Robot Wisdom WebLog for November 1998 (waning)

WashPost has Starr's prepared testimony: [multipage] [Messy URL]

South Pacific Shakespeare tourers offer pidgin translation: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/11/19/34012.html

"But he did say that some of it was incredibly rude. In English, Lady Macbeth says 'Unsex me here'. In pidgin we changed that to 'Seten, takem mi hambag'. That will offend your South Pacific readers. As long as we change that we should be OK. Otherwise they'll get the spears out and eat us."

Some NewHoo volunteers unhappy with sale to Netscape: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=98/11/18/0819250&pid=0&threshold=0

A cause should never be bought or sold. I suggest all NewHoo editors delete all the links in their respective areas to show disapproval of this whoring of our time and effort.

**(I'm somewhat tempted to join NewHoo now, for the visibility. They were pretty upfront about their intent to sell-out from day one, but selling out to Netscape is way more acceptable to me than selling out to many other possibles. Also, they say it's pretty common for editors to indulge in vanity-indexing. ;^)

New New Scientist includes building a better genome: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/981121/ninterferon.html

To make superior versions of an industrial enzyme, the identity of which is still secret, Maxygen's scientists isolated genes from 26 microorganisms which each make their own versions of the enzyme. Using its system of DNA shuffling, Maxygen made 600 new daughter genes, 77 of which produced superior enzymes.

**(There's a huge problem to be overcome wrt secondary functions, though. There was a decent article about this recently that I didn't link, probably New Scientist.)

How Ira Glass broke Lynda Barry's heart, and screwed over his radio partner: http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=213

"It was so weird to see our names in there with this person who changed my belief in human nature. I went out with him. It was the worst thing I ever did. When we broke up he gave me a watch and said I was boring and shallow, and I wasn't enough in the moment for him, and it was over. I had to go around for a year saying, 'Am I boring and shallow and not enough in the moment?'"

Here's how Covino signed off. "I hate to say it, but you know I'm feeling at one with my father this week, because it's back to that old realization I had a long, long time ago. You know, it just seems like in life there are two kinds of people. There's the golden boys, you know, who seem to get what they want. And then -- there are the other boys. There are the pizza boys..."

New Ernie Pook's Comeek is mostly readable again: http://www.creativeloafing.com/savannah/newsstand/current/barry.html

The Water Rat can take you to the wildest parties...

TV 2day: Paula Jones got to tell her side on Inside Edition (missed it)

Excellent Progressive Review has Sam raging against the media's impeachment rollover:

Adler has one righteous point-- the apparent abuse (apparent because we've only heard Monica's side of the story) of Lewinsky's rights after being accosted by the FBI and prosecutors....

Hitchens also notes that by virtue of a much-touted law 'n' order bill signed by Clinton in 1994, not only is sexual harassment a crime, but "those accused of sexual harassment may be asked in court about their own sexual history." He also notes that Dr. Jocelyn Elders was fired for talking about masturbation, that both Clintons have urged sexual abstinence as a replacement for contraception among teens, that Clinton signed a bill that expelled from welfare women who could not or would not reveal the names of their children's fathers, and that he "signed the gay-baiting 'Defense of Marriage Act' and bragged about the fact in 70 purchased spots on Christian radio."

New CounterSpin (not yet posted) reveals that the whole Oliver Stone TWA800 ABC cancellation story was wildly misreported. The show (never filmed) was to be a pilot for a weekly newsmagazine with four items per week about news stories the mass media had covered poorly. TWA800 was to be one of the four in the pilot, but they say they have a huge list of similar topics. There was absolutely no intent to draw a conclusion about Navy missiles re the TWA800. The pilot was green-lighted by the Entertainment division, red-lighted by the News division. The interviewee (a producer) was baffled why the media universally tunnel-visioned onto the TWA800 segment alone. I'll try to check back for this RealAudio in a day or two.

Chernobyl rover almost ready to go: [includes pix] http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_216000/216764.stm

It has a plough on the front to push aside fallen debris and tank tracks to climb over larger objects. An imposing drill allows Pioneer to test the structural weakness of concrete. Crucially, by using spaceage camera technology, the robot will also be able to construct a three dimensional map of the damaged power station's interior.

Very cool anthropological detective-work re 'fertility' figurines: http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/nyu-asfsf.html

The absence of faces on most of the statuettes is not a matter of omission or neglect. In fact, the featureless faces were carefully and laboriously worked by polishing and other means to create an absence of detail. In other words, the empty faces were as much work to create as if they had been given features.

**(Julian Jaynes drew conclusions about the giant, hypnotic eyes in early ?Cycladic sculptures-- he thought people hallucinated a speaking voice via the eyes.)

Japan sees the US as a big brother? http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/wl/story.html?s=v/nm/19981118/wl/japan_10.html

"They rely on the United States as a stalking horse to do a lot of work for them. And then when the United States gets tired of things they can take over with a superior position carved out."

Inside GE's corporate culture: http://www.commondreams.org/pressreleases/Nov%2098/111698a.htm [CDreams]

"Trashing hotels was considered being one of the boys, so was playing demolition derby with rental cars. At the annual meeting one year in Montreal, the German sales contingent heaved a grand piano out the hotel window (fortunately, it was on the ground floor.)"

$350 million for Air Force infowar: http://www.fcw.com/pubs/fcw/1998/1116/fcw-newsinfowar-11-16-98.html

The contract includes services for systems and communications architecture planning; software development; intrusion detection; development of IW indications and warning methodologies; integration of IW concepts into existing country studies; database development and maintenance; systems integration and hardware procurement; World Wide Web site development; modeling and simulation support; interactive training courseware and services; and real-world operations support.

**(They don't itemise offensive hacking, which was mentioned 8 July below.)

Monsanto on the ropes: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/11/18/33740.html

Two internal documents, leaked to Greenpeace and confirmed by Monsanto last night as genuine, say that the company should now consider crisis management.

The actual new NY Observer includes another awesome probing of net.stocks, with emphasis on Barnes and Noble: http://www.observer.com/cgi-win/homepage.exe?nyo1/BE112398

It will be a long time indeed before investors forget the stock-hyping that Goldman, Sachs & Company has engaged in lately on behalf of the absurd E-Bay. Here was the leading white-shoe investment firm on Wall Street -- a firm that had only eight weeks earlier taken E-Bay public at $18 per share -- now putting out a research report on Nov. 10 to argue, on some phony rationale about revenue growth, that E-Bay is actually worth $150. The effrontery of such hype simply leaves one agog.

For Amazon's price to rise in the face of Barnes & Noble's announcement that it was buying the Ingram Book Group is something that makes sense only in the Lewis Carroll world of six impossible things before breakfast -- a world where everything is backward and the Red Queen's on her head.

Barnes & Noble has been struggling to establish itself on the Internet for over a year now and, having found the undertaking too costly, it last month announced a joint venture deal with German-based Bertelsmann A.G., the multimedia giant, to go 50-50 on a Web retailing venture. The cash from that deal -- $200 million -- has helped fund the cash portion of the Ingram purchase ... and with those two pieces in place, Barnes & Noble has the resources and marketing clout to make the Internet happen.

And a second item-- that I haven't digested yet-- also looks at B&N in terms of Alice: http://www.observer.com/cgi-win/homepage.exe?nyo1/MW112398

Will we, down the line, see Barnes&noble.com merged upstream into "big" B&N, on terms which will give Bertelsmann a significant ownership of two of its largest customers, who also happen to be major suppliers to the major competitors of Random House, which is also owned by Bertelsmann. Where is Lewis Carroll when we need him!

TV 2nite: Jesse Ventura on Leno

A sobering case study on the perils of web-success: http://olj.usc.edu/indexf.htm?/sections/news/98_stories/ojrnews_bluesrip.htm

"NewsBlues was seriously overweight. In October, it recorded 3.4 million hits and gobbled up more than 10 Gigabytes of bandwidth. Our server (the second in three months) could not handle the traffic, and asked us to move the Web site. "At the other end," he continued, "we received absolutely no financial backing and could generate no advertising revenue. So, in its three short months online, NewsBlues essentially became too large, could no longer support itself and collapsed under its own weight."

New Onion

Child Baffled By Stationary, Non-Violent Images

New NY Observer (or is this still last week's?) includes a great tidbit about a sculptress's lost childhood diary: http://www.observer.com/cgi-win/homepage.exe?nyo1/AD111698

Seventy-three years later, a man in France was watching a documentary about Ms. Bourgeois called Chere Louise, and recognized some of the stories the artist told -- including her memories of Sadie. The stories reminded him of those in a diary he had purchased in a Paris flea market along with other books.

(And they say Usenet is forever...!)

Huge, sad new Progressive Review includes nicely detailed Vince Foster questions, etc:

Said a Salomon Brothers' report of the early 90s: "All Russia's newly privatized companies, which represent some 5 percent of world oil reserves plus the world's second-largest forestry reserves, massive mineral assets and its huge network of utilities, telecommunications and industrial capacity could be bought for... little more than twice the market capitalization of Peru."

More widely-varying Leonid reports: http://www.skypub.com/sights/meteors/leonids/98firstreports.html

Mark Mikutis, Iowa, morning of Nov. 17: "Just came in to warm up. My feet are frozen. So far have observed for 3 hours Teff under nice clear skies -- limiting magnitude 6.0. SIMPLY UNBELIEVABLE!!! At times rates as high as 5-6/min. Fantastic fireballs illuminating the horizons. Geese on the lake going nuts. I've never seen anything like this before in my life!!!"

New Village Voice seems generally like a downer, but includes this catchall of political tidbits (Bush, Gore, toxic waste, banks, Mena): http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9847/ridgeway.shtml

Without Saddam, Iraq could fall apart, with the Kurds in the north moving decisively to form their own country, thereby destabilizing Turkey, an important U.S. ally. The Shiites in the south could easily link up with Iran.

And an inquiry into where the pedophiles are, and how they're being pursued: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9847/bunn.shtml

Just last week, the core group in alt.fan.prettyboy recently moved their "fort," colonizing an unrelated software newsgroup, alt.bbs.jds.

Chris Hitchens in the Berkeley Monthly: [Deja URL]

I can see why people in this country talk so much about closure, because they never get it. They've been trying to get over Vietnam for how many years? The Iran-Contra thing fizzled out. It was allowed to die a death of 1,000 lawyers. We don't even know what the burglars were looking for in the Watergate building. Nixon copped a plea.

The week of Gennifer Flowers he kept saying, "Why don't we talk about the issues?" So I asked him this: "Isn't executing a mentally retarded black man for votes a clearer indication of what your morality is than what you do with blondes on the side?" Clinton just turned his back on me. Walked away. It turned out he didn't want to change the subject from Gennifer Flowers. Not unless it was, "Mr. President, can you tell us more about your middle-class tax cut?" Which he got a lot of...

Molly Ivins senses a change in attitudes on the drug war: http://www.startext.net/today/news/columnist/ivins2.htm [CDreams]

President Hoover appointed a commission to study Prohibition back in 1929, and after 19 months of labor, the commission reported that it was a disaster area -- and recommended no changes. A columnist known as F.P.A. summarized the finding in doggerel:

Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can't stop what it's meant to stop.
We like it.
It's left a trail of graft and slime.
It's filled our land with vice and crime.
It don't prohibit worth a dime.
Nevertheless, we're for it.

And the LA Times declares it's sheer pork-barrelry: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/COMMENT/t000104608.html [CDreams]

Marijuana remains the scourge of the $11-billion-a-year anti-drug bureaucracy not because of any documentable antisocial impact but simply because that's where it gets the big numbers of drug users to justify the bloated budgets.

Ex-HotWired-Synapse windbag Jon Katz tries to use Slashdot as a stepping stone to credibility, and gets a mixed reception: http://slashdot.org/features/98/11/16/184223.shtml

Richard said he saw Slashdot as primarily a place that gave voice and expression to amateurs, not pros. Thus my style was out of sync. Then, of course, there are people who think I?m gaseous, repetitive or just plain boring. So, do I belong here?

Gurk: I think all the promised Leonid webcasts have fizzled:

Live(?) NASA Leonid RealVid at 1pm CST (? or 11am???): http://www.leonidslive.com/

Later today, around 2pm EST, scientists from NASA's Astrobiology Institute will fly two research aircraft into the skies over eastern Asia where the Leonids are predicted to be most intense. Live video from the flights may be found here beginning approximately 11 am CST on Tuesday, November 17.

(Bad HTML plus heavy loads make this site suck. And they removed the word 'live'.)

CNN is offering Monica's voice, and also promises live Leonids around noon: http://www.cnn.com/index.html (or was this promise-- now removed-- referring to the LeonidsLive site's feed, above?)

CNN audio-only: http://www.cnn.com/audioselect/

Grrr: http://www.cnn.com/videoselect/

CNN Videoselect requires Cascading Style Sheets. Please turn them on in your preferences.

(But when I turn them on, various sites' fonts shrink into unreadability.)

"Uplift anxiety": Prozac-users miss their old personas: http://detroitnews.com/1998/nation/9810/28/10280189.htm

"They can actually feel guilty about feeling good. You make them feel better pharmacologically, so they're feeling good, but they don't know what to do about it."

Detailed local Milwaukee coverage of yesterday's Goth high school murder plot: http://www.jsonline.com/news/1117burlsid1.asp [OSRR]

They had a lot of enemies, and high on the list were the "cowboys." He said the cowboys wore cowboy boots and cowboy hats. He called them "all-American white trash" -- the same phrase used by a prosecutor in court Monday in describing how "Goths" felt the "cowboys" thought of them.

And don't miss: Michael Moore defeats the www.godhatesfags.com guy: [multipage] http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=2509 [OSRR}

Michael and the Sodomobile showed up at the picket. They set up some big speakers, and a group of flamboyantly dressed men danced to loud disco music on top of the Winnebago. Phelps and company were so disgusted that they packed up and left. Michael said a crowd of people at the scene cheered. They said this was the first time that anyone had actually driven Phelps away.

On top of its nonpareil headlines-aggregations, Newshub offers lucid running summaries of top tech stories: http://www.newshub.com/filtered/

In an effort to lure consumers to its Internet access service, Cable & Wireless USA is planning an aggressive marketing campaign. C&W, which jumped into the access game in September with its $1.75 billion purchase of MCI's Internet access unit, is offering Netizens 150 hours of access a month and a free personal home page for $14.95 a month. In addition, anyone who signs up for the Internet service and C&W's long distance service will receive a discount on telephone calls, Internetnews.com reported.

Don't miss: Stewart Brand on the electronic-archive problem: http://www.civmag.com/articles/C9811F04.html [ALD]

Computer scientist Danny Hillis notes that we have good raw data from previous ages written on clay, on stone, on parchment and paper, but from the 1950s to the present, recorded information increasingly disappears into a digital gap. Historians will consider this a dark age. Science historians can read Galileo's technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minsky's from the 1960s.

