has reached 1044, with Macbeth and Lady Godiva making appearances: http://www.guardian.co.uk/millennium/day23.html

In 1044 Pope Benedict IX was driven out again, and John, Bishop of Sabina, was installed as Pope Sylvester III. Benedict again appealed for help, from his home district of Tusculum, and fought his way back to the papal throne. The next year he evidently tired of the job and sold it to John Gratian, a senior priest, who became Pope Gregory VI. Naturally, Benedict then regretted his abdication and claimed the throne again. There were thus three popes at the same time; an embarrassment solved only when Holy Roman Emperor Henry III created a fourth one, Clement II.

NetSkink Rebecca Eisenberg was at Burning Man, too: http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/current/rebecca.htx?source=htx/http2_mw

The festival "grants us the freedom to design, create and enact a project without the stupidity and straightjacket of corporate America," explained Ron Avitzur, CEO and president of Pacific Tech, an educational software start-up in San Carlos, California

A surprisingly ribald immorality tale via AAN: http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=100

Up and down she went on my knee and I didn't know if I was enjoying it because I thought she was a child, a woman, a man, a transsexual or a dwarf. Which perverted impulse of mine was she appealing to?

Perhaps Puritan Giuliani hasn't destroyed this town, after all. Not, at least, if you know where to go, what to do and how to do it.

The FountainFed? A great gossipy exploration of Greenspan's roots with Ayn Rand: http://www.rahul.net/liberty/liberty/features/62greenspn.html [Feed]

"Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness...." Thus began a letter to the editor to the New York Times Book Review in October, 1957. The letter was signed, Alan Greenspan. It was the first time Alan Greenspan's name appeared in the New York Times. By this time, Greenspan had abandoned a career as a jazz saxophonist...

It is curious, given the disrepute into which central planning has fallen since the collapse of socialism, that virtually no one in the West favors abolishing central banking, the oldest and most fundamental kind of central planning agency.

New New Scientist explores a fundamental physics anomaly: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980912/ngravity.html

They found a systematic anomaly, as if Pioneer 10 were receiving an extra tug from the Sun's gravity. The disagreement is 80 billionths of a centimetre per second squared, a tiny rate of deceleration that would take more than 650 years to bring a car travelling at 60 kilometres an hour to a halt. But to scientists used to working with absolute precision it is a glaring discrepancy.

And a bug-resistant spreadsheet language: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980912/nsoftware.html

"Because you have to give variables names, it guards against major slips," says Paine. He adds that Model Master can check for "dimensional" errors -- ensuring that money is not being multiplied by money, for example. It is also much simpler to reuse old formulas on new spreadsheets because they are written in discrete chunks, called objects, that can easily be exported.

New Voice Literary Supplement includes this great review of two feminist zines: http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/157stoller.shtml

Following a humorous rundown of the finer points of the "Mystery Date" game, Peril admits to her childhood crush on "The Dud," the date whom the game sets up as the least-desirable of the mystery men. He resembled "a bus-and-truck version of Mel Gibson," she observes. "I can just see the look on the face of the Milton Bradley designer who worked on Mystery Date, opening the door to his daughter's first boyfriend and realizing that she, like millions of girls the world over, had imprinted on the Dud."

Some of Bitch's most entertaining articles have been about other magazines, like Jervis's clever skewering of Esquire's annually annoying "Women We Love" issue ("Forget Women We Love; try Women We Wish Existed Because They'd Do Everything For Us")...

From the last VLS, an interesting short book review about the Children of God: http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/156davis.shtml

The "Family" was also certainly a cult. "Mo," as David was known, kept himself at a distance, communicating with all but the inner circle through a voluminous series of letters that dictated the group's behavior. Over the years, these missives became increasingly obsessed with sex, as Mo encouraged his many thousands of followers to swap partners and dabble in plural marriages -- experiments by no means alien to earlier American Christian communes like Oneida.

