Robot Wisdom WebLog for November 1998 (waxing)

This Day in Joyce History: In 1902, James set off for Paris, supposedly for medical school but really for adventure.

TV 2nite: Highly recommended: PBS American Masters does Nichols and May

Due tonight: The Dilbert Wars hot up as Norman Solomon's full book goes online: http://www.freespeech.org/normansolomon/dilbert/ For now, this Tom Tomorrow comic gives a quick summary: [celebrity voices impersonated]

Dilbert: "Geez, Dogbert, my boss doesn't know the difference between the World Wide Web and his own anus!"
Dogbert: "Well, I wouldn't want to borrow his PowerBook!"
Sparky the Penguin: "Hold it... um... excuse me..."

This one is good, too: http://www.disgruntled.com/adams1098.html

In the Dilbert world of cubicles, employees are isolated from each other. While Adams' everyman experiences the everyday frustrations felt by many workers, he can't see his commonality with his own co-workers. It's not us against them, but me against everyone else.

The message in The Joy of Work is that happiness is the solution to the plight of today's workers. "If you can decrease the unpleasantness that you experience at work, without taking a cut in pay, it's almost the same as giving yourself a raise," he writes. "It's like a stealth raise, because your boss might not even notice. The best way to reduce your total daily exposure to unpleasantness is to crowd it out with liberal doses of happiness."

Alas, Lynda Barry's strip has apparently been dropped: http://www.creativeloafing.com/savannah/newsstand/current/s_funnies.html

Fifty ways to spot a smuggler: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1202/d_ap_1202_149.sml

A Customs handbook obtained by The Associated Press advises officers that reasonable suspicion usually requires a combination of factors, including someone who: appears nervous, wears baggy clothing, gives vague or contradictory answers about travel plans, acts unusually polite or argumentative, wears sunglasses or acts sick.

New wireless PalmPilot does limited webpage parsing: http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,29436,00.html?pfv

Palm will also include a technology called "web clipping." This is described by Palm as "a means of extracting only a specific set of needed information from a given web site, eliminating the extraneous information prevalent in the Internet browsing paradigm."

Using the Net to upgrade even embedded chips: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/news/trends/t981202a.html

According to market research firm IDC, 500 million Internet-enabled devices -- including PCs, TVs, set-top boxes, hand-helds, and even cars -- will blast onto the scene in the next few years, and hardware developers will be able to use the Internet to deploy upgrades of their products easily.

New New Scientist includes a surprising design tip for digital camera makers: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/981205/newsstory13.html

"So I copied the design of the human eye, which uses liquid to fill the gap between lens and retina," says Edward Kelley, a physicist at the US National Institutes of Standards and Technology. Kelley's prototype bridges the space with a silicone oil.

Limited live Elvis Index: http://www.spellweb.com/ [NewSci]

Not sure which spelling is right? Enter in both versions!

And an easier-to-use net.traffic monitor: http://www.internettrafficreport.com/ [NewSci]

New reviews (shorter than normal?) at Computer Gaming World:

Reviews:
- Emergency: Fighters for Life
- StarCraft: Insurrection
- Total Annihilation: Battle Tactics
- Warlords III: Darklords Rising
- NotYet

Pirate station hides in tree: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/1998/12/02/MN21759.DTL&type=printable [CDreams]

The pair are the most active of a dozen people who have taken turns climbing a rope to the platform to send out commentary about the micro radio movement, tapes by death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, punk rock by the Dead Kennedys and other programming.

(Cool movie premise: in the standard future eco-dystopia, the hippies have returned to living in trees, swinging on bungee-vines, out of reach of the clumsy robo-fascists...)

If you have ideas for a better web browser, you can post them to this page and (supposedly) Marc Andreessen will read them: (simple registration required to post) http://discuss.userland.com/msgReader$560

In all Mosaic-derived browsers, links are colored based on whether they have been visited or not. That's not useful information for me, since I tend to visit the same pages over and over. Why not vary the color based on whether the page is in the cache or not? Or whether clicking on that link will do something that I might not want to do, like opening a new window, sending a mail message, or sending a cookie. I want to know what's going to happen when I click on a link.

In a new NY Observer, another scabrous attack on Greenspan et al, from Michael Thomas: http://www.observer.com/cgi-win/homepage.exe?nyo1/MW120798

Let us give thanks for the good fortune that enabled (so reports a well-placed Greenwich, Conn., source in disgust) various, perhaps most partners of Long-Term Capital Management to move key assets into their wives' names before the firm's collapse...

...Such as (this time I'm going to put it in capital letters): WHAT DID GREENSPAN KNOW AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT? Or this one: Why has no list of the investors in Long-Term Capital, the true beneficiaries of the bailout, been published?

...That the way to keep highly contingent inflation out of the goods and services sector, and thus out of the statistics confected for public consumption by an administration of charlatans and liars and bought men, is to get the money out of the wallets of the middle class, those greedy, inflation-inspiriting purchasers of goods and services, and export it into the private banking accounts of the well-to-do?