And the larger fear looms: We are in the process of building one vast global computer, which could easily become The Legacy System from Hell that holds civilization hostage -- the system doesn't really work; it can't be fixed; no one understands it; no one is in charge of it; it can't be lived without; and it gets worse every year.

Gradually a set of best practices is emerging for ensuring digital continuity: Use the most common file formats, avoid compression where possible, keep a log of changes to a file, employ standard metadata, make multiple copies and so forth.

Excellent backgrounder on Inktomi's use of parallel processing: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1130/6212336a.htm

When Yahoo! forwards a query about, say, early withdrawals from 401(k) accounts, the query arrives at Inktomi's Herndon office and lands in the electronic in-basket of a random one of the 100 workstations. That computer broadcasts the query to the other 99. Each retrieves the 100 most relevant citations from among the 1.1 million pages it has stored on its disks. The computer quarterbacking this search sifts through the 10,000 responses on the short list, picking out the 20 that seem closest to what the Yahoo! customer wanted.

iMac design flaws: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1130/6212340s1.htm

1. The fan's too loud...
2. The little speakers in the Imac are the worst I've heard..
3. There is no delete key...
5. To reboot a frozen machine, you need a paper clip...

And Stephen Manes also looks at full-text harddrive indexers: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1130/6212340a.htm

Best of the bunch is the peculiarly named Enfish Tracker Pro. After indexing your hard drive, it suggests topics you're likely to hunt for in the future. Then it can help you develop queries of your own ("Find results with The Body Ventura or wrestling that also contain Minnesota in the last week but exclude Matt Drudge") and save them as "trackers" you can retrieve with one click.

...In this company, Sherlock, the much-hyped search engine built into Apple's new MacOS 8.5, is a decided also-ran.

Nifty astropic of the day: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

What created this huge space bubble? A massive star that is not only bright and blue, but also emitting a fast stellar wind of ionized gas...

Sky and Telescope has a hot page of Leonid reports: http://www.skypub.com/sights/meteors/leonids/98firstreports.html

Stuart Atkinson (Cumbria, UK) I went out at midnight, and have only come back in because of the sudden arrival of cloud from the west... but since going out I've seen literally HUNDREDS of shooting stars, purple, electric blue, green... some of them so bright they cast shadows and ended in a flare so bright it lit up the countryside for miles...

This morning's pre-dawn hours (sunrise 6:42am CST) are the best time to look for Leonids.in the USA. Live RealVid: http://www.LeonidsLive.com/

A superb guide to MP3 audio: http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-455.html#lnk2

An MP3 guru tells me Usenet is the tool of choice for receiving pirate MP3s, feeding two to three gigabytes of MP3 files daily, and accounting for more than 10 percent of all Usenet bandwidth.

(This is what Net-journalism should be, but almost never is.)

MCS's founder ventures out onto thin ice: [multipage] http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/16276.html

Now, Denninger says, ISPs who subscribe to the Clean News feed will be able to specify which kind of binaries they want canceled, according to newsgroup name. For example, some ISPs may choose to have all binaries stripped, and others may select binaries from the "warez" and "erotica.pre-teen" groups only. A Christian ISP could choose to have newsgroup items canceled that have subject lines that indicate an "anti-Christian bias," says Denninger. A group that wanted to filter out anti-Semitic content could do that, too.

WebEvent 2nite: Jewel talks and sings at 7:30 CST: http://www.twec.com/Events/fancasthelp.asp

Drudgebits: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

One publisher had been close to a deal with Lewinsky, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned, but the publisher reportedly called the former intern a "fat slut" behind her back. Word is said to have traveled back to the Lewinsky camp -- freezing that deal.

Funky Japanese design: http://www.nikkei.co.jp:80/enews/TNW/np/tnwnp0218.html

Company President Susumu Mitsuoka later noticed the very compact, simple structure of the vehicle and thought it could be assembled by general users. In 1996, the Toyama company started developing a new minicar that could be assembled by consumers.

LONDON, Nov 15 (AFP):

Dame Diana Rigg, who played Emma Peel in the 1960's cult series "The Avengers," has been named professor of theatre studies at Oxford University, a press report said Sunday. The actress, who has also led a successful theatrical career, is the latest to be named in what London's Sunday Times dubbed as "star wars" with Oxford's rival, Cambridge University. After taking on the post in January, she will reportedly be expected to hold acting master classes and invite other actors, directors, and producers to lecture.

New New York magazine: http://www.nymag.com/This_Week/view.asp?id=1946

TV 2day: Cast reunion of Roseanne sitcom on Roseanne talker (Oops-- bumped to Friday:) http://www.theroseanneshow.com/thisweek/index.html

Here's an awkward talkshow-schedules site: http://tvtalkshows.com/archive/1998/november/17/

Meta: If you sent me mail in the last few months, and never heard back, please try again-- I've had email-overload.

ABC has clumsy jpegs of the Tripp transcripts. HTML to follow shortly, surely: http://www.abcnews.com/report/starrfiles_part2/suppl_2477.html

CNN should post them here: http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/resources/1998/lewinsky/archives/misc.html#documents

(Or are these old news? I've lost track.)

New NY Review of Books

Sabren ponders putting his money where his AI is-- in a trading-bot: [multipage] http://www.manifestation.com/rants/1998/11/19981114a.php3

I think Ameritrade is $8 a trade. If he could buy and sell stocks and always make sure that he sold for at least $16 more than he bought, then he'd never lose money on a trade. He could deal exclusively in volatile small-caps, never risking more than X dollars. That way, if a stock he buys plummets, it's no big deal. He can just hang onto it until it eventually goes up, or if it comes down to it, write it off.

Misfit-superhero movie from the folks who made "Barb Wire": http://www.tvgen.com/newsgossip/dish/981116c.htm

Ben Stiller: Mr. Furious
Geoffrey Rush: Casanova Frankenstein
Hank Azaria: Blue Raja
William H. Macy: The Shoveller
Janeane Garafolo: The Bowler
Pee-wee Herman: Spleen
Greg Kinnear: Captain Amazing

Dvorak anticipates the W2K Bug: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak/jd.htm

The Windows 2000 name was obviously created over a glass of root beer in the company cafeteria by a couple of executives looking for a way out of the Windows NT delays.

Good luck to all you optimists out there who think Microsoft can deliver 35 million lines of quality code on which you can operate your business.

(I have the same concern on a smaller scale about MacOS X.)

MS-wannabe...: http://www.internet-magazine.com/news/nov/16b.htm

Part of its site promotional activities is likely to take the form of Compaq creating more specific default settings on all its PCs that will link into AltaVista and its planned increased range of services. At the moment, Compaq sets AltaVista as the default search site in browsers that ship on its machines.

...or AOL wannabe? http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2164866,00.html

Compaq is hooking up with these companies to provide a variety of broadband Internet access services. Details on the program so far are sketchy; deliverables will depend on the service providers' schedules for rolling out new high-speed broadband services.

(I like AV enough, and respect Compaq enough, that I'll look seriously at these offerings.)

Vidcap detail of the radar image of a possible skeleton under a parking lot behind one of John Wayne Gacy's residences: http://www.foxnews.com/national/111198/gacy.sml

Ground-penetrating radar produced images of what looked like the skeletal remains of at least four bodies. One image appeared to show a skull, rib cage and shoe.

(I cap'ed the vid off channel 2 here. Supposedly the skeleton is on its back, knees up, skull just below and left of the center of this image, three feet deep, to be dug up shortly.)

Don't miss: Pollard spy details: [Drudge mirroring WashTimes?!] http://www.drudgereport.com/gertz.htm

Pollard called his wife, Ann Henderson Pollard, and instructed her to remove the "cactus" - the code word signaling that he was in trouble. Anne Pollard was to remove a suitcase full of incriminating intelligence documents from their apartment at 1733 20th St. NW.

Fearing the worst, the Pollards made a run for it three days later. On Nov. 21, 1985, they drove their 1980 Mustang through the high-security gates of the new Israeli Embassy compound off Wisconsin Avenue and asked for political asylum.

According to a 1989 book on the case, Israel has been setting aside $5,000 a month for Pollard since he began serving his sentence in June 1986. If he is released by the Clinton administration, the pot of money waiting for him would total $745,000.

Meta: I really hate to see the way the Net treats Alanis, which is exactly how they treated Kurt. And it's interestingly like how Starr treats Clinton-- probing for any chink in the armor, to bring down those who've risen too high.

MS's debut phone-product sucks mightily: http://webserv1.startribune.com/cgi-bin/stOnLine/article?thisSlug=TECB15&date=15-Nov-98

Microsoft's latest hardware product is a $199 cordless telephone that connects to a personal computer and uses Windows-based call management software.

New Computer Gaming World gives Dreamworks' dino-shooter just one star: http://www.gamespot.com/action/trespass/index.html

A tangle of keyboard commands lets you raise and lower your arm as well as bend and turn your wrist. Why? You got me. All these options do is make aiming that occasional gun less precise, thus ensuring a quick death by dino. [Appallingly stupid screenshot]

Forbes claims the first Indian-nuke hacker was a 15yo US suburbanite who can't find India on a map: [multipage] http://www.forbes.com:80/tool/html/98/nov/1116/feat.htm

Forty-five seconds after he'd started, t3k-9 was amazed to discover that he'd cracked one of the passwords. He was inside India's number one atomic research network.

Notice: I think I'm gonna boycott MSNBC as a matter of policy.

New Forbes has a lame series on AI: [multipage] http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1130/

And I missed this story of the company that named the Pentium for $45k: http://www.forbes.com:80/forbes/98/1116/6211088a.htm

Placek's team has come up with DeskJet (Hewlett-Packard's printer), PowerBook (Apple Computer's laptop), Zima (an alcoholic beverage from Coors Brewing Co.), Slates (Levi Strauss & Co.'s dress slacks) and Alero (a new model from Oldsmobile).

This Day in Joyce History: In 1926, Frank Schaurek (brother-in-law) committed suicide; also James sent Harriet Weaver this early draft of the opening paragraphs of FW:

brings us back to Howth Castle & Environs. Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, had passencore rearrived on the scraggy isthmus from North Armorica to wielderfight his penisolate war; nor had stream rocks by the Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County, Ga, doublin all the time; nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick; not yet, though venisoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac; not yet, though all's fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone jonathan. Rot a peck of pa's malt had Shem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.

TV 2nite: 60 Minutes feature on religious groups working for corporate responsibility (decent); Simpsons do the 60s (inane)

Tom Tomorrow hits the sweet spot again, maybe with some unacknowledged help from Matt Drudge's "the American people" -watching (19 Oct below): http://www.salonmagazine.com/comics/tomo/1998/11/16tomo.html

"Bill, the American people think you're an ignorant wienerhead!"

Building a better stonewall: http://www.nypostonline.com/news/7575.htm [Drudge]

"If Richard Nixon had such loyal devotees, I guess he would have probably served all eight years," Ronald Rotunda told The Post.

Let me! I spent many quarters, practicing this in the early 80s: http://www.yahoo.com.sg/headlines/151198/technology/911100600-1115043020.technology.html [Drudge]

They will observe the Leonid shower from two sites near Ulan Bator, Mongolia, and along with another team of observers in northern Australia, will relay real-time data to the University of Western Ontario in Canada and to the US air force 55th Space Weather Squadron in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Using this "flux profile" of the shower, operators there will attempt to tilt the satellites out of harm's way.

Perl banned from contest for being too cool: http://www.perl.org/advocacy/chiem.html

Keith did not merely win, he conquered. He solved five of the six problems in the three hours allotted. The second-place two-person team solved only three problems. They, needless to say, were not using Perl.

Hirschfeld's 72 years illustrating Broadway: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1115/d_ap_1115_9.sml

Finding the Nina in a Hirschfeld in the Times has become a popular Sunday pastime and at one time was used as a Defense Department training tool. "The Pentagon used it to teach pilots how to read maps and spot targets. It's gotten crazy," he said.

Sig quote of the morning: (asg)

"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"Yes, but how do we get the Spice Girls into a pinata?"

I'm not really interested in the antitrust trial, but this piece raises some interesting questions about Intel's mixed motives: http://www.sjmercury.com/columnists/gillmor/docs/dg111598.htm [SN]

Is McGeady a rogue warrior at Intel, the other half of the Wintel duopoly that has proved so fabulously profitable for both companies for all these years? And is McGeady in hot water with his bosses for having given such damaging testimony against Microsoft?

TV lastnite: Chgo's second PBS channel had three awesome documentaries: The Band that showed joyful modern teens in a high school marching band (a reality teevee never hints at-- playfulness liberated by the very same forces that darken this age); then Licensed to Kill that unblinkingly, gruesomely examines a half-dozen men who'd murdered gays (cold determination, no remorse, some acknowledging their own ambivalent gay history, two blaming childhood gay-rape trauma); and Inside the School of the Assassins about the mostly-Catholic resistance to the US Army school that's trained thousands of South American death-squad members in techniques of torture, in several cases immediately applied to US Catholics in those countries. Bravely done, Channel 20!

Very long HDTV piece includes some negatives: http://www.mercurycenter.com:80/compute/center/dtv111598.htm

Unlike analog signals, digital transmissions do not become fuzzy, blurred, or distorted by ghost images. They deliver either a clean, crisp picture or, if the signal is too weak, no picture at all. That's called the "cliff effect."

Fascinating review of Bloom on Shakespeare: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-11/15/044l-111598-idx.html

Now comes Harold Bloom, the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, with an even bolder proposition: that "Shakespeare, by inventing what has become the most accepted mode for representing character and personality in language, thereby invented the human as we know it."

...Bloom will almost certainly be told that his latest publication is a bloated, tedious and frequently slovenly monstrosity that needed a vigorous editor to bring some rigor to its repeatedly flaccid prose and eliminate its plethora of irritating, self-indulgent redundancies.

A three-decade tradition: Jules Feiffer's dancer salutes a new season: http://www.uexpress.com/ups/opinion/cartoon/jf/index.html

Don't miss: Doonesbury does net.tv.chat (23 July below): http://www2.uclick.com/client/adv/db/1998/11/15/

Mike: "You're not watching tv?" Alex: "Yes, but we're instant-messaging about Dawson."

A tidbit from a negative review of Prince of Egypt: [w/spoilers] http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=2502

The CGI software developed for crowd scenes has a feature that informs characters to walk around rocks, descend stairs, random behavior in gait, etc. that exceeds anything I've seen before. The result is that it is an almost - emphasis on the almost - seamless blend of traditional hand drawn and cgi animation.

(I just learned that all the Titanic longshots were cgi via bodysuit motion-capture. Scary!)

From the London Sunday Times: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/98/11/15/stifgnmid03004.html?1334425

Israel is working on a biological weapon that would harm Arabs but not Jews, according to Israeli military and western intelligence sources.