My Dvorak-radar broke down so I missed this great anti-MS rant: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak_print/jd980803.htm

With Word, the process has actually been relatively slow. With many products, such as Microsoft FrontPage, it's been quick. The Web page editor was bought by Microsoft and tweaked into being a Microsoft product. This is where Microsoft shines. The first iterations were fantastic, but soon it went downhill fast. I don't like it at all anymore. When Microsoft takes a product from outside, it never understands the basis for the product, and it gnaws at it like a beaver on a pine. The pine soon falls over.

And here's a nice scandal re rechargeable batteries: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak_print/jd980723.htm

So now I wonder where the D, C, and AAA nickel hydride batteries are? Mostly in Japan. As far back as January 1996, Toshiba rolled out the first complete line of standard cells and other Japanese battery makers have followed. This event was essentially hushed up in the U.S. market. The big-name American battery companies have avoided this market-killing technology for obvious reasons.

And here's another Mata-Hari type app: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/inside_track/it980723.htm

I use SuperSleuth when doing serious research on the Web. The product can take 8 hours to run, but the results are phenomenal. SuperSleuth does more than search: It analyzes, validates, and indexes all the words used on all the pages found and writes short abstracts, too. Though not a difficult product to use, SuperSleuth is not trivial either, and some hands-on instructions are needed. Rubenstein feels that this was unavoidable, but it doesn't help sales in the current market for "dumbed-down" products.

Bobby's turn in the muck: http://www.usatoday.com/life/columns/ljean.htm

But it also says RFK had an affair with Mary Jo Kopechne, had sex with Marilyn Monroe, including a night his older brother also did, and conspired in her death. He took drugs and sexual favors from women busted for narcotics in the 1950s, and passionately kissed ballet star Rudolf Nureyev, it says.

The Wash Times tidbits page continues to be great reading, at least during this impeachment watch: http://www.washtimes.com/politics/inside.html

"I think really for the hard-core Clinton haters you could surround the polling places with armed guards and these people would rush the place to still vote," Mr. Cook said Monday on CNN's "Inside Politics." "There's no way they're going to stop these people from voting. They're going to vote high numbers, and that's a real risk for Democrats."

More Village Voice includes an extraordinary discussion of actors not-selling-out: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/theater/37feingold.shtml

In the absence of sane government support -- and we haven't had a sane government for decades -- actors are in effect subsidizing the theater, and there is no computable way to arrange what they really deserve, which Bernard Shaw cogently defined as, "Give me a decent living wage and let me work at my art."

Here Brecht becomes the model, and you don't have to parrot his ideas or ape his style to share his concern for working people as people, passionate and intelligent enough to deserve more than merely being handed a cheap answer on a cracked plate.

But the theater never goes away; and if it looks like a trivial diversion now, there is always the dark chance looming up ahead that it may become the spiritual necessity it has been for other cultures at other times.

Headlines from Anti-Terra: (inspired by CounterSpin on Russia coverage)

IMF TO FDR: NO NEW DEAL
"Free Markets Require Belt-Tightening"

(The online CounterSpin is an older show, I think:) [RealAudio] http://www.webactive.com/webactive/content/cspin.html

Yet another great day for the Progressive Review:

Here are some stats on the costs of various approaches to drug rehabilitation:
$2500 for intensive outpatient treatment
$3900 for methadone maintenance program
$4400 for short-term residential treatment
$6800 for long-term residential treatment
$25,900 for incarceration

...A Green European Parliament member recently suggested that storms and hurricanes be named after Global Climate Coalition members like Ford, General Motors and Exxon... Then you could have headlines such as "Exxon Kills 20 in Miami." The proposal was rejected.

This long Rwanda story was too graphic for me to finish, but it's an incredible story: [multipage] http://www.phillynews.com:80/inquirer/98/Sep/09/front_page/RWAN09.htm

When the genocide erupted in 1994, ethnic Tutsis from Mugonero village and the surrounding countryside fled by the thousands to the serene Seventh-Day Adventist Church complex here. The Rev. Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, an ethnic Hutu who operated the church complex with regal authority, at first seemed to be a savior. He welcomed the Tutsis to the compound, a grassy campus containing a hospital and schools that had been a haven during past pogroms.