And Chris Byron on Barry Diller: http://www.observer.com/cgi-win/homepage.exe?nyo1/BE120798

But Mr. Diller has his believers -- mostly, it would appear, from the Hollywood-linked investment firm of Allen & Company, and in the person of cable industry macher John Malone. That, in turn, has enabled Mr. Diller to assemble a distinctly unimpressive collection of assets on the cheap, pronounce them valuable properties at the cutting edge of infotainment on the Information Superhighway, and more or less get away with it in the current bull market.

...The risk in this case being that if you combine one money-losing company with a company that is only marginally profitable at best, you might not get anything except larger and larger losses from the combined operation.

To add insult to injury, virtually the whole of the I.P.O.'s proceeds will go to the repayment of a $51 million loan from Mr. Diller's company to the new business to make it look healthy -- much in the way one might stick a martini in the hand of a drunkard to make him look suave.

MTV's new shows: http://www.variety.com/article.asp?articleID=1117489017

"Live Through This," created by Karen Krenis ("My So-Called Life," "Party of Five"), looks at what happens when a young person, whose parents were members of a famous '70s band, is forced to join them on a reunion tour.

I'm going to start favoring stories on teen violence and media violence, because I think it's becoming a major dilemma: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1201/d_rt_1201_108.sml

"Although most of the products on the market can legitimately be called 'games' some of the ultra-violent games might be more accurately called 'kill-for-fun murder simulations' and are inappropriate for children."

(Will the gunfreaks among the religious right defend them, for example? "First they came for our videogames, but we said nothing..." ;^)

This Day in History: In 1891, WB Yeats initiated Maud Gonne into the Order of the Golden Dawn.

TV 2nite: Frontline's Whitewater whitewash: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/arkansas/etc/synopsis.html

Online classic by one of the faces on the Sgt Pepper's cover: http://www.crystalclarity.com/yogananda/ [OLB]

Autobiography of a Yogi is not an ordinary book. It is a spiritual treasure. To read its message of hope to all truthseekers is to begin a great adventure.

Very cool artistic collaboration with a worm: http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/isast/articles/duprat/duprat.html [Spike]

The activities of the caddis worm, as manipulated by Hubert Duprat, are prompted by the "noise" -- beads, pearls and 18-karat gold pieces -- introduced by the artist into the insect's environment.

First, I only provided the larvae with gold spangles, but then I gradually added beads of turquoise, opal, lapis lazuli and coral, as well as rubies, sapphires, diamonds, hemispherical and Baroque pearls, and tiny rods of 18-karat gold. The larva connects the materials with silk thread from inside the tube, using a spiral movement, and then upholsters the inside of the case with a lining also made of silk.

New Onion:

Marc Singer Appointed Beastmaster General

Odd couple: Tony Perkins and Fred Rogers: [Deja URL]

Around this time [mid '50s], Fred Rogers, who hadn't seen Tony since his freshman year at Rollins, ran into him on the street. "Joanne and I were walking down Fifth Avenue, and all of a sudden we saw this person in sneakers on a bicycle. It turned out to be Tony, and I hailed him. He was just thrilled to see us. He got off his bike and said, 'Come on! Let's go to the top of this building.' I don't remember what building it was, but we went to the roof, he made paper airplanes, and we threw them off the top of the building. That was so typical of Tony and his enthusiasm..."

(Ken Starr reminds me of Mr Rogers.)

Goofy idea: I'm starting a contest to write new verses for "American Pie", that cover the history of rock between 1970 and 1998: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/jorn/americanpie.html (draft)

In researching the contest, I found this cutie at the end of an American Pie FAQ: http://www.mbhs.edu/~bconnell/cty/american-pie-FAQ.txt

According to the latest edition of the "American Pie Historical Interpretive Digest" (APHID), noted McLean historian Vincent Vandeman has postulated that cheezy country songs may have played a much more prominent role in the epic composition than had originally been thought. In particular, the "widowed bride," usually supposed to be either Ella Holly or Joan Rivers, may in fact be Billie Jo. According to this radical exegesis, the "pink carnation" of McLean's song is probably what was thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge, and was later found by the lonely, teenaged McLean as he wandered drunkenly on the levee...

A splendid idea in the new Progressive Review:

The Colombian ambassador to the US has suggested that if America gives 50 cows to every Colombian family that grows coca, it will induce them to change their choice of agricultural product.

[Also:] In a case that exposes the disastrous implications of the NAFTA agreement, a Canadian firm has sued for compensation from American taxpayers because of decision against it by a Mississippi jury. The jury had found the Loewen Group, a Canadian funeral home conglomerate, guilty of fraudulent practices. Said the jury foreman, "We decided that they were a bunch of crooks." Now Loewen wants hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation because the jury engaged in what it claims is a discriminatory trade practice...

Turnout in 1998 American winner-take-all elections: 36%
Turnout in 1998 German proportional representation elections: 83%

New Village Voice includes an okay look at spycam chic: http://www.villagevoice.com/features/9849/boal.shtml

Around the time he shot Outer and Inner Space, Warhol thought he'd make a fortune pitching NBC The Nothing Special, a real-life surveillance show in which "we'd all be waiting for something to happen but nothing ever would." As usual, Warhol's vision was years ahead of the popcult curve.