...Dr Daan Goosen, head of a South African chemical and biological warfare plant, said his team was ordered in the 1980s to develop a "pigmentation weapon" to target only black people.

The antitrust trial is making NetSkink depressed: http://www.examiner.com/981115/1115skink.shtml

Last week (like most weeks) I talked to friends and insiders in the computer industry about the Microsoft antitrust trial unfolding in Washington, D.C. All of them have been following it closely, all had an opinion and all gave the same reason for not wanting their names to appear in this column: They're afraid of repercussions at work, or later in their careers, for saying anything remotely critical of Microsoft.

Short sympathetic bio of legendary satanist Aleister Crowley: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/stibooboo03005.html?1334425

His academic career was lacklustre, but this was immaterial for, when he was 21, he inherited the modern equivalent of £2m. It was to allow him to set upon a life of self-indulgence and a quest for new truths.

The most hated man in Chicagoland television: For some reason McDonalds thinks that carpetbombing us with his unbelievably condescending phony Chicago accent wins our loyalty. If you own their stock, it's time to sell.

I'm looking to write my first 'parsing browser' in Perl: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=411790423

I need some help getting started with MacPerl, coding an app that can build me a custom newspaper from items on many different sites...

(Much help already gratefully received.)

The Millennial History has reached the Last King of All Ireland, which is where Joyce began Finnegans Wake: http://www.guardian.co.uk/millennium/day89.html

So anyhow to wind up after the whole beanfeast was all over poor old King Roderick O'Conor the last king of all Ireland who was anything you like between fiftyfour and fiftyfive years of age at the time after the socalled last supper he gave...

Catching up on Rat Sludge in Brenda Starr: (series started 6 Aug, looks near winding up) http://www.ctoons.com/static/brenda/19980925.html

I still hate Michael Wolff (12 June below), but Amazon's readers mostly loved his book, and their comments make good reading: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ts/book-customer-reviews/0684848813/qid=910907386/002-6230756-0949604 [CJR]

when you're reading it, the one thing you notice about BURN RATE is how stupid everyone else seems. when you're done with it, you realize how stupid the book actually is.

(I almost never use Amazon-- can people recommend other pages there that make good reading?)

Q: What goes 'squelch, squelch, squelch'?
A: Microsoft entering a market: http://cbs.marketwatch.com/archive/19981113/news/current/rebecca.htx?source=htx/http2_mw/

Just last month Qualcomm announced a forthcoming product that most likely displeased Microsoft - - a wireless phone that integrated technology with 3Com's blazingly popular product, the Palm Pilot. WirelessKnowledge services, not surprisingly, will not be optimized for Qualcomm software or the Palm OS. Rather, the company will focus "initially" on compatibility with Windows, aiming to fill the gap between CE-based small devices with Microsoft enterprise software products such as Windows NT and Exchange. If all goes as planned, it is a notable step forward in Microsoft's Windows Everywhere campaign.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1938, Finnegans Wake was finished:

And it's old and old it's sad and old it's sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo moremens more. So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I'll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he'd come from Arkangels, I sink I'd die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There's where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the

TV 2nite: John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 is the wee-hours movie on ABC here

Duh: Microsoft Sidewalk blows it: http://www.atnewyork.com/sitesnow.htm

As a rule, Web sites should give the people what they want right up front. That means putting your most valuable content on the front page. What you first see when you arrive at New York Sidewalk isn't what most people find most useful in a city guide - movies, restaurants, cultural events, maps. Instead you see what Microsoft wants you to see. Which is to say, they try to sell you things.

This long piece on Julia Butterfly says she's not coming down yet (but it's pre-recent-developments): http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=210 [AAN]

Journalists are no longer allowed to climb the tree to visit Butterfly, only photographers. Parker says it's too much hassle. A videographer for Evening Magazine reached Butterfly and nearly fell off the platform. Others didn't even make it that far. "A reporter from Time magazine got up 30 feet, and freaked out," says Parker. Climbing guides had to bring her back down.

Despite the weather and PALCO's best efforts, she's had a peaceful year, probably one of the most spiritual years of her life.

Thought experiment on Iraq: Suppose a tyrant seized New York City, and the USA responded with a seven-year siege that killed off over a million New Yorkers. Would Madeleine Albright declare it was 'worth it'?

New first chapters online: (beware the javascript) http://chicago.digitalcity.com/cafe/books/chapter/

Stories, by T.C. Boyle
Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and Its Battle with Microsoft, by Michael Cusumano and David Yoffie
The Road Home, by Jim Harrison
As Time Goes By: A Novel of Casablanca, by Michael Walsh

(You can bypass the j-script by retyping the filename ("authorname.htm", visible when you mouse over the link) after the URL of the index itself.)

Edward Herman's top 20 semi-currently active war criminals: [Deja URL]

-- Government leaders:
1. Bill Clinton...
2. Boris Yeltsin...
3. General Suharto of Indonesia...
4. Mike Harris: Premier of Ontario...
5. Sese Seko Mobutu...
6. Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico...
-- Middle Managers:
7. Michel Camdessus: head of the IMF...
8. Allan Greenspan: head of the Fed...
9. James Wolfensohn: head of the World Bank...
-- Business leaders:
10. Jim Bob Moffett: chairman of a transnational mining company...
11. M. A. Van den Bergh, Managing Director of Royal-Dutch-Shell...
12. Donald Fites: the CEO of Caterpillar...
13. Al Dunlap: champion of down-sizing...
14. Charles Hurwitz: corporate raider...
15. William Simon: pioneer of leveraged buyout...
-- Economists and intellectuals:
16. Jeffrey Sachs: Harvard neoliberal...
17. Arnold Harberger: Chicago School guru...
18. Robert Bartley: editor of the Wall Street Journal...
19. Charles Murray: author...
20. Thomas Sowell: Hoover Institution economist...

In a new Science News, fuel from ice: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/11_14_98/Bob1.htm

"Methane hydrates are a potentially enormous natural gas resource," declared a U.S. presidential commission last year in its report on future energy research. "It may be that [natural] gas can be produced economically from the methane hydrates on the continental shelf, and this may prove to be a very large new source globally, particularly for some developing countries such as India as well as for the United States," concludes the report.

Medium-high-bandwidth fun with Shockwave Flash: http://www.futile.com/ (ark)

Don't miss: New Chomsky on US/UN/Iraq: [Deja URL]

...To select another example that is quite relevant here, in December 1975 the Security Council unanimously ordered Indonesia to withdraw its invading forces from East Timor "without delay" and called upon "all States to respect the territorial integrity of East Timor as well as the inalienable right of its people to self-determination." The US responded by (secretly) increasing its shipments of arms to the aggressors, accelerating the arms flow once again as the attack reached near-genocidal levels in 1978. In his memoirs, UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan takes pride in his success in rendering the UN "utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook," following the instructions of the State Department, which "wished things to turn out as they did and worked to bring this about."

The US also cheerfully accepts the robbery of East Timor's oil (with participation of US-based companies), in violation of any reasonable interpretation of international agreements. The analogy to Iraq/Kuwait is close, though there are differences: to mention only the most obvious, US-backed atrocities in East Timor were vastly beyond anything attributed to Saddam Hussein in Kuwait.

Q. Do you see in Irak an alternative to Saddam Hussein? A. The rebelling forces in March 1991 were an alternative, but the US preferred Saddam. There was an Iraqi democratic opposition in exile. Washington refused to have anything to do with them before, during, or after the Gulf War, and they were virtually excluded from the US media, apart from marginal dissident journals.

Ramsey Clark on Iraq: http://www.iacenter.org/rc111198.htm

Iraq has been further decimated by the most severe Security Council sanctions in history since August 6 (Hiroshima Day) 1990. More than a million and a half people have died in Iraq as a direct result of those sanctions, as U.N. agencies have reported. The great majority of the victims were infants, children, elderly and chronically ill persons. This is unquestionably a violation of the Genocide Convention.

Funny tasteless joke: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/Nov/chelsea.html

Hillary and Chelsea are sitting around the table having a mother/daughter talk...

Correction: Yesterday's NYT quote was indeed too good to be true: [Deja URL]

The quotation and its attribution are inaccurate. John Swinton was a radical journalist writing in the late 19th Century, not in the 1950's.

New Discover includes a science-gift guide with excellent taste:

The Inquisitive Cook. Anne Gardiner and Sue Wilson with the Exploratorium. Owl Books, 1998, $13.95, paperback. At last, science you can -- literally -- sink your teeth into. Here's the chemistry, and at times the physics, underlying those cooking rules we unquestioningly obey. Why, for example, do we brush a piecrust with milk? And why bother adding salt to water before boiling pasta?

Salon recommends a Bollywood video: http://www.salonmagazine.com/rec/1998/11/13salutes.html

If you've never indulged in a bit of Bollywood, this is a delicious way to experience this contemporary musical form that mixes the insane optimism and giddy morality of old American musicals and the sensual excesses of MTV.

And you can't go far wrong with telemarketer haiku: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/chal/1998/11/13chal.html

So many sink like
Stones into silent lakes, but
You are pre-approved.

Hello, may I speak
to the lady of the house?
... You are a lady?

Your name and number
were sold to our company.
Want to buy them back?

Decades of soft shade
from oak branches high above.
Is your roof insured?

If you hang up now
I'll have to call someone else
Why disturb them too?

A short history of porn films: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/11/13/32824.html

The strait-laced inventor Thomas Edison unknowingly sold one of the first cameras that he created in 1894 to a group of prospective porn merchants.

The coolest thing about Michael Moore is he always has video to defend himself with: http://www.nydailynews.com/1998-11-13/News_and_Views/Scandal_Sheet/a-10794.asp [OSRR]

The segment, which was reviewed by the Daily News, shows no signs of an assault or even a harsh word spoken. On the tape, a characteristically irreverent Moore is seen giving Rullan an "award" for Rennert, honoring him for owning a company that is one of Utah's biggest polluters.

Kollege of Klowns embraces XML: http://www.mediainfo.com:80/ephome/news/newshtm/stories/111398n1.htm

By Thursday, plans had been hammered out to create a more flexible and effective news markup language, and build interactive relationships between users and media.

"Emotions. This is what we need to tap into," said Linda Crider, head of the Interactive Media Center at Miami University of Ohio. "This is the connecting. This is what we need to do."

Net.Biz 1, College 0: http://spyglass1.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/035900.htm

The pair joined what some experts say is a growing trend of tech-savvy college students forsaking the classroom for the workplace. The fledgling Internet industry is expanding so quickly that young entrepreneurs see opportunity everywhere, as long as they grab it fast. And a nationwide shortage of programmers, network administrators and other computer professionals is forcing companies to throw lush salaries and perks at anyone with the right skills -- regardless of whether they have a college degree.

An extraordinarily simple way to build strong domes: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/health/111398/health17_8000_noframes.html

Strands of barbed wire laid between the rows of sandbags hold them together like Velcro. The roofs of Khalili's houses are self-supporting domes or vaults so no timber beams or trusses are needed, an important consideration in arid zones.

Wot's for tea, luv? [includes 4-min RealAudio of Ladysmith Black Mambazo] http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_213000/213054.stm

Heinz asked NOP to carry out a survey of 1,000 people asking them about things they would miss a bit or a lot if they left the UK. The results:
-- The countryside - 90%
-- British sense of humour - 83%
-- Fish and Chips - 69%
-- Heinz Baked Beans - 48%

"Contracts are invalidated by violence done to 1 party therefore the social contract has no validity, for the individual is constrained by the violence of birth to enter the society of the living on their terms." --James Joyce http://www.foxnews.com/news/international/1112/i_ap_1112_137.sml

Researchers in Sweden who studied the birth records of men who killed themselves violently found that they were roughly twice as likely to have been exposed to birth-related trauma, such as an emergency Caesarean section or forceps delivery.

Expect the Iraq attack to be either a full day before the Leonids, or after? [includes cool image of satellite getting zapped] http://www.msnbc.com/news/213237.asp

If spacecraft monitoring the situation in Iraq sustain damage, that could affect the United States' ability to keep track of Iraqi forces and assess the damage done during the strikes.

Two dozen reality-checks on Ally McBeal: http://www.lawgirl.com/allyrant.shtml [Whump]

...Elaine would have been fired her first day on the job . trials take more than one night to prepare, and it takes much longer than a week from filing a case through trial . Ally would never be allowed to try all of the cases that she does...

Forbes looks at net.radio: [multipage] http://www.forbes.com:80/tool/html/98/nov/1113/feat.htm

According to the report, almost one-third of all radio listeners state that if they could choose, they would abandon their local stations and find a station beyond their home area.

Chilling Star Wars poster: (detail) http://www.starwars.com/episode-i/news/1998/46/one_sheet.html [SB]

This analogy between Linux and Martin Luther's Reformation is entirely righteous: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/11/12feature.html

No more commercial motivation, no more iron-fisted control over the source text, no more programmer-user bifurcation. New game, your Holiness.

Dang-it's-just-a-satire department: Florida biochemist alters orange-tree DNA to produce THC: http://www.sfbg.com/wire/20.html [Slashdot]

Professor Nanofsky wasn't pleased that his son had been arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia, and he became livid when Tallahassee police informed him that the Aerostar minivan would be permanently remanded to police custody.

It was in the fall of 1984 that the John Chapman Professor of Biochemistry at Florida State University, now driving to work behind the wheel of a used Pontiac Bonneville, first set on a pet project that he hoped would "dissolve irrational legislation with a solid dose of reason."

Much to the chagrin of authorities, the effort to regulate Nanofsky's invention may be too little too late. Several hundred packets containing 40 to 50 seeds each have already been sent to those who've requested them, and Nanofsky is not obliged to produce his mailing records. Under current law, no crime has been committed and it is unlikely that charges will be brought against the fruit's inventor.

TransMeta-mancy is just beginning on comp.arch: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=411216036

In the text, they claim that an "embodiment" (presumably an existing [in August 1996!] Transmeta device) with 1/4 the gates of a Pentium Pro runs x86 code faster than any existing x86 processor. This "embodiment" has 64 integer and 32 floating point registers, and has a 2MB "translation buffer" for caching dynamic translations of x86 code to native code...

...Also maybe it's just that I'm not that familiar with patents, but it seems like they disclose an awful lot of stuff that is tangentially related to the central claims of the patent?

Patent highlights in genuine HTML (not TIFF): http://scottlangley.com/patent.htm [Slashdot]

(VLIW = very long instruction word, concatenating one instruction for every part of the chip that can operate in parallel)

My preliminary summary:

This is just the inevitable next step for speeding up the x86-series design, but apparently it was a bigger imaginative leap than Intel had been ready to make. There's been an optimisation- bottleneck where the Pentium-et-al couldn't optimise their own microcode (on the fly, in what Mac people would call 'Level 2 cache'), because they'd often had to make a worst-case assumption of memory-mapped I/O (which can't be cached, and so is much slower) instead of pure memory (emulatable in cache, and therefore fast).