On April 16, 1994, witnesses now say, Mr. Ntakirutimana drove to the Mugonero complex in his beige Toyota Hilux pickup, leading a motorcade of Hutu soldiers and militia. The troops surrounded the grounds and began throwing grenades over the walls. It was a Saturday, the Adventist Sabbath.

Nice detailed Burning Man wrap-up: http://www.phillynews.com:80/inquirer/98/Sep/09/lifestyle/BURN09.htm

"This is the hugest playground in the world," said Peter Kreysler, 31, of Berlin, Germany, as he lay atop a minivan, assembling a massive mobile made of wooden hangers. "Everyone's creating things. Everyone's excited. The air is dry and clean and everyone's happy to be here."

And a more negative participant's notes: http://www.wired.com:80/news/news/culture/story/14886.html

There was a dilemma in our camp that night, because there were only nine E's (ecstasy tablets) among 12 people (I didn't want any). They sat in a circle and discussed the options. Eventually, it was decided to dilute the tablets in water and divide them evenly. A few revellers also decided to "candy flip" by taking acid with the E, while others opted for a nice cup of mushroom tea instead.

This Day in Joyce History: In ?1871 in Ulysses, Marion Tweedy (aka Molly Bloom) was born. In 1907, James announced his decision to rewrite Stephen Hero. In 1909, James and Byrne were locked out of the latter's flat at 7 Eccles.

TV 2nite: Maybe Joyce Maynard on Charlie Rose; PBS's Nova looks at Wiles and Fermat: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/proof/

Salon argues very convincingly that Clinton might love Monica (cf 30 Aug below): [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/09/cov_09newsa.html

Thus, Clinton is irresistibly drawn to a woman who in his mind embodies the animal passions -- not a well-bred (or well-educated) female with a proper hairdo, trim, shapeless bosom and modest callipygian tush. But a woman who trumpets her sexuality with big hair, crimson lipstick, great Willendorfian titties and a high-water booty.

New "NY Review of Books" trashes Private Ryan: [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998092407R

When Germans are shot, they go down like ten-pins, and they stay down. Their deaths are movie deaths. And the more agonizingly the Americans suffer, the happier we are to see the Germans slaughtered. The realism just ratchets up the enthusiasm.

It is as though he believed that if he let the hook slip out of our mouths even for a minute, we might get the wrong idea about Nazis or slavery. He leaves nothing to chance.

Microsoft Search: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,26114,00.html?pfv

Microsoft has launched a beta version of its highly anticipated search engine, almost a year after the software giant said it was developing the product with technology firm Inktomi.

New Drudgestuff: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

Starr will offer detailed evidence that Clinton obstructed justice, according to case intelligence, claiming Clinton personally engaged in a course of conduct designed to obstruct, delay and impede a grand jury investigation.

New Village Voice includes Ledbetter's farewell address, and J Hoberman's loveletter to Orson Welles: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/film/37hoberman.shtml

As if his unshaven, bleary-eyed, bloated, gratuitously nasty presence weren't enough, Welles gives himself shameless bits of business -- hobbling through the movie on a cane, upstaging Heston by plucking a bird's egg off a windowsill, inadvertently crushing it, and then wondering where to wipe his hands.

Citizen Kane gave what would eventually be called "film noir" a new visual vocabulary and narrative structure; Touch of Evil effectively rung down the curtain on one of the most fertile movements in American popular culture.

Another great issue of CJR's Darts'n'Laurels: http://www.cjr.org/html/98-09-10-d_l.html

But when the Asbury Park Press ran that AP pick-up on April 25, five little words -- The Press of Atlantic City -- had mysteriously disappeared. In their place was the anonymous attribution to "a published report."

New Scientific American includes instructions for building the first GermCam on the Web: http://www.sciam.com/1998/1098issue/1098amsci.html

The eyepiece for most microscopes consists of two lenses situated at either end of a short metal tube. The top lens, the one you hold your eye near, is normally blocked off except for a hole at the center about the size of your pupil. This opening is too small for your camcorder to see through. The bottom lens, however, is larger and virtually unobstructed. And your camcorder will focus just fine with only this one lens in the eyepiece.