And 25 favorite books of 1998: [multipage] http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/159/faves.shtml

Solibo Magnificent By Patrick Chamoiseau
Bulletproof Buddhists and Other Essays By Frank Chin
The Store of a Million Items By Michelle Cliff
Hell By Kathryn Davis
Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster By Mike Davis
Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots Edited by Robbie Davis-Floyd and Joseph Dumit
Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace By Jodi Dean
Skating to Antarctica: A Journey to the End of the World By Jenny Diski
Secrets By Nuruddin Farah
Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country By William Finnegan
Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity By Joshua Gamson
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families By Philip Gourevitch
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art By Lewis Hyde
Thirst By Ken Kalfus
The Poisonwood Bible By Barbara Kingsolver
Forbidden Workers: Illegal Chinese Immigrants and American Labor By Peter Kwong
Kurdistan: In The Shadow of History By Susan Meiselas
Birds of America By Lorrie Moore
Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler By Thylias Moss
Gain By Richard Powers
Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters By Rosamond Purcell
Charity By Mark Richard
Towards the Blanched Alphabets By Gustaf Sobin
The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City By Robert Sullivan
Filth By Irvine Welsh

And an excellent look at NewHoo vs AOL: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9849/bunn.shtml

But of course, nobody knows quite yet just what will happen once AOL takes a close look at Netscape's open source projects, Mozilla and the ODP. Hard to believe it will continue without some alterations. Imagine a major TV network buying another with a public access channel in tow -- do they really want the baggage?

[Also:] Swatch has newly branded "Internet Time" with a watch to go along. The idea is this: the day is divided up into 1000 "Swatch beats," one for every 1 minute 26.4 seconds.

New "New York" turns up late: http://www.nymag.com/This_Week/view.asp?id=1975

Top Japanese neologisms: http://www.foxnews.com/news/international/1201/i_ap_1201_55.sml

1- "the wizard of Yokohama" [baseball]
2- "the nobody, the soldier and the weirdo" [politics]
3- "I told ya so!" [pop music]

While watching for a new "New York" I found an interesting look from last week at Earthweb's and theglobe's IPOs, by Austin Bunn: http://www.nymag.com/This_Week/view.asp?id=1968

Traditionally, only the most august institutional investors get a crack at IPOs. But when Earthweb went public -- underwritten in part by Wit Capital, a year-old New York company that specializes in online offerings -- the big names steered clear. Seasoned Wall Street pros looked on with horror as small-time stock-watchers (the "retail market") stampeded in. "I feel like nasdaq lost control," says Vincent Slavin, a trader who tracks IPOs for Cantor Fitzgerald. "Investors are beating each other to death."

Missionaries in Hollywood: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/nation/120198/nation5_11805_noframes.html

Mastermedia offers counseling and support groups and sends out newsletters and tapes, claiming a database of about 2,200 Hollywood types and a mailing list of 36,000 total. It distributes a cassette tape called "Defending Yourself Against Media's Evil Influences," a videotape called "From the Inside Out," and a calendar giving Christians a different media leader to pray for every day. (Recent prayer recipients included pop singer Madonna, author Stephen King and fashion designer Calvin Klein.)

Proof that Jewel is better than her critics: Regis Philbin just tried to read one of her poems and couldn't wipe the smirk off his face. (She also did a totally killer live performance of 'Simple is True'.) Don't be like Regis!

Don't miss: US spies plagiarise Internet concept: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1998-12/01/058r-120198-idx.html [OSRR]

Intelink now runs with a Netscape browser and a variety of commercial search engines, including AltaVista. The searchable universe consists of 440,000 electronic pages...

Martin describes the network as impenetrable to attack by hackers because it runs on dedicated Defense Department networks that have no link to the Internet. This so-called "air gap" is the first line of defense.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1896, a Belvedere retreat with Father Cullen started, that's the likeliest source for Portrait's chapter 3. In 1900, Oscar Wilde died.

TV 2nite: Garrison Keillor narrates an American Experience (PBS) on the Wright brothers: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/amex/wright/about.html

New first chapters at CNN (titles not easy to clip): http://www.cnn.com/books/beginnings/

The Millennial History reaches Francis of Assisi, and Cambridge University: http://www.guardian.co.uk/millennium/day105.html

Oxford had established itself as an important centre of learning, with some 70 teachers and 200 students from many parts of Europe. Its origins could be traced to the end of the eleventh century. That had given the nascent university quite enough time to acquire a reputation for rowdyism and energetic exchanges of views with the townspeople.

New NY Review of Books includes:

Leon Levy and Jeff Madrick: Hedge Funds: The Power and the Danger
K. Anthony Appiah: Africa: The Hidden History
John Gross: 'A Nice Pleasant Youth' [Hitler]
Louis Menand: William James & the Case of the Epileptic Patient

Plus Nixon's long-since-buried experiment in drug-addiction treatment: [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998121704R

By 1973, the total drug budget would reach $420 million, eight times greater than the amount when Nixon had first taken office. Most of that money was put directly into creating drug treatment and methadone replacement programs for heroin users, creating, for the first -- and, as it turned out, the last -- time in American history, treatment on demand for intravenous drug addicts.