This patent allows it to zip along, assuming pure memory, and then to backtrack to safe ground-- before the real memory is changed-- if this assumption proves false. It can then single-step thru the problem code until it finds its mistake, and fix it.

I think all the talk of emulation has misled Slashdotters into thinking that's the main point, but so far it looks to me like they mainly mean "precisely emulating Intel", and any other emulations are beside the point.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1913, James made his first notes for "Exiles" (If anyone has the edition with these notes handy, could they mail me the first few words he would have written?)

TV 2nite: Tom Wolfe and Joni Mitchell both on Charlie Rose

Here's an extremely dense analysis of the new chip-patent from the mysterious TransMeta Corp. (who employ Linus), suggesting it's trying to outperform Intel using extra layers of internal programmability (I think): http://slashdot.org/features/98/11/12/1935212.shtml

This allows it to use optimization strategies written in software to improve throughput: a much more flexible route than that taken by AMD and Intel which use predetermined hardware optimization strategies.

It's fun to watch the Slashdot hardcores try to figure it out! The consensus seems to be cheaper - faster - lower power than Intel, with extra emulations thrown in: http://slashdot.org/articles/98/11/12/1441235.shtml

"It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to provide a host processor with apparatus for enhancing the operation of a microprocessor which is less expensive than conventional state-of-the-art microprocessors yet is compatible with and capable of running applications programs and operating systems designed for other processors at a faster rate than those other microprocessors."

...Basically, it's an MMU that handles memory-mapped hardware effectively. Very useful for a processor that, like the M68k, uses memory-mapped I/O exclusively, but that emulates a split bus like the X86.

...It seems that this patent will allow developers a much "cleaner slate" with which to design fast new processors. They can ignore (to a larger extent) the constraints faced or imposed by the designers before them.

...The RISC philosphy being a regular instruction set. Transmeta is a regular meta -instruction set, with the particular complexities of architectures relegated to "software" (on chip tho).

...In short, with this design, you should be able to run Risc Linux, Windows, Sparc Solaris and iMac binaries side-by-side, on the SAME processor, transparently.

...There are two big innovations here: 1) There is a buffer of translated instructions. (They give an example size of 2MB for a typical intel-targeted buffer). When a new instruction is encountered, a software layer translates it to native (morph target) code. The next time that code is reached, it is run natively. ... 2) It also makes certian assumtions about the code it translates. First, it assumes memory operations operate on memory, not memory mapped I/O. Second, it assumes no exceptions will occur during the entire translated code...

...The "speculation" part allows the front end to make certain assumptions about the code it's translating so it can generate a more optimal sequence for the back end. If those assumptions turn out to be false, then the techniques that form the "meat" of the patent are used to efficiently roll back to the last state in which those assumptions weren't true and retranslate a small bit of code without making those assumptions.

New The Nation turns the impeachment third-degree on a dozen-plus congresspeople (pretty appalling!): http://www.thenation.com/issue/981130/1130SHAP.HTM

Jay Kim (R-California): Do you admit or deny that between 1994 and '96 you received $230,000 in illegal contributions from South Korean corporations? Oops, you've already admitted it in a plea bargain, which is why you're wearing that electronic ankle bracelet and why your wife calls you "the most crime-committing person I know." You were defeated in a Republican primary, but if Hyde stays on schedule you'll still get to vote on Clinton's impeachment, ankle bracelet and all.

Plus Katha Pollitt denouncing recent leftist timidity: http://www.thenation.com/issue/981130/1130POLL.HTM

In The Nation's "Rethinking" and "First Principles" series, article after article has proposed moving away from cultural liberalism -- for example, unfairly bashing the "left" as latte-swilling atheists -- in favor of a minimal "middle-class agenda" mislabeled economic populism.

Drudge is also having a busy day: http://www.drudgereport.com/

Lester Thurow on the inequality boom: http://www.usatoday.com/news/comment/ncguest.htm [CmnDrms]

When a majority of the population faces falling or stagnant standards of living and hears about the wealth being created around them, democratic theory says they are supposed to demand some answers and help from the political process. But there are no such demands. ... Those with stagnant or falling incomes may be a majority of the population, but they are not a majority of the voters.

Alex Cockburn's version of the Mitch-blame argument: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/COMMENT/t000102840.html [CmnDrms]

If you want to pick a date when the fates of those thousands of poor people was sealed, it wasn't when Hurricane Mitch began to pick up speed off the coast of Honduras. It came 44 years ago, in 1954, when the United Fruit Co., now renamed Chiquita Banana, prodded the CIA to take action against the moderately left government of President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. Arbenz had purchased vast unused stretches of productive land held by United Fruit and was planning to redistribute it to poor peasants.

Dvorak's monthly columns slipped off my radar some time back. Here's one about an inevitable revolution in storefront software distribution: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak_print/jd_p.htm

The software industry needs a new distribution mechanism. There's simply not enough shelf space in the stores for all the good software available.

And a lovely disproof of Microsoft's lies about their Internet strategy: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak_print/jd981009.htm

It was August 1995 when things changed. Netscape became public, and Jim Clark became an instant billionaire. More important, on August 8, 1995, the front page of Forbes ASAP read "Netscape's Marc Andreeson: George Gilder thinks this kid can topple Bill Gates." This was during the peak of Gilder's cult of personality. When he spoke, people listened.

A great story about a guy who builds treehouse hotel rooms: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1112/d_ap_1112_110.sml

The county said it couldn't issue him permits because there is no building code applicable to a structure whose foundation is a tree. But state authorities ulitimately said the county must grant Garnier a permit if he can demonstrate through stress tests that his treehouses are safe.

New Progressive Review reports an incremental victory in DC's war of re-independence, and looks at the new NPR boss:

Ironically, one of the few journalists who raised questions about the relationship of media and the CIA -- to the detriment of his career at CBS -- was Daniel Schorr, now at NPR. Carl Bernstein, in a contemporary article in Rolling Stone, estimated that 400 American journalists had been tied to the CIA at one point or another, including such well known media figures as the Alsop brothers, C.L. Sulzberger of the New York Times, and Philip Graham of the Washington Post. Later the New York Times reported that the CIA had owned or subsidized more than 50 newspapers, news services, radio stations, and periodicals, mostly overseas.

First he excoriated Dilbert, now Norman Solomon has turned against... milk! [Deja URL] or soon: http://www.fair.org/media-beat/981112.html (anticipatory URL)

Just how much of a problem is fatty milk in the diets of young people? A new study, published by the medical journal Pediatrics, found that milk is the foremost source of saturated fat congealing in the arteries of America's kids.

Yet another real-life Truman-Show-alike: [excellent 2-min RealVid] http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/newsid_213000/213207.stm

Well how about this: a naked Japanese man is confined to a tiny apartment for months on end as he tries to win his way out. His every move is tracked by camera and, unknown to him, is being broadcast to the nation.

Obviously some folk disagree with the advice of author Gore Vidal, who said "never turn down sex or the chance to appear on television".

From the NY Post et al: (agc) http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,3897,00.html

Jennifer Aniston has just learned that her face adorns the wrappers of a popular brand of condom in Russia.

Glimpses of Michael Moore's new UK tv show: [Deja URL]

Moore gave a lecture here in Knoxville, TN, and brought along some clips from the show. Andy Richter plays the doting father of a dying little girl who wins one of those "last wish" deals from some charitable organization. The problem is what she wants for her last wish. I won't give away the details, but it's very dark and very funny. Evidently the short (3 min. or so) fictional segments will be a regular part of the new format.

(It's been picked up for the USA by the Bravo cable channel.)

An unusual issue of Risks Digest consisting of a single long, complex argument by a professional 'strategist' about e-commerce: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.06.html

The financial world in its entirety is about packaging risk so that it can be bought and sold, i.e., so that risk can be securitized and finely enough graded to be managed at a profit. Everything from the lowly car loan to the most exotic derivative security is a risk-reward tradeoff. Don't for a minute underestimate the amount of money to be made on Wall Street, London and/or Tokyo when you can invent a new way to package risk. The impact of Moore's Law on the financial world is inestimable -- computing has made that world rich because it has enabled risk packaging to grow ever more precise, ever more real-time, ever more differentiated, ever more manageable. You don't have to understand forward swaptions, collateralized mortgage obligations, yield burning, or anything else to understand that risk management is where the money is. In a capitalist world, if something is where the money is, that something rules. Risk is that something.

...I submit that the problem statement is how to bring a transactional semantic to the Internet. This is not a new problem, but it is an as yet unsolved one. The existing financial markets want transactions because transactions are what they are about and transactions are what they know. Upstarts like the payment vendors want to be the first to deliver transactions and disintermediate the financial firms. Technical legal beagles reason that there is no transaction without recourse, no recourse without contract, no contract without non-repudiation and no non-repudiation without digital signature. Anyone who wants to do business on the Web needs transactions.

Electronic commerce payment technology cannot absorb loss, so it cannot and will not disintermediate the banks.

Think of it this way: when I get a certificate issued to me by a certifying authority, I do have some risk around whether the CA is well operated or not. This includes the probability they will issue a certificate with my public key but someone else's name and whether when I tell them that my key has been compromised they will spring into decisive action. Most of that risk I can handle by a combination of due diligence and contract.

In some sense, sovereignty, based as it was on the idea of a border, is less meaningful now than for some centuries. In its place is a different kind of sovereignty, because the only borders in an electronic world are cryptographic ones. As such, the debate over who may or may not have a key known only to themselves is a proxy discussion for who may or may not have sovereignty within a cryptographically defined space.

Meta: I settled on 18-pt Geneva as the most readable browser font, though it screws up many pages esthetically. (I have my 15-inch monitor pushed to 1024-by-768.) If you notice this page getting screwy, please let me know, because I may not see it.

(Awesome morning for good net.reading! I think there's a day-after-a-holiday effect.)

Stolen from Whump:

"Texan, George W. Bush, describes himself as a `compassionate conservative', which in Texas means he asks you how you like your Jell-o just before he flips the switch." -- Craig Kilborn, on The Daily Show

Lots of thoughts from Sabren today: http://www.manifestation.com/

In my little megalomaniacal quest for fame and fortune on the web, I've been wasting too much time writing about links that really aren't all that important. It's just that adding a one-line link without some commentary really wastes space in the archives.

Vonnegut's anti-math: http://www.post-gazette.com:80/magazine/19981110vonnegut4.asp

This was Vonnegut on literature. "I will bring science to the study of literature," he promised and used the board to "graph" the classic stories in literature from "The Man in The Hole" in which the hero falls from grace and recovers to Kafka's "The Metamorphsis" in which the hero starts in a lowly place and gets lower.

Yay! Pacific Lumber's logging license gets suspended! http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1112/d_ap_1112_67.sml

The violations that caused Tuesday's suspension include the use of heavy equipment to build a landing in an area inhabited by the endangered spotted owl, cutting roads improperly into logging sites and disturbing water crossings.

(Does this mean Julia Butterfly can finally come down?)

How manufactured-consent works: http://www.msnbc.com/news/212150.asp [OSRR]

ABC's Cokie Roberts is furious with George Stephanopolous for jumping off the impeachment bandwagon. Stephanopolous has complained to friends that Roberts "lit into him" for changing his anti-Clinton stance, sources say.

A very smart exploration of CDA2: http://www.bostonphoenix.com/archive/features/98/11/12/DIRTY_MINDS.html [OSRR]

Rielly is defiant when he's asked whether he would consider restricting PlanetOut to adults. "We're not going to sacrifice young people for the safety of reducing our liability. I'll go to the mat on that," he says. "We really care about what we're doing. For me it's a matter of life and death."

...Yet the omission of Usenet makes a mockery of claims that COPA will do something about Internet porn.

New fluoridation hullaballoo: http://www.icom.net/~nexus/fluoridebomb.html

Other revelations include:
-- Much of the original proof that fluoride is safe for humans in low doses was generated by A-bomb program scientists who had been secretly ordered to provide "evidence useful in litigation" against defence contractors for fluoride injury to citizens. The first lawsuits against the American A-bomb program were not over radiation, but over fluoride damage, the documents show.

Musing: I predict that in the next year or so, it's going to become inarguable that tv violence is partly to blame for this youth-thrill-kill epidemic. Watch whether the media play these connections up, or down...

Compaq revives MilliCent micropayment scheme: [multipage] http://www.millicent.digital.com/buy/rcfoc.html [NewsBytes]

The Rapidly Changing Face of Computing (RCFoC) is a technology journal that provides insight, analysis and commentary on the innovations and trends of contemporary computing, and the technologies that drive them. Using MilliCent, the RCFoC demonstrates how an advertising-heavy website can use MilliCent to provide value-added interaction with advertisements.

(But parsing web-browsers will make this moot.)

An obsessive obsessive-fan-site fan site: [nasty HTML] http://countingdown.com/fans/

Every couple of weeks, we give out awards to the most excessive, embarassing fan sites on the web ... and there are a lot of them.

-- Noah Wylie: Man or Animal?
-- The Ultimate Dawson's Creek Site
-- David Cassidy & The Partridge Family
-- Tara Lipinski
-- A Tribute to Oprah Winfrey
-- The Unofficial Barry Pepper Fan Site

Top transnational corporations: [Deja URL]

The world's top 100 TNCs, ranked by foreign assets, 1996 (assets and sales in billions of US dollars)

 Rank Corporation Country Industry         Foreign assets Foreign sales
 
    1 General Electric, United States Electronics  82.8   21.1
    2 Shell, Royal Dutch Netherlands--UK Petroleum 82.1   71.1
    3 Ford Motor Co. United States Automotive      79.1   65.8
    4 Exxon Corporation United States Petroleum    55.6  102.0
    5 General Motors United States Automotive      55.4   50.0
    6 IBM United States Computers                  41.4   46
    7 Toyota Japan Automotive                      39.2   51
    8 Volkswagen Group Germany Automotive          n/a    41.0
    9 Mitsubishi Corp. Japan Diversified           n/a    50.2
    10 Mobil Corporation United States Petroleum   31.3   53.1

Don't miss: Male execs tell all about working in female-dominated corporations: http://www.forbes.com:80/mind/

Craig Rydin, President Godiva Chocolatier, Inc.: "If you are a command-and-control type of a manager, forget about working for a company with a lot of women."

US electric companies looking to become ISPs: http://www.forbes.com:80/tool/html/98/nov/1112/feat.htm

If a utility tries to compete with say, Cablevision, the utility is "cutting its margin in half," says Effros. "If you have two systems in the community, they'll at least split the revenue generation," he adds. "Then neither of the systems can afford to maintain the top-of-the-line system, accomplishing the opposite of what the intention was."