And focused soundbeams: (notice the idiotic new Apple Computer style links) http://www.sciam.com/1998/1098issue/1098techbus2.html

A public address system could then target a message to its intended recipient, calling a worker, say, from the shop floor without disturbing everyone in the factory.

And why the Army is afraid to fight in cities: http://www.sciam.com/1998/1098issue/1098techbus3.html

With urban battles increasingly likely (about 70 percent of the global population is expected to reside in cities by 2020), something clearly has to change. The army, Glenn notes, has not published a MOUT field manual since 1979, and even then its tactics dated to World War II: "Throw the grenade through the window, bust through the door and storm the room," he sums up.

Meta: Okay, nobody complained about black-on-purple, but I hated it, so I skipped that purple background. (Still fiddling with the textcolor-- this one looks real classy on my Mac!)

Odd I can't find any webpages about this rumor: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=380879291

[Q] Correct me if I am wrong, but I read MANY years ago that David Carradine was making a feature film of Mata Hari, starring his daughter. He started filming her scenes, supposedly, in her childhood and was planning to continue shooting as she became an adult. Thus, when she was in her 30's (I believe), they would be able to finish the picture.

[A] The film was completed and was planned to premiere at Cannes last year. What happened I don't know...

...I stumbled on it while looking for discussions of this promising Win95 search utility (6 Jun below): http://hotfiles.zdnet.com/cgi-bin/texis/swlib/hotfiles/pcmag_info.html?fcode=000R9E

It features a compact, tabbed interface that steps you through query input, filtering, search-group management, Internet connection particulars, and results browsing. A comprehensive progress display gives real-time statistic updates, as the program accesses search directories, validating and removing duplicate or invalid pages. Mata Hari provides thorough and intuitive results handling...

New Progressive Review asks journalists to un-blacklist these Whitewater books:

PARTNERS IN POWER by Roger Morris (Henry Holt)
SHADOWS OF HOPE by Sam Smith (Indiana University Press)
THE SECRET LIFE OF BILL CLINTON by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (Regnery)
THE STRANGE DEATH OF VINCENT FOSTER by Christopher Ruddy (Free Press)
UNLIMITED ACCESS by Gary Aldrich (Regnery)

Online-journalism interning as a career-foothold: http://www.mediainfo.com/ephome/news/newshtm/stop/stop.htm [Spike]

The interns in my sampling were all paid, from a low of $6 per hour to a high of $15 an hour.

The author of an amazing 1977 Pynchon tell-all, Jules Siegel, has been defending Joyce Maynard's Salinger tell-all: http://www.joycemaynard.com/wwwboard/messages/75.html

I wonder if moving to Northern California enabled her to cut some of that Eastern prudery and ego denial enough to write the book.

And Joyce didn't like the NYT piece (Sunday below): http://www.joycemaynard.com/wwwboard/messages/2123.html

I am doing something more here, I think, than providing the ongoing soap opera of my life for public consumption.

The Internet stock bubble follows a familiar pattern: http://www.forbes.com:80/forbes/98/0921/6206054a.htm

It's an old story, really, only the names are different. In the late 1960s a slew of computer-leasing companies manipulated small floats to keep their market valuations high, facilitating mergers and impressing creditors and customers. When these accounting styles proved too aggressive, their house of cards came down fast.

Boom times for tv writers: http://www.forbes.com:80/forbes/98/0921/6206208a.htm

Before he turns 40, Kevin Williamson will have earned more than $100 million from a 10% cut of his movie creations.... His first writing effort, a gory short tale of date rape and the injustice of being a teenage outsider, earned him an "F" in a high school English class. He still reads Mad magazine.

...That's why, down the food chain from the Microsofts and the AT&Ts, through the TCIs and newer delivery channels such as Yahoo!, big money is going looking for stuff to serve up to the world's waiting eyes and ears.

As a result young writers with little experience have been winning a kind of insiders' jackpot: $3 million-a-year guarantees plus a cut of any potential profits from shows they have yet to think of.

"Television used to be a cozy club of insiders, but now it's scorpions in a jar," says battle-weary Don Ohlmeyer, NBC's West Coast president...