For the parents, Massing writes, "the notion of recovery meant that addicts could get well -- a message that, they felt, undermined their warning to young people not to use drugs."

What Pomerleau is suggesting is that for an awful lot of us -- not all of us, of course, but many of us -- cigarettes don't present a powerful lure at all. We don't start smoking because smoking makes us feel sick.

And a forgotten classic 1916 vampire flick: [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998121708R

Without buildup or the slightest hint of backstory, it unleashed a succession of perturbing images and inescapable situations, which neither had nor required any justification beyond their own intensity. Severed heads turned up in hatboxes; householders were lassoed out of windows and then rolled down stairways in baskets; motorcars raced on dark errands along deserted country roads; conspirators caroused in low dives; masked assassins slipped across the roofs of Paris; a tack treated with a stupefying drug was hidden in a suede glove; chambermaids submitted to hypnosis; top hats exploded when hurled to the ground.

Les Vampires also shares with Buster Keaton's films a plastic beauty owing nothing to artistic flourishes: we merely have the impression of seeing the world for the first time.

In Les Vampires the camera scarcely budges, and some of the most eventful scenes are enacted in a single theatrically staged long shot. Nonetheless Feuillade's use of the medium is arguably subtler than D.W. Griffith's; he just goes at it differently.

One of the film's most memorable episodes -- the gassing and despoliation of a whole houseful of bejeweled aristocrats -- is almost haiku-like in its brevity.

In Feuillade's world the idea of criminals communicating by means of anagrams seems not altogether out of place.

And Mailer on Wolfe: [multipage, some spoilers] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998121718R

For example, Atlanta, high society and low, lives in the book as vividly as did New York in The Bonfire of the Vanities. The difference is that Wolfe appreciates the complexities of Atlanta's social issues with a subtlety that was absent from the earlier novel, and one of the surprising virtues of this second novel is how well he has captured the speech and airs and wit and sophistication of the black mayor and the upper-class anxieties of the black lawyer. Indeed, he is so sensitive to the nuances of their situation that it is as if he is making amends for the simple-minded outrage he exhibited against ghetto leaders in the first novel.

Extraordinarily good writing forces one to contemplate the uncomfortable possibility that Tom Wolfe might yet be seen as our best writer. How grateful one can feel then for his failures and his final inability to be great -- his absence of truly large compass. ... The internal monologues of Wolfe's people are surprisingly routine and insist on telling us what we know already. There is almost no signature quality of mind.

(Joyce is generally credited with discovering-- or at least perfecting-- this signature quality of mind. Even in Dubliners it affects the style in general, not just in characters' speech and thought.)

She was also in Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet: http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/News/9811/30/showbuzz/index.html#story3

Jane Horrocks' character is an introverted girl who most think is mute -- until they hear her dead-on impersonations of famous singers like Judy Garland and Marlene Dietrich. Originally written for the stage, the role is based on Horrocks' long-running personal penchant for imitating legendary singers, and was written especially for her by playwright Jim Cartwright.

Post-1982 pennies are poison: http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/duke_cpws.html

When a child swallows a penny, it can react with stomach acid to create a toxic mixture as corrosive as car battery acid, leading to severe stomach inflammation and even ulcers, physicians at Duke University Medical Center have discovered.

...those minted after 1982, which are nearly all zinc, with a thin copper plating, began eroding immediately. By the second day, they had holes in them. The researchers found the zinc in the coins reacted with the acid to form hydrogen gas and zinc chloride.

From the Progressive Review:

Insight Magazine reports that some federal investigators and private lawyers view Clinton's legal defense fund solicitations as racketeering-related mail and wire fraud since "the president made specific claims that the Monica Lewinsky allegations were completely false. Clinton and his aides denied in the fund-raising appeals all the Lewinsky-affair charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and witness tampering." Insight quotes an unnamed Justice Department official: "It's classic wire fraud. The fund-raising appeals were in furtherance of a conspiracy and could easily rise to racketeering."

...the Secret Service says it has no logs or surveillance video showing the arrival or departure of Vince Foster to the White House on his last day of work, July 20, 1993. The SS was replying to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by independent Whitewater investigator Allan J. Favish.

Grrr: http://www.jpost.co.il/News/Article-1.html

An estimated $20 million in European Union aid that was intended to provide cheap housing for Palestinians has been used to finance luxury apartments for rich supporters of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat.

Yay! NewsHub is UNwedged again after five hours: http://www.newshub.com/world/bytime.html

This hypermedia poem makes me feel too rushed: [multipage, Flash] [Messy URL]

Suffused with fado and the peculiar vibe that has drawn people for centuries to Evora, Whitehill "took a bite of something and started to cry. It was just incredible. The bar owner knew something was happening and asked us. He said a lot of people come in here and don't really know what's going on."

Cute pic from Irish Times: (detail) http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/paper/1998/1130/index.htm

Young singers auditioning for the Dublin production of Les Miserables in Vicar Street centre in Dublin on Saturday.