Japanese-style socialism: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1116/6211202a.htm

Want to go shopping? You won't find many category killers in Japan, since its Large-Scale Retail Store Law still limits the advance of big-box stores. The argument is that their efficiency gives them an unfair advantage over mom-and-pop operators. Ignored is the fact that Japanese consumers are required to pick up the tab for protecting these small retailers.

This urge to take care of everybody has made investing in Japanese assets somewhat risky.

(That sort of says it all...)

Parks for profit: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1116/6211131a.htm

Visitors pay $8 to see the bridge, and another $7 for a 45-minute tour of the cave and a 70-figure wax museum on site.

Okay, it's not wilderness. But it sure is clean and well-kept.

Conrad Black's new "CanadaToday"-equivalent has come online: http://www.nationalpost.com/artslife.asp?s2=life&s3=lifedigest

Greenlaw, who also penned a haiku for corporate Christmas cards, selects poems to inspire, provoke or to just make the lawyers think.... "Sometimes they were baffled or amused, or simply didn't get it.'' But at least they were touched by poetry, which is the point of the year-old Poetry Places project, funded by a $750,000 grant from the National Lottery. The program is run by the national Poetry Society, which intends to place 100 poets in schools, businesses and other environments throughout Britain. They are even considering placing a poet on a natural gas platform in the North Sea.

Novelist of Somalia: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/enter/111298/enter33_8640_noframes.html

The writer, exiled in the early 1970s by dictator Siad Barre, traces the history of Somalia from independence in 1960 to the present chaos in his narrative. Author Salman Rushdie called him "one of the finest contemporary African novelists" -- an accolade many writers would welcome but one that further damages Farah in the eyes of Somalia's predominantly Muslim population.

(Cf 28 Sept below, where Somalia was offered as a libertarian sucess story?)

Incredible quote: [Deja URL]

"There is no such thing at this date of the world's history in America as an independent press. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write his honest opinion, and if you did, you know beforehand it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things. and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allow my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before 24 hours, my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it, and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and the vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks. They pull the strings, and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." -- John Swinden, 1953, then head of the New York Times, when asked to toast an independent press in a gathering at the National Press Club (at a time when the public was not allowed to attend). Oops, false attribution

NPR's new Minister of Propaganda: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1112/d_ap_1112_29.sml

Prior to his promotion to that post, Klose was president of the government's Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty from 1992 to 1997.

Clinton to pardon Pollard? http://www.washtimes.com/news/news3.html

Clinton administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity said it is unusual for the Justice Department not to be the lead agency in a clemency review of a major espionage case. "It tells you a political deal has already been cut," said a U.S. government official close to the department. "This is not going to be a serious look at the case."

How that madman Saddam sees things: http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/monitoring/newsid_212000/212589.stm

"The claim that Unscom is a subsidiary agency belonging to the Security Council and that it is a UN agency cannot be supported by facts on the ground. This is a mere deceptive cover."

Kibo researches Olestra, using a patent server: [Deja URL]

"Hello, I would like to buy some edible gas, not otherwise specified."
"Here you are, sir."
"Yay! Now I can make my own Olestra! I have mystery gas!"

Leonid enthusiasm: (shortlived URL) http://www.flatoday.com/space/today/111298b.htm

"The 1966 shower peaked around 4 a.m., with some 50 meteors falling per second. We all felt like we needed to put on 'hard hats'! The sky was absolutely full of meteors...a sight never imagined...and never seen since! To further understand the sheer intensity of this event, we blinked our eyes open for the same time we normally blink them closed, and saw the entire sky full of streaks...everywhere!"

A nifty sad poem of the day, by Ewart Milne: http://www.books.com/scripts/poem.exe?

Lord, it's been a hell of a life
That's for those of us who somehow survived its strife
Nothing but wars crying after wars and bloody murders
World wars civil wars holy wars ritual wars and massacres...

Tidbits from Mr Moon: http://www.washtimes.com/politics/inside.html

Democrats will have some advantages in the battle for the House in two years, says Wall Street Journal political columnist Gerald F. Seib. First of all, the Democrats will need only a six-seat pickup to recapture the House, the columnist noted. "As it happens, that election in the year 2000 also happens to be the time when the term-limits chickens come home to roost for Republicans. At least 10 House Republicans have pledged not to run again. And internal GOP rules force committee chairmen to give up their gavels in 2000, which might prompt many of them to retire. So Democrats will be blessed with a wider array of chances to take over the seats they need," Mr. Seib said.

Meathead's tax passes: ...The tax increase from 37 cents to 87 cents per pack takes effect Jan. 1. Critics say the measure would create a new bureaucracy and could take away from programs now funded by existing cigarette taxes by cutting cigarette sales.

"There is a reasonably good chance that the Senate will include four Kennedys after the 2000 elections: Ted from Massachusetts, Rep. Patrick from Rhode Island (Republican Sen. John Chafee's seat is up in 2000), Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend from Maryland (if Democratic Sen. Paul Sarbanes steps aside), and either JFK Jr. or RFK Jr. in New York (to replace the retiring Sen. Patrick Moynihan)."

Simulated-astronomy pic of the day: (looks real!) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

This simulated image models the intensities of gamma rays with over 40 million times the energy of visible light, and represents how the sky might appear to the proposed Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) over its first year in orbit.

The best bookstore I know for Joyceans is Kenny's in Galway. They have a book club that's sort of a weblog-by-parcel-post: http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/paper/1998/1112/fea3.html

He gets a variety of responses to these experiments: "I warn them when they join: 'Every so often you're going to get a book from me and you won't know what to make of it, but I want you to read that book.' Some people will say they read it and they didn't like it. Others will give it away to friends. But they know what I'm doing, trying to broaden their horizons, and they respect that."

(Kenny's has seven floors, including a wall full of Thom's Directories from every decade.)

Wired looks at freelancing: [multi-multi-page] http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/16201.html?1

Programming US$100 to $200 per hour
Writing (Technical) $80 to $100 per hour
Writing (Non-Tech) $300 to $1,000 per piece (or $.30 to $1 per word)
Producing $50 to $100 per hour
Interface Designing $50 to $100 per hour
Graphic Designing $50 to $100 per hour
Editing $35 to $50 per hour
Copyediting $25 to $40 per hour
Straight HTML Coding $10 to $20 per hour

Lively media tidbits at Salon: http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/1998/11/12media.html

Kinsley... dismisses suggestions Microsoft pressured Slate to dump Lewis.

Anti-Christian sentiment in India: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/11/12/32741.html

In India, where popular legend dates the advent of Christianity to 52 AD, and a convent education is seen as a sign of good breeding, the gang rape of the nuns caused a collective gasp of shock. But it was not, as the authorities claim, an isolated incident, an opportunistic crime against four women living alone in a remote area of one of the roughest and most deprived parts of India. Since last March when the coalition led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in New Delhi, the Catholic and Protestant churches have recorded around 40 instances of violence or harassment of Christian institutions or personnel.

Emma Shrugged: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/11/12/32801.html

"It's very nannyist," Ms Thompson told the Guardian. "I wasn't asked if I'd be a role model. I found out when a friend rang me to jeer at me. My immediate response was an overwhelming desire to go out and score a load of cocaine in rebellion. Because when I was young my role models were Mick Jagger and Marlon Brando."

Results are in, for the UK survey of Freemasonry in the courts (20 Feb below): http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/11/11/32588.html

In a survey of the judiciary in England and Wales, 13.6 per cent of male magistrates declared that they were Freemasons, while 5.4 per cent of magistrates as a whole refused to disclose whether they were Masons.

Huge new Progressive Review

It's not often you can date the death of an establishment cliche so precisely, but November 10 may have marked the end of the "free trade" era. On that day, notes David Sanger in the New York Times, President Clinton for the first time said "that the United States would not tolerate the 'flooding of our markets' with low-cost goods from Asia and Russia, particularly steel, that are threatening the jobs of American workers."

Meta: It's mind-expanding to reset your browser's fontsize a couple of notches larger, and maybe change the face too (while forcing it to use your settings). Everything looks different!

New Lynda Barry comeek is the most unreadable yet: http://www.creativeloafing.com/savannah/newsstand/current/barry.html

New New Scientist

PC Mag analyses search-engine sites: [multipage] http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/websearch98/edchoice.html

Editors' Choices:
Simple searching: Yahoo!
Advanced searching: Northern Light
Kids' search: Ask Jeeves for Kids
News search: None
Metasearch: MetaCrawler

Find an acronym: Acronym Finder
Find anyone: Yahoo! People Search
Find an apartment: AllApartments
Find an ATM: Visa and MasterCard
Find an attorney: lawyers.com
Find company information: Hoover's Online
Find a computer article: Computer Magazine Archive
Find a definition: OneLook Dictionaries
Find a discussion forum: Forum One
Find a domain name: NetNames USA
Find driving directions: MapQuest
Find a file: Filez
Find a house: Realtor.com
Find an ISP: The List
Find a job: The CareerBuilder Network
Find legislators' voting records: Project Vote Smart
Find a long-distance carrier: TeleWorth
Find a mailing list: Liszt
Find medical information: Medical World Search
Find an old friend: ClassMates and PlanetAll
Find online events: On Now and Yahoo! Net Events
Find a personal home page: WhoWhere?
Find public records: KnowX
Find stock filings: Edgar Online
Find technical information: developer.com
Find tech-support information: No Wonder
Find the weather: AccuWeather
Find yellow-pages information: Switchboard
Find a ZIP code: USPS ZIP Code Lookup

Microsoft Arthur tanks: http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/ctd813.htm

Marc Brown, creator of Arthur, says all other Arthur products, from books to CDs, are hot sellers. He says he can't figure out why the toys aren't selling. But somebody had better. And fast. On Dec. 2, Brown says, "we have Bill Gates going on Rosie O'Donnell to demonstrate Arthur."

Internet bubble raises eyebrows: http://www.thestreet.com/Markets/marketroundup/33005_11101998.html [OSRR]

The strategist, who asked not to be named, was particularly galled by Goldman Sachs, which upped its price target on eBay to 150 from 90 after the latter was breached. In reaction, eBay soared 27.3%, but it was far from alone in the stratosphere.

How capitalism fathered Mitch: http://www.foe.co.uk/pubsinfo/infoteam/pressrel/1998/19981110130736.html [OneWorld]

Central America once had about 500,000 km^2 of forest cover, but by the late 1980s this had fallen to an estimated 90,000km^2. Thirty per cent of Honduras' forest has been lost since 1960, with more than 800km^2 being lost every year to ranch land, banana plantations, small farms and fuelwood collection. The expansion of fruit plantations is partly a result of the need to earn foreign exchange to repay debt.

A strange tale of a 1972 'white hat' anti-war prank phone call: http://www.globe.com/dailyglobe/globehtml/312/An_odd_footnote_in_a_colorful_histo.shtml [CommonDreams]

After a brief speech by McGovern, the amplified voice of the anonymous Boston caller filled the quadrangle. The crowd of 25,000 was stunned by what it heard. Oliphant's Page 1 account in the next day's Globe called it "the kind of genuinely electric scene that happens so rarely in presidential campaigns." The New York Times, in an account by then-reporter Christopher Lydon, called it "an extraordinarily emotional moment, even in a campaign that has been fueled from the beginning by the passion of the anti-war movement."

I've stumbled onto a progressive portal, which will take some weeks to digest: http://www.commondreams.org/ (I may drown in self-seriousness first! Is the secret weapon of the Republicans that blatant lying feels more comfortable than attempted truth? The other day a flamer told me, "Aw, get over yourself...")

Celebrity rhyming slang: http://www.mirror.co.uk/stories/F1111812.html [Drudge]

Tom Cruise - Booze
Calvin Klein - Wine
Sharon Stone - Mobile phone
Wallace and Gromit - Vomit
Teletubby - Hubby
Saddam Hussein - Pain, as in in the neck.
Germaine Greer - Beer
Steve McQueens - Jeans
John Cleese - Cheese

New NY Observer

Dilbert slanders the family name! http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert981104.html

"I'm a barger, not a knocker."

TV 2nite: Tom Wolfe on Letterman

Reno's half-assed response to FBI-whistleblower suit: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1110/d_ap_1110_199.sml

And, Kohn said, the 1989 law protects any whistleblower disclosures made to Congress by other federal workers, but the Justice rules provide no such protection to FBI employees who report alleged misdeeds to Congress. "Under these rules, an FBI employee could be fired for reporting misconduct to Congress,'' Kohn said.

New Onion:

Educational Puppet Pelted With Crayons

(I'm guessing the 'Sarcasm' editorial is aimed at the Post?)

Meta: I've mentioned "Monica" some 34 times this year-- three times per month, or about 1% of my story-links!

TWA800-pariah Ian Goddard (28 Dec below) complained to ABC about dropping the Stone special: [Deja URL]

It seems to me that Westin's reply can be summed up as that they resolved the facts I cited by concluding that up = down, since David Westin says that the witness accounts of the rising rocket were in actuality witness accounts of the falling debris.

Duh: I just noticed MSNBC only offers Windows Media Player video, no RealPlayer. Is this included in any anti-trust arguments?

Cool underwater spy tech: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1110/d_ap_1110_116.sml

Settling the submarine quietly to the bottom, and operating well within Soviet territorial waters, the crew attached to the cable a listening pod specially designed by Bell Laboratories. "It would take the spooks at least two weeks to sift electronically through the hundreds of lines running through the cable and choose which lines to record,'' the authors write.

Good Progressive Review

Although we haven't kept track, TPR can't recall a single expression of concern over any action of the past few decades "dangerously weakening the institution of Congress," even though during this period the White House has achieved Peronist-type powers while the Congress has been steadily eviscerated.

New Village Voice includes Julian Dibbell on Japan's tiny-photo fad: http://www.villagevoice.com/features/9846/dibbell.shtml

How long have we been dreaming of these tiny pictures? The world-historical answer, I suppose, would look all the way back past miniature paintings, locket portraits, and landscape carvings embedded in nutshells to the smallest figurines found in the deepest archaeological digs. But for me? I'm pretty sure it started with the matchbox-size "spy" camera I ordered from a comic-book ad when I was 11 years old.

An excellent edition of Press Clips: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9846/hsiao_vest.shtml

Their chagrin is understandable: these political insiders were spectacularly wrong about the election. Barone, for example, had predicted that the GOP would gain eight House seats. And as we all know, they were not alone: Bill Kristol was convinced the GOP would gain 15; George Will, six to 20; John McLaughlin, 13; Pat Buchanan, 12; Tony Blankley, seven. Even a liberal like Al Hunt thought the Republicans would pick up five or six Senate seats.

Professional dancers finally earn real money in Broadway's Lion King: http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/9846/jowitt.shtml

Lion King salaries are a jump up for most. Equity minimum for chorus is $1135 per week with $5 to $15 add-ons for "specialties" (from making the set revolve to performing a solo). Then there are perks like the residuals from an American Express commercial some of the dancers did with Taymor, and royalties for singing on the original cast album.