(TV is so awful these days, it seems like there needs to be a new model for incubating talent.)

Mitnick's cyber-handcuffs: http://www.wired.com:80/news/news/politics/story/14855.html

"We told the judge that giving him access to those files was like giving someone access to a locked safe that might contain a gun," Painter said. "[Mitnick's attorneys] claimed in court that the data might contain exculpatory evidence but offered no further explanation."

The laptop is disabled from connecting with the outside world. It has no modem, and no network card. The data is recorded on write-disabled CD-ROM disks. Mitnick is only allowed to use the computer in the presence of either Randolph or Vincent at the Metropolitan Detention Center is Los Angeles.

Thirteen Ways of Realizing the Party's Over: http://washingtonpost.com:80/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-09/08/029l-090898-idx.html

If all this sounds alarming, it means to be. The summer of 1998 was a time for giddiness, lewd jokes and the heady rush of moral posturing. But it is over now. As the poet Wallace Stevens wrote:

"He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him... "

Peru's junkyard inventors: http://www2.nando.net:80/newsroom/ntn/world/090798/world9_9592_noframes.html

After more than a year of experimenting, Juape, who knows little math or science, built "The Condor," a man-size robot covered in tin foil that can roll about the house on wheels, pick up objects with pincer-like hands and turn its head. It is operated by a hand-held control panel. ... Of course, the results aren't always what's planned. Juape's grandmother is afraid of the robot, calling it "the dead soul."

Brief comparison of four 'AI-based' search engines: http://www2.nando.net:80/newsroom/ntn/info/090798/info16_4744_noframes.html

But performance remains spotty. To test it, three questions were posed to all four services: (1) Who was the 16th president of the United States? (2) What is the major export of Brazil? (3) What was the most-watched TV show of all time? None came up with all the answers. The best was Ask Jeeves, which returned detailed answers for two of the three.

Sheinbein extradition solution full of holes: http://www.jpost.com:80/com/Archive/08.Sep.1998/Opinion/Article-0.html

The law, which was amended in 1978 to prohibit the extradition of Israelis who were citizens at the time a crime was committed, makes no mention of connection to Israel as a limitation on the protections of citizenship. In fact, until now, no legal distinction has ever been made between different types of Israeli citizens, based on an undefined quantity of "connection" to Israel.

...In this respect, it is hard to imagine that the Supreme Court, to which this decision will be appealed, will accept the decision as is.

Don't miss: The brave new world of marketing: http://www.amcity.com:80/kansascity/stories/090798/smallb2.html

What makes it even more amazing, though, is the number of widely accepted business practices Ty has contradicted the past five years. Beanie Babies lack a major distributor like Toys-R-Us. They're not supported by any advertising. The line launched without a single promotional tie-in, which is standard procedure with toy introductions. And Ty is the Soup Nazi of toy makers -- If you're a retailer that complains about a missed or mixed-up Beanie Babies shipment, well, it may be your last.

Lame-looking av-centric webnews-collation experiment: http://www.amcity.com:80/philadelphia/stories/090798/story7.html

The new site, set for a Sept. 9 launch, is called A/V DailyNews. It will aggregate news from assorted sources including the Associated Press, United Press International, Comtex, The Sports Network, CNBC and ITN World News.

"I think if they are successful in doing all this, they'll literally change the way news is delivered over the Internet," raved Roland Perry, head of the Internet Stock Report, a firm that tracks publicly traded Internet-based companies.

Wow. Major exotic Siberian supermodel-babe Irina writes a literate memoir: http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/4723.htm

"We don't have a computer," says Pantaeva, who attributes her low-tech tendencies to her closeness with her late grandfather, a farmer and shaman.

Joyce Maynard on her Salinger letter-trove: http://www.joycemaynard.com/wwwboard/messages/2060.html

When I first approached the writing of this new book of mine, it was hard to imagine how to tell the story of a love affair of sorts that was begun on the page, through the exchange of letters, without sharing with readers the contents of those letters. I fell in love with Salinger's words. How could I explain how I formed my attachment to him, without conveying those words?