New Yorker teaser about Hopi cannibalism: http://magazines.enews.com/magazines/new_yorker/archive/981130-001.html

Turner eventually concluded that the Polacca Wash site was a place known in Hopi legend as the Death Mound. Hopi informants had first described the legend to an anthropologist at the end of the nineteenth century. According to the story, sometime in the late sixteen-hundreds a Hopi village called Awatovi had been largely converted to Christianity under the influence of Spanish friars. In addition, the people of Awatovi practiced witchcraft, which the Hopi considered a heinous crime. Eventually, five other Hopi villages decided to purge the tribe of this spiritual stain. An attack was organized by the chief of Awatovi himself, who had become disgusted with his own people...

The term "man corn" is the literal translation of the Nahuatl (Aztec) word tlacatlaolli, which refers to a "sacred meal of sacrificed human meat, cooked with corn."

A fun inventory of web-based tests for personality, IQ, etc etc etc: [multipage] http://www.2h.com/Tests/personality.phtml

Attention Deficit Test. How focused or scattered are you? 18 questions.

Very well-chosen but pricey hi-tech gifts: http://www.seattletimes.com/news/technology/html98/gift_112998.html

Mitsubishi HDTV-box $3,499
Rocket eBook $499
Lego Mindstorms $200
Motorola Iridium Phone $3,000
Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live! $199
Cambridge SoundWorks Desktop Theater $280
Moonlight's FoneCam $400
Panasonic L-10 PalmTheater $1,299
Vadem's Clio $999 [Pic source]
Arcade games $350 to $600

Innovative-looking business-sim from an unexpected source: http://www.cdmag.com/Home/home.html?article=/articles/014/082/ruthless_preview.html [via Slashdot]

Like other games from Red Storm, ruthless.com will come out simultaneously with a Clancy-esque book of the same name; both should be on store shelves this November.

Using Netscape 4.5 with Javascript on, I still get locked out of this ruthless.com review at MSN's Gaming Zone: http://www.zone.com/asp/script/default.asp?game=ruth&content=/asp/content/games/rs/ruth/scoop.asp

We're sorry, but the Zone does not support versions of Netscape before version 4.0. Please upgrade to a current version of Netscape to play on the Zone. You may also download Microsoft Internet Explorer and jump into the action now!

(So screw 'em!!!)

The story isn't much, but I love this headline: http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,29297,00.html?pfv

Egghead reveals new face

November Harper's Index: http://www.harpers.org/harpers-index/listing.html

Number of Sudanese factories besides the one the U.S. bombed last August that had U.N. approval to export drugs to Iraq : 0
Price a Houston company charges for sending a DNA sample into outer space for possible cloning by aliens : $50
Average number of Americans under the age of 18 killed by their parents or caretakers each day : 5

Drudge scoops Time's MotY: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

One camp is behind a Bill and Hillary Clinton "couple" of the year award. Another is arguing in favor of Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Fed for the year-end honor.

Scary as hell: Corporate tax shelters get organised: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1214/6213198a.htm

Today's shelter hustlers parse the numerous weaknesses in the tax code and devise schemes that can be pitched as "products" to corporate prospects. Then they sell them methodically and aggressively, using a powerful distribution network not unlike the armies of pitchmen who sold cattle and railcar tax shelters to individuals in the 1970s and 1980s. With encouragement from shelter hustlers, a new attitude is spreading: that the corporate tax department is a profit center all its own, and that a high effective tax rate is a sign of weakness.

Says one lawyer: "The IRS misses nine out of ten shelters. On the tenth, the company settles and pays back taxes and the government agrees to no penalties. That's a smart roll of the dice for the company."

Thanks to rampant industry gossip and clever reverse engineering, sellers find it hard to keep products proprietary. To keep them fresh, KPMG is said to require staffers to come up with one new idea per week.

Intel's tax vice-president Robert Perlman says he avoided the notorious step-down preferred: "Our standard is: If what we did and why appeared on the front page of the paper, would Andy Grove be embarrassed?"

Better than green cheese: http://www.flatoday.com/space/today/113098d.htm

Nestle has created nine commemorative bars in their Nestle Crunch candy bar line. For each candy bar there is a space scene engraved into chocolate. The nine scenes are:

- First American In Space, 1961
- Space Walk, 1965
- First Man On The Moon, 1969
- Lunar Rover, 1971
- Space Shuttle Columbia, 1981
- Hubble Space Telescope, 1994
- Mars Pathfinder, 1997
- International Space Station, 1998
- Stardust Mission, 1999

TV 2nite: Nightmare Before Xmas (NBC)

Seen on Usenet:

Reuters reported this lunchtime that Jonathan Kwitny, author and former Wall St Journal reporter, died of cancer on Thursday (Nov. 26). He was 57. Kwitny was the author of, inter alia, 'The Crimes of Patriots', a superbly detailed investigation of the Australian bank Nugan Hand. Although this was published in 1987 it remains essential reading for anyone seeking to understand two subsequent scandals, Iran-Contra and BCCI. His other books included 'Endless Enemies', a critical analysis of US foreign and security policies; 'Vicious Circles', about Mafia penetration of "legitimate" business; and most recently 'Man of the Century - The Life and Times of Pope John Paul II'.