Toys-for-grownups don't get a special section at eToys.com: http://www.etoys.com/html/et/et_fav_xea0019_001.shtml

Conscience by GoRu Products. Age: 7 yrs+. eToys Price: $24.99
It's the fun way to learn right from wrong! Will you make the right choice? No more lectures, but interactive fun as children build the foundation to make real life choices.

Molly Ivins gets Newt out of her system: http://www.startext.net/today/news/columnist/ivins2.htm

When I think of Newt Gingrich, the words that come to mind are `sick, pathetic, traitor, ideological, cheat, steal, insecure, bizarre' and `radical.' The reason those particular words come to mind is because they are the ones that Gingrich himself recommended to his fellow Republicans. In a 1990 advisory put out by GOPAC, Gingrich's political action committee, Republican candidates were advised to use these words to describe their Democratic opponents -- no matter who the Democrats were or what their records.

Salon rehashes X-Files details for the inattentive: http://www.salonmagazine.com/ent/glow/1998/11/10glow.html

If you didn't see it, here's the main dish: The first inhabitants of Earth were extraterrestrials; human DNA carries non-functioning remnants of alien DNA; the telepathic boy's alien DNA actually functions, making him the missing link between aliens and humans; the aliens want their planet back...

AMA finds some truth in alternative medicine: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1110/d_ap_1110_71.sml

- Italian obstetrician Francesco Cardini divided 130 women in two Chinese hospitals into two groups. Those treated with this ancient practice, called moxibustion, had 30 percent more babies move out of the dangerous breech position than women left untreated.

- Irritable bowel syndrome afflicts millions of people with no reliable treatment. A study of 116 Australians found those given five capsules of traditional Chinese herbs three times a day improved by 50 percent to 60 percent, vs. improvements of just 37 percent in people given dummy capsules.

- Yoga exercises, by improving posture and strengthening muscles, appear better than wrist braces at helping carpal tunnel syndrome, the painful inflammatory disorder caused by repetitive motions, such as computer typing, according to a preliminary study of 51 patients at the University of Pennsylvania.

Keyword-spamming gets guarded okay? http://www.internetday.com/archives/111098.html

According to interviews with search engine executives in the Search Engine Watch, the search engines seem to have adopted a whole new healthy attitude towards doorway pages! As long as your doorway pages do not promote keywords or phrases that have nothing to do with your Web site's content, and that you do not submit too many doorways with the same keyword and clog up the search results, you are free to go for it! In other words, if your doorways help search engine users to find what they are looking for without being deceived, no one will penalize you.

Congrats to NewsLinx on their sale to Mecklermedia. Maybe now someone will write up how they do it? http://www.newslinx.com/ [CopperSky]

The Guardian keeps mentioning Julie Burchill, but I never clicked those links. Here's a review of her attitude-intensive autobio: http://www.suntimes.co.za:80/1998/11/08/arts/ane07.htm

For amusement, Burchill would smoke a cigarillo down to the quick and flick the burning butt over the partition onto the hippies. "Ten points for getting the hippie in the hair. Look out ... hippie on fire."

Juicy new Computer Gaming World includes previews of SimCity and Command and Conquer sequels (some broken links!?)

New New York magazine includes the full Patrick O'Brian hidden-history: http://www.nymag.com/this_week/view.asp?id=1941

Caesar: The Life Story of a Panda Leopard was finished in March 1930, three months after his 15th birthday, but the dry wit and unsentimental precision O'Brian's readers savor is already in evidence. Caesar furiously mauls two shepherds, then suddenly laments, with utter sangfroid: "I dimly felt sorry that I had needlessly killed these two useless things, for though I was hungry I could not bring myself to eat these smelly men."

New Scientific American features cloning, and software metrics, plus this on how the Pioneer-acceleration anomaly is still an open question: http://www.sciam.com/1998/1298issue/1298scicit2.html

The value of the anomaly matches the critical acceleration in a new law of motion devised 15 years ago by Mordehai Milgrom of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. The scheme, known as MOND, has steadily gained adherents because it explains galactic motions without recourse to "dark matter," material inferred by traditional laws of motion but never actually seen. MOND modifies Newton's second law (force equals mass times acceleration) for accelerations less than a critical value.

A mysterious drop in birthrate in Bangladesh: http://www.sciam.com/1998/1298issue/1298scicit4.html

In 1975, when asked how many children she wanted, a typical woman would reply four. Today she would say two.

Another oft-cited trigger for the transition is microcredit, an idea pioneered by Bangladeshi economist Muhammed Yunus.

Human-rights worldwide survey: http://www.sciam.com/1998/1298issue/1298numbers.html

Green = good [ = Protestant]
Beige = intermediate [ = Catholic, Hindi, Marxist]
Red = poor [ = Muslim, Maoist]

New Yorker teaser about the Iraq-inspection loose-cannon: http://magazines.enews.com/magazines/new_yorker/archive/981109-001.html

In the national-security offices of the White House, Ritter was sometimes referred to as Darth Ritter, and though the Administration denied charges by Saddam that he was a spy, some people at the Central Intelligence Agency apparently were not so sure. Polygraph experts there raised the prospect, after running extensive tests, that Ritter might have been working for Israel--or, at least, that he had inappropriately handed American secrets to Israeli intelligence agents.

From the Progressive Review, a nifty little chart showing historical ups and downs in the fight for democracy: http://www.prorev.com/Bucking.htm

Period               People win                      System wins
 
Late 18th century    End of monarchy & nobility      Eradication of 
                     End of British colonial rule    Indian peoples
                     Creation of a constitutional
                      democracy

This page offers first paragraphs of new books: http://www.nymag.com/Today/view.asp?table=Today&id=1227

Details on the new copyright law and net.radio: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/11/09feature.html

Webcasters will be forbidden to play more than two songs in a row from the same album, or three in a row from the same band, within a three-hour period. That rule has already put an end to sites like Dead Radio and Floyd Radio, which had developed cult followings by broadcasting only Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd songs.

This album by Patty Griffin has a killer song called "Wiggley Fingers" that unfortunately isn't included among these 30-sec Realaudio clips: http://www.amrecords.com/artists/pattygriffin/sound.html

A site that tracks successful web forums: [multipage] http://www.forumone.com/srch/mega.html

Match Number: 1 of 26 Nerd World Media / Assembly
Match Number: 2 of 26 Yahoo Message Boards
Match Number: 3 of 26 Cafe Utne
Match Number: 4 of 26 SALON / Table Talk
Match Number: 5 of 26 Excite / Message Boards
Match Number: 6 of 26 Pathfinder
Match Number: 7 of 26 Hotwired / Threads

Nanotubule TV? http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/SCIENCE/SCIENCE/t000101754.html

Ren believes millions of nanotubes could act as separate electron guns, and because they are so short, the set could be thin enough to hang on a wall.

Japan contemplates depression-dividend: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/NATION/t000101865.html

Here's an idea to get Japan's tightfisted consumers to finally start spending: Give away $250 to every man, woman and child in the country.

"This program is so stupid," said Hachiro Fujunaka, a retiree getting on his motor scooter in Tokyo's Ginza shopping district. "The whole world is going to laugh at us with this coupon idea."

Quiet weekend in Lake Wobegone: [MyExcite]

Illinois News (Nov 9 4:23AM)

Woman Dies In Expressway Accident
Family Overcome By Carbon Monoxide
Cops Hunt For Hit-And-Run Driver
Woman Stabbed By Boyfriend
Gunman Sought For Teen's Murder
Father Holding Son Gunned Down

They may hate us, but they love our stuff: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-10/27/045l-102798-idx.html [ALD]

This nationalism must be behind the decision of Philip Morris to market a cigarette brand in Russia called Peter the Great rather than, say, George Washington.

"I don't think Nike and Ralph Lauren sell because they're American," said French novelist Philippe Labro. "They sell because they're better conceived and marketed. Your country has a genius for marketing, for branding."

Michael Jackson is popular in India, but it is his dancing and the way his videos are cut and orchestrated that has had the biggest impact, spawning Indian versions that threaten to eclipse their inspiration. And only a culture in full control of its irony could spawn, as Vietnam has, a cafe named Apocalypse Now. This is not bowing at the American altar. It's postmodern spoofery.

Seven contrarian principles from Chrysler's head engineer: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1116/6211106a.htm

1. "The customer isn't always right."
2. "The primary purpose of business is not to make money."
3. "When everybody else is doing it, don't."
4. "Too much quality can ruin you."
5. "Financial controls are bad."
6. "Disruptive people are an asset."
7. "Teamwork isn't always good."

A strange free service that emails you whenever AltaVista indexes a new page with your specified search pattern: http://www.peacefire.org/tracerlock/ [Samizdat]

Why Nigerians fight the oil companies: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/africa/newsid_209000/209441.stm

"The oil pipelines run straight through our villages. When they burst and the oil goes everywhere, it ruins everything. The fish die, and our nets are ruined. We're fishermen, but we cannot live any more. ...We're suffering from this and the oil companies never compensate us. It's not fair."

Movieline cattiness: [Deja URL]

Most Precipitous Fall From Grace: Kevin Costner
Most Stuck-up: Gwyneth Paltrow
Most Articulate by a Mile: Emma Thompson
Most Pretentious Actor on Stage or Screen: John Malkovich
Most Amazing Body (Actress): Ashley Judd
Most Amazing Body (Actor): Brendan Fraser
Most Dreaded Publicity Client: Farrah Fawcett
Most Inept at Picking Boyfriends: Laura Dern
Most Likely to Play Monica Lewinsky in a TV Movie: Shannen Doherty

Another good morning for the Obscure Store including this Ventura campaign diary (sort of) that makes it clear how much his victory was due to show biz: http://webserv1.startribune.com/cgi-bin/stOnLine/article?thisSlug=DIAR08

Jesse's reception at the parade was unbelievable. He was cheered, mobbed and given ovations.... We did not have to ask people to take our literature, they came up to us and grabbed the "Ventura Buck," our first lit piece. We handed out over 10,000 pieces of literature in a parade that went only 7 blocks. . . . This was the first time I began seeing the "Jesse Phenomena" and his ability to instantly connect to the people.

ABC's science page looks darn good: http://www.abcnews.com:80/sections/science/

Alternative housing experiment: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/NATION/t000101529.html

Sanders and her 14-year-old grandson, John, last month settled into what is thought to be the nation's first subsidized housing for grandparents raising grandchildren. GrandFamilies House, a 26-unit "mini-village" with a gabled roof and a broad inviting front porch, is the $4-million co-venture of three nonprofit groups here.

Kibological mysteries: [Deja URL]

>>Where is New Ulm ?  I have never heard of it...
>New Ulm is about 3400 miles (14 kilometers) due east of Old Ulm.

Which one, New Ulm or Old Ulm, is the home of Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern- schplenden- schlitter- crasscrenbon- fried- digger- dingle- dangle- dongle- dungle- burstein- von- knacker- thrasher- apple- banger- horowitz- ticolensic- grander- knotty- spelltinkle- grandlich- grumblemeyer- spelterwasser- kurstlich- himbleeisen- bahnwagen- gutenabend- bitte- ein- nurnburger- bratwustle- gernspurten- mitz- weimache- luber- hundsfut- gumberaber- shonedanker- kalbsfleisch- mittler- aucher von Hautkopft of Ulm? I need to know by 8 AM for my dinosaurology class thanks in advance!

A good froth against the British monarchy: http://www.zolatimes.com/V2.37/doll.html

She, Lizzie, earns nothing, contributes nothing and ADDS NOTHING to the economy, or the psyche of a nation claiming to be a modern state at the forefront of Europe and the exporter of democratic values around the world. The Queen's wealth is obscene and ought to be confiscated, leaving her an annual operating expense as Good Will Ambassador until her demise. And that goes for the rest of the bunch: kids, peers, cousins, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, land barons and all the remaining sycophantic spongers on the Civil List.

(tanked)

Jules Feiffer decodes MonicaGate as a metaphor: http://www.uexpress.com/ups/opinion/cartoon/jf/index.html

Today's Dilbert made me laugh: http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/ab.html

PHB: I have a solution to our morale problem...

A very short, cryptic poem called "The Sandcastle": http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/stibooboo01006.html?1334425

We spent ages making it impregnable and fast,
a crenellated keep complete with flag
and drawbridge, moat and blind portcullis...

Frank Kermode on a Pinter anthology: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/stibooboo03005.html?1334425

Pinter's political prose is admirable, its lucidity and force contrasting keenly with the "stale, dead but immensely successful rhetoric" that has, in his view, defeated our intelligence and democratic will. Writing as strong as this reminds one of Ben Jonson's claim that the corruption of language is the mark of a deeper social corruption.

Gossipy Woody Allen bio review: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/stibooboo02017.html?1334425

The dialogue in his films often seems ad libbed, but this is achieved through mind-numbing repetition during hours of rehearsal. Hiring Marshall McLuhan to play a cameo of himself in Annie Hall, Allen typically decided the scene wasn't good enough, and insisted that McLuhan return from Canada to reshoot it - and when he arrived, virtually ignored him.

Robert Parry reality-checks Sally Quinn's nauseatingly hypocritical analysis [qv] of Clinton as a Washington outsider: http://www.consortiumnews.com/consor39.html

Insider presidents: JFK, LBJ, Ford, Reagan, Bush
Outsider presidents: Nixon, Carter, Clinton

New additions to the First Chapters page (already!) include Wm Gass and Dave Barry

Explaining NGOs: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1107/d_ap_1107_91.sml

The largest nonprofits in the United States operate on budgets approaching $500 million. NGOs range from huge operations like the Red Cross, CARE and the Nature Conservancy, which buys and protects vast acreage, to one-issue groups like Solar Cookers International and tiny grass-roots movements everywhere.

In addition to dispensing charity, NGOs take surveys, dig wells, fix bad teeth, stop epidemics, house refugees, protect natural resources, lend money, sue polluters and sometimes demonstrate against governments.

A good day at the Obscure Store includes this update on the artist who paints money: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-11/07/128l-110798-idx.html

Authorities seized some of the artwork in 1991 in Cheyenne, Wyo. They acted again in 1992, when he was on the verge of launching "Project Pittsburgh," a well-publicized effort to distribute $1 million in Boggs Bills in the area. They carted away bills and a host of other items depicting currency, including a pair of boxer shorts.

I'd mostly given up on the ongoing Jack Parsons saga at Laissez-Faire City Times, because it had gotten so self-indulgent, but it may be returning to the central tale of early rocketry, Scientology, Aleister Crowley, etc, and the current episode includes a synopsis: http://www.zolatimes.com/v2.36/JPAR14.html

January 1946: January 4: Parsons and Hubbard begin work on a magic ritual to attract a Scarlet Woman, through which Parsons will conceive a Moonchild.