Major redesign at IMDb (steered by their new owner Amazon, no doubt): http://us.imdb.com/

Mixed Suffragette review: http://www.phillynews.com:80/inquirer/98/Sep/05/lifestyle/SESS05.htm

Additionally, for a Girl Power gig it was surprisingly undemocratic: the Indigo Girls -- Amy Ray and Emily Saliers -- stood front and center for most of the night. Under this constraint, a great talent such as Jane Siberry was not the clear leader when performing her own "Love Is Everything"; the Girls' clarion harmonies and muscular acoustic guitars rang throughout the piece as Siberry stood to one side.

This overlong piece on industrial espionage mentions a black market for biotech bugs: http://www.bergen.com:80/news/sleuths199809068.htm

An FBI agent posing as a Chinese investor who wanted to convert an idle factory for Ivermectin production agreed to pay $1.5 million for the formula and the microorganism used to produce the drug.

(Did he smuggle it out under his fingernails?)

Burning Man police report: http://www.mercurycenter.com:80/premium/nation/docs/burnman06.htm

Eight people have been arrested, all on drug charges. Six were booked for selling LSD and mushrooms, and two others were arrested for selling marijuana, McGee said. Four other participants were injured, one seriously, in a head-on collision late Friday near the festival site, 120 miles north of Reno.

Kibo pioneers yet another area of cultural studies: [Deja URL]

The list of Official Colors for flavors is the greatest product of the American culture.

         CANDY WANTS      SO THEY
         YOU TO THINK     DYE IT:
         IT TASTES LIKE:
 
         cinnamon --      very dark red
         raspberry --     dark red
         cherry --        red red
         strawberry --    light red (a.k.a pink)
         watermelon --    nuclear pink
         grape --         purple
         berry, n.o.s --  blue
         peppermint --    pastel blue
         spearmint --     light blue-green
         lime --          dark green
         wintergreen --   pastel green
         apple --         light yellow-green
         lemon --         yellow
         peach --         peach
         orange --        duh
         root beer --     brown
         licorice --      black

New Progressive Review includes a fascinating comparison of the Times vs the Post on Russian barter:

[Post:] "Barter is poisoning the development of capitalism in Russia because it consumes huge amounts of time that would be better spent producing goods..."

[Times:] "...barter also reflects gritty determination to get by without the bank credits and investment capital that fuel Western-style capitalism ..."

TV 2nite: Masterpiece Theatre reruns part three of the great Francis Urquhart trilogy

Meta: I've been systematically working my way thru the 'browser-safe' background colors, one per fortnight, but it's looking like this one is just too awful. My first two textcolor choices, FF66FF and off-white, have drawn howls of protest. If black is still too painful, I'll skip this one...

The First Millennial Cartoonize Proust Competition: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/9/7/20417.html

Mr Heuet, who spent two years researching the project, making countless drawings of the scenes and buildings around the small town of Illiers-Combray and digging into archives to ensure that every detail of clothing was correct, seems unperturbed by the modern critics' response.

Kibo offers a short overview of one of the greatest Internet kooks, Archimedes Plutonium: [Deja URL]

Among his many accomplishments, he claims to be a millionaire stock market investor with his own island (but he took a job washing dishes at Dartmouth to get access to the Internet); he's the reincarnation of Phar Lap, the racehorse; he's invented numerous useful inventions, like electric Velcro; he is superintelligent because he has a plutonium atom at the center of his brain; he shaves his head for hygiene.

Okay update on music compilations: http://www.atnewyork.com/news.htm

"While the consumer might want [custom CD compilations], there are too many barriers here," said Bennett. Not only are major labels holding tightly top hits, but most top artists have extensive contractual control over how their material is used in compilations.

The Washington Post notices Africa, in a pc feature: [multipage] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/africanlives/front.htm

His help is given grudgingly... But as men with good jobs in a big city, they are obliged to care for sisters, brothers, nephews, cousins, parents, grandparents -- any relative in need. ... Ouattara has a good name in his family, but he has paid a steep price for it. He said that if not for his role as family pillar, he would have shed the status of lower middle class long ago. [Abidjan]

The consolation for parents is that their urban children are less likely to be trapped by the tribal thinking that has poisoned political discourse and made national unity an elusive goal in this East African country and throughout the continent. [Kenya]

Classic form updated in this dialect joke: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/Sep/lucille.html

The best call came from a man who repeatedly complained that he was being paged by "Lucille". ... "She don't never leave no number, so I can't call her back," he said...