The Post reburies April Oliver, with a lot more care than CJR et al: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-11/29/036l-112998-idx.html [OSRR]

But Oliver's reporting, or at least her paper trail, was convincing enough that even now, after the story has been picked apart and retracted, many of the CNN producers who oversaw Oliver's work are not convinced it is not true.

"I'm not a blind ideologue who goes through something as intense as I've gone through, and as much criticism as I've gone through, without retracing my steps very carefully and thinking, "Did I misread something? Did I do something terribly wrong here?' And I go through it over and over again, and it's totally clear what people told me, and I look at the aftermath of the complaints and I see it through this prism of military pressure."

Over the decades since Tailwind, Van Buskirk, by his own account, has been jailed in a high-security German prison, seen Jesus, been treated with mood-stabilizing drugs and arrested on charges of money laundering, in that order. He is, in short,the kind of source who would cause many a journalist to run for cover. But April Oliver felt that just about everyone in the secret war business was worthy of skepticism, Van Buskirk no more so than most. She knew his story was a risky buy, but found it too good to pass up.

By February, she says, she had tracked down two dozen pilots who had flown SOG support missions out of a secret Air Force base in Thailand. Thirteen of them said they had flown something stronger than tear gas, she says, and a squadron commander said they flew GB -- the military designation for sarin.

But the stories of poison gas and dead defectors seem ultimately to be less about men than metaphors of Vietnam. The gas reflects the lasting image of the dirty, evil techno-war; the defectors evoke the bitter sense of betrayal by critics at home.

Hello, Cleveland! [free demo available for Mac or Win95] http://www.theater3d.com/ (asg)

In BACKSTAGE it becomes the player's quest to navigate their way through the endless doors and hallways of the backstage area and arrive onstage for the evening's performance. In the various rooms, players are presented with challenges and puzzles (in music, dance and drama), and will interact with many other personalities found behind the scenes of a theatrical production. As an added extra, Carol Channing occupies one of the many BACKSTAGE dressing rooms.

Plug-n-play Linux for home use: http://www.andoverNews.com/cgi-bin/news_column.pl?195 [Slashdot]

But the real reason to buy a Linux computer from a small company like AmNet is that they can preconfigure it to your exact taste instead of filling it with a one-size-fits-all generic software "bundle" of some sort.

Inside one of the Net's nerve centers: http://www.sjmercury.com/business/center1/net112998.htm [SN]

This is Compaq Computer's Palo Alto Internet Exchange (PAIX), one of approximately 75 network access points around the globe where the great data rivers of the Net converge.

...In the same fashion, nine large Internet content firms park servers at the Compaq exchange so they're directly accessible to many networks. Household names that pump data through Palo Alto include PointCast and Compaq's own search engine, Alta Vista.

The really big pipes -- the 13 ultra-high-capacity fiber-optic lines the phone companies lease to the largest Internet service providers -- can carry a combined total of 26.52 gigabits per second (the equivalent of about a half-million home modems all going at once).

In the basement, there is one machine that sits apart from the city of cages, in its own room, with its own security layer. This is the GIGAswitch, the great sink to which all the data rivers great and small must flow.

Sweeps week hits new lows: http://www.bostonphoenix.com/archive/features/98/11/26/DON_T_QUOTE_ME.html [OSRR]

If you think you've seen this story before, then you must get around. Because Sherman's report, far from being original, was one of about 20 cookie-cutter pieces done around the country this year -- starting in Seattle and spreading to New York, Charlotte, and Miami, among other places -- by local news operations looking for easy ratings points at the expense of gay men.

Reality-cop shows finally get flak when they invade the privacy of rich white people: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/ASECTION/t000108861.html

The crux of the Marichs' legal case, though, is a telephone call to them by an LAPD officer who they charge invaded their private grief because it was recorded and included in the show's segment on Michael's death.

Blurring the line between dance and stripping: [multipage] http://www.scotsman.com:80/news/ne09nude981128.1.html

By pledging to take the sleaze out of table dancing and replace it with "an artistic admiration of the female form" he has persuaded Westminster Council to licence his Sophisticats club for full nudity.

Informative look at lesbian-produced porn: http://www.bostonphoenix.com:80/archive/1in10/98/11/LESBIAN_PORN.html

"Producing our own porn has not been on the number-one hit parade of important endeavors by lesbians," Kinney observes. "It's not that easy to do, especially not that easy to get distributed; there's not a lot of money in it -- right now, anyway -- so it's really kind of a labor of love. You really have to have some inner motivation to do it."

"I'd like to encourage any lesbian out there with a video camera to get it rolling and let's see what we can do together."

Excellent Robert Bly update: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/enter/112998/enter34_2296_noframes.html

"It's an attempt by corporate men to dismiss us by making fun of us, by trying to shame us," said Bly, the Minneapolis writer widely considered the big daddy of the burgeoning men's movement. "The way to become a man is to become a drunk: That's corporate thinking."