Also there, a purported CIA psychological typology: http://www.zolatimes.com/V2.36/personal.html

The descriptions are hard-core. They bite. They draw blood. None of this "I'm okay, you're okay" nonsense. And, of course, you are not okay. You're under interrogation, remember?

The nine major groups within the psychological-emotional category adopted for this handbook are the following:

1. The orderly-obstinate character.
2. The optimistic character.
3. The greedy, demanding character.
4. The anxious, self-centered character.
5. The guilt-ridden character.
6. The character wrecked by success.
7. The schizoid or strange character.
8. The exception.
9. The average or normal character.

And a sweet adolescent memoir from brainiac Grabbe: http://www.zolatimes.com/V2.36/Ahundred.html

The main classes were in number theory and abstract algebra, and the first week some of the other kids kept coming up to ask me what room I was in. It turned out they just wanted to hear me say "room 1035" with a Texas accent. It was the drawn out "5" that clinched it, of course, so I started saying "11 cubed minus 14 squared minus 10 squared," which was the same thing but took some of the fun out of it the way they saw it.

Nope: No This is Hell live realaudio funny progressive highly recommended but taking a back seat to the nwu football team alas this week either

What would The Onion say? I've been trying to think up Onion-style headlines:

Glenn To Study Effects Of Aging In Pay-Per-View Motorcycle Leap Over Grand Canyon

Strange Win95 shareware competes with e-books? http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,28485,00.html?pfv

Winslett's book reader program modifies the text on a PC monitor to make it easier to read and navigate, he said. He won't yet detail all the improvements he's made, but says the program addresses text size, out-of-focus fonts, and hands-free navigation through the text, among other common user complaints.

Hubble scarab: (false color) http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/whats-new.html

The original Nature article on Jefferson's paternity test: [Messy URL] [ALD]

If Jefferson's relationship with Hemings began in the late 1780s, it would mean that he began to back away from a leadership position in the anti-slavery movement just around the time that his affair with Sally Hemings started. Jefferson's stated reservations about ending slavery included a fear that emancipation would lead to racial mixing and amalgamation. His own interracial affair now personalizes this issue, while adding a dimension of hypocrisy.

Norman Solomon points out that a movie predicted the election results: http://www.fair.org/media-beat/981105.html

"Pleasantville" is a brilliant deconstruction of '50s nostalgia in a present-day context. When the two epochs collide, the nice defenders of timeworn images turn nasty -- demanding that women remain submissive, ripping up art deemed smutty, burning offensive books and proclaiming that the world must be seen in black and white.

New Consortium includes impeachment, Hyde, Moon, and Kosovo

Does anyone know a less commercial way to do a free website poll than this? http://www.freepolls.com/

TV 2nite: PJ Harvey on Letterman; Todd Rundgren on PI

Salon gathers raspberries for the departing Newt, from Maxine Waters, Jerry Brown, Christopher Hitchens, etc: http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/11/cov_06newsd.html

CH: He is the Clinton of the GOP and I cannot put it more meanly than that.
JB: You know what H. L. Mencken said: Politics is the art of shushing away bogeymen.

New Science News includes this upbeat piece about applying science to community problems: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/11_7_98/bob1.htm

It's but one of dozens of small centers that have sprung up around the country using community-based research to address local problems. The Netherlands, home to several dozen such research centers, is widely credited with pioneering this type of institution and its generic moniker: the science shop. Its model has spawned centers in France, Northern Ireland, and Austria, but most of the centers in the United States developed independently.

After 30 years of loving Michael Hurley's songs, the Web delivers me his life story: [multipage] http://www.furious.com/perfect/michaelhurley.html

In my '51 Plymouth I'd go and pick up Pasta when she got off work in the middle of the night. She'd be dressed in her white waitress dress. Neither of us had any idea of how beautiful we were. We didn't know that they should have been making a movie about us, but at the time they didn't know either. We drew practically no attention at all.

That winter we moved to Philadelphia and rented a small apartment for $25.00 per month. There Daffodil, our first child, a girl, was born. Then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts where she hatched out two more rugrats, boys, we named them Jordan and Colorado. By this time, of course, I began to grow weary of Pasta's surly and unremitting ways, so I went up to Vermont and began to study auto mechanics.

Anybody who can draw has powers of intuition as well. They can predict the future altho' not always correctly, but can read your mind on occasion. And I have this capability too.

My dog Boone was eventually killed by Hendricks, our neighbor, who lost patience with Boone eating out of his garbage can. When my girlfriend, Andy Behr, noticed my grief, she said it was the first time she saw me reveal any human emotions, but the boys in our tribe had been trained not to weep and we actually spent a lot of time away on the warpath. I still go occasionally on the warpath, but these days we call that a crimewave. But it was women the reason for all us to lay aside the weapons of war and learn the civil arts. If you will obey women, you will be happy. As long as the women you obey are smart enough. Which is why I stopped heisting produce off of trains.

The werewolf was a gentleman who was a helpful influence. He showed me that there were others,who would never fit in. It seemed that once that snout and facial hair and pointed ears appeared, there wasn't really a realistic chance that the guy would ever be able to have a lovely wife and a good home.

Q: Your music comes across as from someone for whom establishing harmony with his direct surroundings is more important than success or the rat race-is that right? HURLEY: That is exactly right. Most of the years of my so-called career I did not perceive any career...

"Michael Hurley is the last unreconstructed folkie-shaman in America. His songs are primordial tales of the hunt for good cheer and satisfying sex, etched like cave paintings on city walls and farmland silos. Like many characters in his songs, his voice seems to have been run over by the dump truck of life, but it marries human mystery to forthright music like no other." Milo Miles

More on the successor to the PalmPilot (16 Sept below): http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?98116.echandspring.htm

"The group who were not so well-served was younger people, something more 'cool' if you like, and that's the sort of direction we're thinking of heading in," Dubinsky said. Long battery life, fast performance, and the type of design simplicity that helped catapult the PalmPilot to success will be high on Handspring's priorities for its new product, Hawkins said. An Internet hookup will also be important, as will a greatly improved display.

Mexican duo "Plastilina Mosh" create crossover hits: http://cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Music/9811/06/plastilina.mosh/index.html

Take 25-year-old Alejandro Rosso, with his training in classical and jazz music and his love of timeless musicians such as Thelonious Monk and Herbie Hancock, throw in 22-year-old Jonas, who played in punk bands and was influenced by Nirvana, and you wind up with a mix of multilingual rap, swanky lounge-lizard tempos, frisky hip-hop and playful, inane lyrics.

A good week for the only newspage with a denser prose style than Robert Stone: http://www.ntk.net/

Remember, remember the fifth of - I'm sorry, it's gone again, pleaded BILL GATES this week, as his taped testimony to the DOJ Truth Commission revealed an inability to recall the details of his own e-mail outbox. We guess then he won't remember the words of the NYT column where he noted "I can remember all the moves of many chess games that I've played. I can still remember all my lines in a high school play, 'Black Comedy'... I remember financial data very well, too. I can visualize the source code to the version of BASIC that I wrote for the first microcomputer, back in 1975." But I can't quite remember sending a three-line e-mail which included the phrase "Do we have a clear plan on what we want Apple to do to undermine Sun?"

Including the first Furby-dissection online: [multipage] http://www.phobe.com/furby/guts.html [NTK]

Nervous System: Furbies have a single main PC board, which contains a few minor chips (they don't look custom), some analog components (caps and resistors), the pet and the inversion sensor, and connectors for the wires leading to the remote switches, speaker, mic, IR, etc. Mounted on the main PCB are two daughter PCBs, one about 0.8x0.6" and another about 0.4" square. Each contains a blob of black plastic which usually represents a cheap, custom masked IC. This is most likely the CPU, ROM, RAM (if any), voice samples, etc. all in a single atomic unexaminable blob.

Malpractice horror story: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/NATION/t000100971.1.html

The doctors, who were performing the outpatient procedure with the device for the first time, ignored repeated warnings from nurses. The salesman using the device could be prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license, Tarlton said.

The earliest instance of the ape-suits joke I can find: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=407813220

Inevitable one-liner for the new Meg Ryan movie:

You've Got Spam

'SimCity' Professional Edition? [multipage] http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/16077.html

Last year in Dallas the researchers simulated a chemical truck overturn, which showed that a gas plume travels farther around buildings lifting the plume into stronger winds above them. Using this information, researchers can model flow around buildings to prepare for terrorist attacks, for example.

Whew: NewsHub is back: http://www.newshub.com/world/bytime.html (Musing: Reading long columns of headlines starts to feel like listening to people shouting. Getting rid of the extra capitals would help.)

Don't miss: OJR kindly fills in our French-Minitel blind spots: http://olj.usc.edu/indexf.htm?/sections/features/98_stories/stories_france.htm

French media and business have been reluctant to accept the idea of the Net as a profit center and it was only this fall, in fact, that French Telecom announced a partnership with International Business Machines (IBM) to develop software and services that will integrate the Minitel and the Web.

...Conversely, it is an unwritten rule that journalists do not claim author rights for stories published on Minitel.

And somebody who makes money off a free email newsletter: http://olj.usc.edu/indexf.htm?/sections/features/98_stories/stories_email.htm

Cassingham says he earns roughly 15% of his revenue from ads in the free version of his newsletter, 40% from paying subscribers (who get to read more content, ad-free), 20% from syndication to print publications, 25% from selling his three book collections of columns, and a handful here and there from speaking appearances and consulting.

A tidbit from AIC: [Source]

There are big troubles with Mike Leigh's new Gilbert and Sullivan film. Apparently, the financiers completely miscalculated the budget, and it has rapidly risen to become his most expensive film by far. Most of the cast are supposedly working off contract now, shooting schedules are not being stuck to. The actors are told at 10pm each night whether they will be needed for the next day. Each day is taken as it comes, and at every minute there is the fear that the backers will pull the plug at any moment. The only good news is that the rushes supposedly look great.

If you register, you can use Funk & Wagnall's online encyclopedia for free: (I haven't tried it) http://www.funkandwagnalls.com/ [Coppersky]

TV 2nite: conclusion of PBS Touching Evil; Sheryl Crow on Leno

Major cultural relativity in this first chapter about Beijing's first McDonald's: http://chicago.digitalcity.com/cafe/books/chapter/jwatson.htm

The terms tu and yang have been paired concepts in the everyday discourse of Chinese political culture since the nineteenth century. In common usage, tu means rustic, uncouth, and backward, whereas yang refers to anything foreign (particularly Western), fashionable, and quite often, progressive. The juxtaposition of these common terms demonstrates how McDonald's and its foreign (yang) food have become synonymous with progressive changes that make life more enjoyable in contemporary China.

During my interviews with students in a primary school, one nine-year-old boy told me that his dream is to buy a huge box of hamburgers and eat them every day. Several youngsters expressed the desire to open a McDonald's restaurant of their own when they grow up.

New The Nation includes lots of unsurprising election post-mortems; Chiapas; Wye; progressive consensus-building; and this look at Jefferson's slave-'wife': http://www.thenation.com/issue/981123/1123WILL.HTM

It may be that Jefferson loved Hemings. It may be that Hemings loved Jefferson. But since slavery was the practice of absolute control, I wonder at the rush to embrace "love" as the overarching feature of their bond.

Busy day for Drudge: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

In what could be the biggest blow to tobacco since the Surgeon General's warning on cigarette packs, the chairman of the American Medical Association tells CBS' 60 MINUTES on Sunday that smoking causes impotence!

I think I have to nominate this archive of first chapters as the link of the month ...at least! Does anyone know a comparable site, or a mirror that doesn't do that damnable Javascript BS? http://chicago.digitalcity.com/cafe/books/chapter/

Enormous detail about the K-T comet, by Alvarez himself: http://chicago.digitalcity.com/cafe/books/chapter/alvarez_w.htm

Within hours of the impact, most of Mexico and the United States must have been reduced to a desolate wasteland of the most appalling, agonizing destruction. Where only the day before there had been fertile landscapes, full of animals and plants of all kinds, now there was a vast, smoldering netherworld, mercifully hidden from view by black clouds of roiling smoke.

PJ O'Rourke sounds entirely reasonable...so far: http://chicago.digitalcity.com/cafe/books/chapter/pjorourke.htm

I had no interest in economics at college, either. I belonged to that great tradition of academic bohemia which stretches from the fifteenth-century riots of Francois Villon's to the Phish tours of the present day. For university hipsters, there is (no doubt Villon mentions this in his Petit Testament) nothing more pathetic than taking business courses.

A cute first chapter about bots: http://chicago.digitalcity.com/cafe/books/chapter/leonard.htm

Bots are the first indigenous species of cyberspace, a class of creatures dazzling in its infinite variety. Web robots, spiders, wanderers, and worms. Cancelbots, modbots, Lazarus, and the Automoose. Softbots, userbots, taskbots, chatterbots, knowbots, and mailbots. MrBot and MrsBot. Bartender-bots, BalooBear bots, and bolo bots. Warbots, clonebots, crashbots, floodbots, annoybots, hackbots, and Vladbots. Turing bots. Tsunami bots. Gaybots, gossipbots, and gamebots. Prostibots. Conceptbots and RoverBots. Skeletonbots, spybots, slothbots, and spambots. Xbots and metabots. Eggdrop bots. Motorcycle-bull-dyke bots.

The first chapter of Robert Stone's new novel, highly recommended: http://chicago.digitalcity.com/cafe/books/chapter/rstone.htm

Inside the chapel, some Americans with guitars were plinking unhappily away, accompanying their own sad sing-along of a few socially responsible, with-it numbers from the sacred liturgy of whatever cow college town they called home. Like many visitors, they had been unnerved by the inimitable creepiness of the Holy Sepulchre, a grimly gaudy, theopathical Turkish bathhouse where their childhood saints glared like demented spooks from every moldering wall. Lucas, once born, once baptized, put his hand in the holy water and crossed himself. "Dark is life, is death," he thought. It was all that came to mind. The text was from Mahler's Song of the Earth but he supposed it might be considered a sort of prayer. "My heart is still and awaits its hour."

(There's also an excruciatingly slow-spoken 30-min talk by Stone. But the chapter is great, though many sentences require multiple readings to sort out.)

Wow-- they have a huge archive of recent first chapters, including Joyce Maynard (fine), Elizabeth Wurtzel, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace (disappointing), and many many others. (Beware the annoying Javascript URLs on the archive page. I've fixed them here.)

Battlefield-Area Network being tested in Korea: http://www.fcw.com/pubs/fcw/1998/1102/fcw-newscomm-11-2-98.html

Cmdr. Mark Monti, 7th Fleet FBE coordinator, said the ADOCS/LAWS system provides commanders with an integrated theater database featuring pop-up menus that provide a high level of detail to commanders "down to the number of rounds left in the magazine" of a particular artillery battery or ship.