Ascii art from Matt McIrvin: [Deja URL]

This is an example of the environmental Crisco Cycle, as explained in a brightly colored illustration in the Random House Encyclopedia...

NetSkink Rebecca Eisenberg's column is due today, but the link is broken at the moment (or is the byline just mis-macro'd?). She has a new column for CBS though, on the fumbling of Proctor & Gamble to make their websites more like TV ads: http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/current/rebecca.htx?source=htx/http2_mw/

"Nobody wants a relationship with Tide, and god knows nobody wants to go to tide.com."

(Prediction: the direction such websites will have to go is detailed info on ingredients, manufacturing techniques, etc. This will be a huge advance for informed consumerism.)

Yikes! She also backpedals on her anti-portal crusade: http://cbs.marketwatch.com/archive/19980824/news/current/rebecca.htx?source=htx/http2_mw/

"The nice thing about communities is that they aggregate regular buyers of a particular product, which makes them valuable from an e-commerce perspective."

The thought of communities as e-commerce strategy might offend some sentimental online community types. But my guess is that when they receive email notice of the latest Howard Rheingold "Virtual Community" book from their shop-port, they will go ahead and purchase it.

(The big question here is will there be five main portals, as the Gartner Group claims, or 50,000 as I predict. The technology already allows any site to make a buck by recommending the book.)

An okay review of a new Stephen Sondheim bio: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-09/06/077l-090698-idx.html

In the 1959 "Gypsy," Sondheim refused to write an ending to "Rose's Turn" because "a woman having a nervous breakdown should not get applause." He changed his mind when Hammerstein insisted that if the audience could not release themselves after this overwhelming song, they would miss the rest.

Comparing the haunting beauty and musical unity of "Merrily" with its shabby demise, one wonders how anything of substance succeeds on Broadway.

The quirkiest top-40 list yet: http://www.paulwilliams.com/hits.html

The 20th Century's Greatest Hits

1. "Things We Said Today" The Beatles (1964)
25. Two-Lane Blacktop Monte Hellman (1971)
26. concert performance Grateful Dead (1969)
27. Krazy Kat Sunday page George Herriman (1920)

Stupendously good profile of Joyce Maynard: http://www.nytimes.com/partners/aol/mag/article2.html [OSRR]

Once, in a pizza restaurant with her family, she dumped a glass of beer over her head by way of communicating her frustration with the evening. "It's easy to wonder whether it's love she's looking for, or fame, or attention," says the novelist Joseph McElroy, an old friend. "God knows, Joyce wants attention and intends to get it."

After the publication of "Leaves of Grass," Walt Whitman received a letter from a woman who, heeding his expressions of lavish desire for his readers, offered herself up to the poet as the fleshy, sexual partner he appeared to be seeking. Whitman wrote back to her in chagrin and some disgust, explaining that he had not meant his poem to be taken literally.

...She wasn't wrong, either, about what was required of her: after her separation announcement, 20-odd newspapers discontinued her column on the grounds that, as far as family matters were concerned, she was no longer fit to comment.

She has, as she intended, let herself rip, and while Maynard diluted can be cloying, Maynard at full strength -- in her very shamelessness; in the unrelenting thoroughness of her self-exposure; in her determination not only to tell the truth but to tear it open and eviscerate it and squeeze it until it is bled dry -- is surprisingly powerful.

An odd confusion runs through much of this criticism: in their hurry to condemn Maynard for imagining that the trivial details of her life are interesting, her critics tend to veer into claiming that trivial details of life in general are not interesting. In the world of Maynard criticism, it can seem as though the novel never existed.

Imagine the positions reversed. Maynard is the recluse, Salinger the memoirist. Offered a memoir by one of America's great writers, who would shed a tear for the violated privacy of Joyce Maynard, purveyor of minor novels and contributor to women's magazines?

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