Now Bly has co-written, with Jungian psychoanalyst Marion Woodman, a book that takes "Iron John" into its next phase: a reunion of the masculine and feminine.

"We wanted first of all to do this together, so younger people could see an older man (Bly is 71) and an older woman work together. Second, we wanted to warn of the danger of oppositional thinking. Oppositional thinkers should be eaten."

"Look at the rise of fundamentalism," said Bly. "Look at today's authors. All they can write about is what they did last year, what they saw, how they feel. There's no myth, no metaphor..."

Lots of semi-interesting stuff in the WPost BookWorld: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/m-bookworld.html

When Tim O'Brien was seven years old, he and a pal built an airplane out of two pieces of wood. To make it fly they needed an engine, so O'Brien's father was asked to produce one. Several weeks later, Dad brought something home. "Here's your engine," he said. But it was a turtle, a real live turtle. Since when did a turtle become an engine?

Including obsessive rock-climbers: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-11/29/015l-112998-idx.html

Among the interesting details is the Yosemite Decimal System, so different from the one beloved by school librarians, according to which a climb is rated 1 if it can be walked, 2 if one must "scramble," 5 if one can climb it by just grabbing onto the rock (called "free-climbing") and 6 if one needs "aid" in the form of bolts drilled into the surface one is climbing.

Nice poem of the day by Thomas Lynch: [expires Monday] http://www.poems.com/today.htm

...by bump and grinding motorcade we'd come
to bury our dead by the river at Oak Grove.
And it is not so much that shoppers gawked
or merchants carried on irreverently.
As many bowed their heads or paused or crossed
themselves against their own mortalities...

NetSkink sketches some AOL-Netscape-Sun synergies: http://www.examiner.com/981129/1129skink.shtml

Look for hand-held AOL Java Web products in the future, to go up directly against Microsoft's plans for small CE devices...

One of Ted Hughes's last poems: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/11/29/35815.html

Gulls are glanced from the lift
Of cliffing air
And left
Loitering in the descending drift...

Back in April (below), I was looking high and low for a pic of the new 500 Euro (? or franc??) notes based on themes from Magritte: http://www.internet-brussels.com/gianassographic/inkschem.htm

9am to noon CST: This is Hell Next week should include Kevorkian's lawyer.

Browsing tip with Netscape 4.5: [Deja URL]

In order to download a web page as complete with backgrounds, graphics, drawings, animated gifs, text and whatever:

With the target web page up on screen, on-line.
File->Edit Page [in the File menu, the item Edit Page]
Then type a dot (a period).
Then use the normal ordinary SAVE command.

Drudge reminisces about the beginnings of MonicaGate: http://www.drudgereport.com/ml.htm

Web Posted: 01/17/98 21:32:02 PST -- NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN X X X X X BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT

Web-design villain David Siegel finally eats his words: http://www.it.fairfax.com.au/981103/webmechanic1.html [UseIt]

But Siegel does accept one final reason why the beautiful sites he pointed to in 1995 and 1996 have not gained ground. Consumers didn't like them.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1893 in Ulysses, Bloom and Molly had sex for the last time (U17.2280)

New Science News

Website-review of Wall-St wonder theglobe.com: http://www.atnewyork.com/site412.htm

Content: Warmed-over wire-service news, ubiquitous stock quotes, puerile chat, and lots of amateur 'sites' created by theglobe.com members...

New first chapters at AOL: http://chicago.digitalcity.com/cafe/books/chapter/

Charming Billy, by Alice McDermott
Prozac Diary, by Lauren Slater
Complete Novels, by Eudora Welty
Stories, Essays & Memoir, by Eudora Welty
A Man in Full, by Tom Wolfe.

I've thrown down yet another gauntlet wrt XML and update-bots: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=416231561

...And to keep things grounded, I suggest using Polti's 36 situations as a framework (here sorted by my fractal-thicket approach):

 person thing: Obtaining
 person motive: Victim of misfortune, Disaster, Ambition
 person motive motive: Self-sacrifice for an ideal
 person motive modality: Daring enterprise, Remorse...

YAY! ABC comes clean on Dark Alliance: http://www.abcnews.com/sections/tech/Silicon/silicon981126.html

But the CIA report on ties to drug dealers, ordered by a congressional committee looking into Webb's allegations, essentially corroborates many of his charges. The evidence goes unmentioned in the report's executive summary and is buried in Volume II -- but it's there.

(But it's just their SILICON supplement.)

Poem of the day is by Robert Bly, from 1965: [Messy URL]

But there is something moving in the dark somewhere
Just beyond
The edge of our eyes: a boat
Covered with machine guns
Moving along under trees.

TV 2nite: Home for the Holidays (ABC); Jewel on Letterman

Specs for the Mac 'consumer portable': http://www.macosrumors.com/

Wireless networking standard (optional version without) -- range may be wide enough for so-called "Data PCS" services, with average range of 25 miles per transmitter tower. Transmission speed is variable depending on range and signal quality, but speeds of 10Mbps or more are possible at close ranges.