And details on the DoD worldwide-frequencies snafu: http://www.fcw.com/pubs/fcw/1998/1102/web-dod-11-02-98.html

The process for ensuring international cooperation in matters involving the frequency spectrum, known as the JF-12 process, provides detailed guidance for DOD spectrum managers on how to coordinate telecommunications operations with foreign governments.

Heh: http://www.fcw.com/pubs/fcw/1998/1102/web-web-11-04-98.html

Air Force Maj. Gen. Michael Hayden, deputy chief of staff of the United Nations Command and U.S. Forces Korea, told attendees at the Conference that a routine security review of its unclassified systems concluded that the command's Web page presented a "wondrous source of intelligence" for hostile forces.

Interesting minor spoilers from the Andy Kaufman movie shoot: http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=2449

Andy directs them to play faster and faster, until the old woman collapses. The show is stopped as a doctor races onto stage only to proclaim the woman dead. Andy then appears from off stage wearing an Indian headdress. He chants and dances until the woman rises...

The only comic I look for on the rare occasions I visit comic stores is "Tales of the Beanworld". Turns out it has a gorgeous unofficial site: [multipage] http://www.proaxis.com/~half/BeanWeb/Introduction.html [SB]

A most peculiar comic book experience.

Should I bother with these standardised site pages?? http://www.theobvious.com/archives/110298.html [HtB]

/about/index.html          [alias for site tour]
/help/index.html           [alias for site tour]
/archive/index.html        [not applicable]
/new/index.html            [alias for weblog?]
/search/index.html         [barely applicable]
/contact/index.html        [alias for bio page]
/download/index.html       [not applicable]
/legal/index.html          [not applicable]
/text/index.html           [not applicable]

(I agree:) Sabren writes: http://www.manifestation.com/

Personalized news isn't about going to Excite and getting stories that match your keyword. It's about going to a person you trust. Personalized. Each of the current presurfers have their own interests, and they capitalize on them and share those interests. That's why I don't think Jorn and I are competing. Or Bill at whump.com or Raphael at Honeyguide. Or the folks at memepool. Heck. 99% of the web doesn't even know we're here yet.

Editor's Fujitsu laptop gives false positive on bomb-sniffing gizmo: Progressive Review

In the end, a bomb-sniffing dog happily nosed about the computer, licked the hard drive and quickly returned without complaint to K-9 officer Jim Cox. Smith, who covered his first Washington story in 1957, was permitted to restuff his backpack and board the plane.

DC residents prodded further towards revolution: http://www.sunspot.net/cgi-bin/editorial/story.cgi?storyid=950000196132 [OSRR]

"I will continue fighting to oppose any attempt to use federal funds appropriated to the district to print or count ballots supporting the legalization of marijuana, whether done under the guise of 'medical use' or otherwise," the statement said.

The Beeb Sell Out? http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk_politics/newsid_208000/208427.stm

MPs have told the BBC that it should be taking advertising on its internet services. Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, the chair of the Commons Media Committee, said the corporation should also consider commercialising its News 24 television channel.

So just how big is MS's "lobbying office"??? http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,28367,00.html?pfv

...Microsoft said it will add a top Republican Congressional aide to its Washington lobbying office. Kerry Knott, chief of staff to House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) and a 13-year Capitol Hill veteran, will join Microsoft later this year to manage external affairs...

Slate editor tests Microsoft's tolerance with brash DOJ coverage: [2nd item on page] http://www.observer.com/cgi-win/homepage.exe?nyo1/rc110998 [OSRR]

Asked about interference from on high, Mr. Kinsley insisted that "for the whole two years, they've been faultless." He added: "If you're going to develop media products, you have to have a reputation for being hands-off."

This Day in Joyce History: In 1902, James dined at the Nassau with Yeats and Lady Gregory.

TV 2nite: CEOs of AOL and Netscape on Charlie Rose; also: I don't understand why PBS is doing a 2-hr promo for NBC's Homicide??? http://www.pbs.org/whatson/1998/11/descriptions/ANHO.html

Al Gore raps!? http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

"We say: let's heal our nation! They say: more investigation!"

Gore first introduced the rap in a world premiere before campaign audiences in Iowa a few weeks ago. It has been racing up the stump charts ever since.

Smartcards face chicken-and-egg problem in USA: http://www.techserver.com/newsroom/ntn/info/110498/info13_28814_noframes.html

...But the card readers broke frequently. And merchants weren't happy about allocating precious counter space to yet another device, even if it was free. So merchants dropped out of the program.

Lame new anti-piracy law: http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,28357,00.html?pfv

The new regulations require each ISP to designate a point-person to receive complaints about copyright infringement, and to send that information to the federal copyright office along with a $20 filing fee. The person's name and contact information also must be displayed prominently on the ISP's Web site.

Looks like new Lynda Barry's go up Wed afternoons: http://www.creativeloafing.com/savannah/newsstand/current/barry.html

MemeWatch: "kinder, gentler" [AV pattern]

AltaVista found 8145 Web pages for you.

SSN's gain ground as national ID numbers: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/nation/110498/nation32_22462_noframes.html

Gore said victims will be able to get new Social Security numbers by providing written evidence of domestic violence from a local shelter, a treating physician or a law enforcement official. Until now, the Social Security Administration has required victims to prove not only that they were abused but that their abuser had misused the victim's Social Security number.

70Myo parrots? http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1104/d_ap_1104_230.sml

"It certainly looks like a parrot jaw, so I think this is quite possibly that of a parrot and is a significant, very interesting finding for the history of birds,'' she said.

(I had a poetic vision once, that dinosaurs died of sensory overload, from the colors and speed of birds.)

Finally getting back to the NYRB, I find this beautifully written account of Russia on the day the market collapsed: [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998111904F

I dropped in to see a girlfriend and found her small children dressed in tutus and eating black caviar as if it were porridge. "Have you all gone mad?" I asked. "Not at all," my friend replied. "It's just that all our regular clothes are dirty and you can't get laundry detergent anywhere. And caviar is cheaper than anything else at the moment. I can't afford cheese anymore, can I?"

A white wedding limousine stood in the middle of the street with its doors wide open: a bouquet of flowers fluttered on the hood; inside it was empty. The car had obviously broken down, but it looked like the bride and groom, hearing on the radio that "the exchange rate is crawling," had abandoned the car and rushed off -- as they were, in veil and patent leather boots -- to the nearest shop to buy up whatever they could get their hands on.

It is thought that three people basically control the reins of power in Russia: Yeltsin's daughter Tatyana Dyachenko -- a strong-willed woman who knows how to influence her father; Valentin Yumashev -- the head of the presidential administration, the ghostwriter of Yeltsin's "autobiography," and the man who filters information and controls access to the Patient; and Berezovsky -- a sort of late-twentieth-century Rasputin, who deftly pulls the puppet strings in his personal interest.

..."How do you explain all your monkey business?" he asked in conclusion. Strangely enough, Chernomyrdin wasn't prepared for this question: it seems no one reminded him that there are human beings living in our country and that they may have their own opinions. He paled, and then got mad and sort of sputtered.

And David Lodge on the new Updike is probably a better read than the book itself: [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998111908R

The format of all these books (for which Nabokov's Pnin is perhaps the model) is the same: a collection of self-contained stories unified by their common protagonist. ... Most modern short stories end with either an epiphany or a twist.

Updike, unlike Bech, is clearly past caring what reviewers say about him, and indifferent to how his fellow writers may feel about having their names promiscuously dropped in the Bech chronicles. His account of "the Forty" seems to be a mischievous travesty of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he is himself a member...

And a good exploration of the falling crime rate: [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998111932R

He upgraded his officers' equipment and dressed them in spiffy new uniforms. (In Turnaround, Bratton -- convinced that cops who look better perform better -- spends much time discussing the finer points of police fashion.)

Because of all the drug arrests being made in the city, Jacobson said, "kids in New York schools have to attend classes with ninety other kids."

"The result of mandatory laws and punishment by slogan," she observes, "is that we spend more and more money locking up less and less violent people."

Spending a million dollars on longer prison sentences, RAND estimated, would reduce cocaine consumption by about 13 kilograms (about 28 pounds). Investing it in law enforcement would reduce it by 27 kilograms. Putting the same amount of money into treatment programs, by contrast, would reduce consumption by more than 100 kilograms.

New Atlantic magazine: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98nov/index.htm

A nice bit of erotica from Nerve: http://www.nervemag.com/Siegel/flight/

We kiss again, her body against mine, her arms around my back. It is a strangely anchored feeling, like climbing a tree and coming to a fork in the branches, the kind that allows you to wedge yourself in and dangle your legs, suspended in air with no danger of falling.

New New Scientist includes a promising trick for preserving transplantable organs: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/981107/ntardigrades.html

Organs can usually be stored for only 30 hours before they have to be used. For hearts and lungs, the time limit is even less--just 4 hours. The main problem with keeping organs in cold storage is that water damages cell membranes at low temperatures. Unfortunately, removing water from tissues usually causes at least as much damage.

And this cool theory: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/981107/nboulders.html

The comet or asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs also left some giant chunks of sandstone perched on top of hills in Arkansas, a geologist claims. He says that the boulders must have been swept up onto the hills from coastal regions by a giant tidal wave, or tsunami, that followed the impact.

An excellent basic intro to hi-speed connection options: http://www.abcnews.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/glite981103.html

The availability of high-speed access will accelerate in the coming months, however, thanks to G.Lite. Technically known as the G.992.2 standard, it pulls data off the Net at 25 times the speed of 56 kilobit-per-second (Kbps) modems, but only uploads, or sends data from the individual user to the Internet, at speeds around 51Kbps. While G.Lite is slower than regular ADSL, customers can hook up by simply installing special DSL modems, which cost about $300 each.

Not RealAudio, either!?!? http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,28276,00.html?pfv

A poll taken on behalf of WebTV found that customers cited Java and Real Audio as the top two technologies they want. The Microsoft subsidiary, however, says it will not support these technologies in the near future.

Found on alt.religion.kibology:

Subject: World's Biggest Practical Joke
From:    KenMC @ spacelab.net at TIME_INC
Date:    11/3/98  2:09 PM
 
IMPORTANT: Please distribute this to everyone you know:
 
When John Glenn returns from space, everybody dress in Ape Suits.
 
We have 9 days in which to bury the Statue of Liberty up to her head.

New NY Observer includes this music-libel oddity (and also a bizarre musical baseball team): http://www.observer.com/cgi-win/homepage.exe?nyo1/nw110998

But later that same night, when Momus was filming a documentary scene at Fez prior to another performance at the club, Wendy Carlos showed up again. "She just walked in with this strange, mechanical look on her face," said Claudia Gonson, a friend of Momus'. "It was very frightening." Ms. Carlos approached the stage, stiffly holding out a complete copy of the lawsuit.

On her Web site, Ms. Carlos calls Ms. Franklin her "partner."

[Team:] 2. P.J. Harvey (second base)

And they maintain an Internet Sucker's Index: http://www.observer.com/cgi-win/homepage.exe?nyo1/BE110998

When we first set up the index back in April of this year, we scoured Wall Street for every public stock offering of the previous two years that had presented itself to the public as an "Internet" stock, and came up with a total of 18.

Just as the Dutch tulip craze soaked up so much of the nation's wealth that, when the bubble finally burst in 1636, the destruction of capital was so severe it plunged Holland into a depression, so too is the Internet binge staking claim, week after week, to a growing share of the stock market's aggregate worth.

And above-average egghead Harold Bloom on the new Wolfe (plus a postscript full of spoilers by a guy who claims to have inspired a character in Bonfire): http://www.observer.com/pages/frontpage4.htm

Some reviewers have seen A Man in Full's forays into the Stoic Epictetus (circa 50-138 A.D.) as the largest of Mr. Wolfe's jokes; perhaps it began as such, but to my aged critical ears Mr. Wolfe takes his Epictetus straight, even if he expects (and wants) to convert no one. If we are to have a national moralist, let it be Tom Wolfe and not the unspeakable William Bennett (surely a fictional character, invented by Gore Vidal in the absence of Nathanael West).

What upsets us, according to Epictetus, is not so much what happens to us, but our judgments upon those happenings. ... I am grateful to Mr. Wolfe for reminding me of this, which is excellent advice for any author enduring irrational reviewers.

Save the world-- buy more stuff! http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1116/6211194a.htm

He sets the tone by dropping a bombshell: "It's not an exaggeration right now to say the world economy hinges on the outlook of the American consumer."

"In the 1950s we sacrificed for family, for God and country. In the 1960s we questioned whether we needed to sacrifice like mom and dad did if times were good. In the 1980s sacrifice went out of fashion as we settled into the Have-It-All Era. In the decade of the 1990s we discovered that 'having it all' doesn't work," he explains.

He worries that writers have already started using the words "crash" and "depression." That bothers him. If the headlines scare people enough, they may cut up some of their credit cards.

"Our children are growing up with lots of possessions‹but will they become responsible, sharing adults?" As a mother, I am too shaken by that remark to take a bite of my lobster salad.

Yowzah! A plug-n-play webserver! http://www.forbes.com:80/tool/html/98/nov/1104/side1.htm

Easy-to-use Website Builder and Storefront Builder software asked us to fill out some simple forms, and follow the onscreen commands, and helped us create a basic no-frills web site and a ten-product catalog. Since we did not have a domain name, Encanto service gave us a domain name forbestest.encanto.net. Total time: 30 minutes.

(I'd like to know who Forbes has who's so hip...?!)

Geek Dreaming: This morning I dreamt Eric Raymond confessed the Halloween doc was a hoax!

Short lame profiles of hackers include rare pix (this is Stallman): http://www.discovery.com/area/technology/hackers/hackers.html [Slashdot]

How not to run a game company: http://loonygames.com/content/1.10/guest/ [Slashdot]

While all this planning, designing, and throwing away of ideas was occurring, money was being spent. Lots of it. Salary, rent, and other expenses took a ~$30K chunk out of bank every month. We had grown from 3 to 9 people and moved into a bigger office.

Good advice about rebates: http://www.techserver.com/newsroom/ntn/info/110498/info5_14959_noframes.html

So what should you do? If you buy a product based on a rebate, by all means don't leave the store without everything you need to claim it. Then send it in immediately AFTER you make copies of everything. Mark three months on your calendar and start calling the store when that time expires. And don't give up until you get your bucks.

More about Denmark's Dogma 95 group: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/enter/110398/enter4_25755_noframes.html

But he also wanted to show that restrictions slapped on filmmaking work better and lead to better films, something directors in Communist East Europe had long experience with as they concocted elaborate Aesop fables to get around censors.

Inconclusive profile of Lycos' CEO: http://www.internetworld.com:80/print/current/news/19981102-newsmaker.html

Further isolating Davis during Lycos' startup phase, the creator of the Lycos technology and site, Michael "Fuzzy" Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University, chose not to work at Lycos after selling his technology to CMG, opting instead to stay in his university lab. Davis and his venture backers were left to puzzle out the business model themselves.