A giddy monolog about the state of videogames: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/11/27/35340.html

Meanwhile, the DreamWorks animated movie Small Soldiers was released simultaneously with an execrable Playstation shoot-'em-up of the same name, and the delirious South Park is coming in the new year to Nintendo's games console, giving armchair delinquents the chance to kill Kenny with a cow-launcher.

New theory claims Neanderthals just lacked iodine: http://oakridger.com/stories/112598/new_salt.html

Scientists previously assigned several possible ailments to the Neandertal to explain the differences in bone structure. But iodine deficiency includes them all and makes more evolutionary sense, says Dobson.

I went thru the last few months of logs and sorted the best links into my portal-pages (linked above)

August "New Internationalist" looked at the politics of chocolate: [multipage] http://www.oneworld.org/ni/issue304/contents.html

...African markets are not like this. Here people look each other in the eye, discuss the quality of the goods, what is fair and what each party can afford. If the product doesn't meet up to expectations the buyer can return to complain directly. If the seller thinks the price offered is just too low there are usually other customers willing to pay a more reasonable price. Prices more or less fit the needs of human survival. There is an honesty and an equality here. So when next you hear the 'free market' being lionized, make sure to inquire which market the speaker has in mind.

WB Yeats via speech mis-recognition: http://www.forbes.com:80/tool/html/98/jan/0115/side1.htm

Saline tube is a p.m. [Sailing to Byzantium]

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
-- Those dying generations -- at their song,
The salmon-faults, the MacWorld-crowded seas,
Fish, flush, or file, commend all summer long
Whatever is the gotten, board, and eyes.
Caught in that sensual musical neglect
Monuments on aging intellect.

Pepsi's nouvelle-pizza franchise fiasco: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1130/6212138a.htm

These two former lawyers opened their first restaurant in Beverly Hills with $500,000 of capital back in 1985, serving designer pizzas in the spirit of Wolfgang Puck, but at half the price. Sticking to swank areas like Brentwood and Newport Beach, Calif., they served exotic little pies -- Hoisin duck portobello, rosemary chicken potato, and BBQ chicken pizza among them -- prepared in five minutes in wood-burning ovens.

TV 2nite: Cringely's Nerds 2: http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/log/1998/11/23log.html

New "New Internationalist" features money: http://www.oneworld.org/ni/issue306/contents.html

Money, markets and madness: What's happening to the world's money? Vanessa Baird begins a journey of exploration.

New The Nation a day early, featuring integration

New Boardwatch: http://boardwatch.internet.com/mag/98/nov/fable.html

New New Scientist includes speculation on non-DNA inheritance: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/981128/epig.html

But outlandish evidence now suggests that changes in the epigenetic instruction manual can sometimes be passed from parent to offspring. These findings have even inspired some biologists to suggest that changes in the manual passed down through the generations could provide a way for populations of animals to quickly adapt to their environment, creating a fast-track supplement to the more sedate Darwinian selection.

Dang: TV yesterday: Paula Jones does Roseanne

Unreadable Lynda Barry: http://www.creativeloafing.com/savannah/newsstand/current/barry.html

Help Marlys Escape the Spook House

Joe Bay on ark: [Deja URL]

>Nevermind, I remember.  Yoda is esentially the old man (Grandfather)
>from "The Seven Samurai".  I'm not making this up.

"Luke, once in a while call Yoda you maybe could, hm? Or to the Dark Side have you turned, mister light saber? And kill you would it not married to get, hm?"

New Progressive Review looks at Clinton corruption:

[Note each $ represents $10,000 paid by Loral CEO Bernard Schwartz to Democratic organizations in the month indicated. According to the Judicial Watch suit, Schwartz contributed at least $1.5 million to the Democrats between 1994 and 1998, making him the single largest contributor to these groups.]

JUN 94: $$$$$$$$$$...

Twelve poets considered underrated: http://www.geocities.com/~tavkoan/undrated.htm (email)

John Clare - Leonie Adams - Alberta Turner - Paavo Haavikko - Melvin Tolson - Cormac McCarthy - Jean Garrigue - Lorine Niedecker - Stephen Crane - Larry Levis - Velimir Khlebnikov - Tomaz Salamun

Drudge claims scoop on major document-leak: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

The papers, totaling more than 20,000 pages, according to sources who have read them, include a history of the secret negotiations between the U.S. and North Korea, describing the failed policy of trying to buy off North Korea to forego its nuclear weapons policy. They describe in great detail the intelligence and policy failures that led to the detonations of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan this year. Most embarrassing, the papers appear to corroborate, according to sources who have read them, allegations by a former U.N. arms inspector that the Clinton administration concealed from Congress and the public details regarding Saddam Hussein's ambitious program to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The papers also reveal new details on the Clinton policy towards China in which the White House allowed ballistic missile technology exports to China at the behest of wealthy Democratic campaign contributors.

New NY Observer

TV 2nite: Ice mummies on Nova: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/icemummies/

Taking the week off: No new Onion

Universal Networking Language details: http://www.ias.unu.edu/research_prog/science_technology/universalnetwork_language.html [Slashdot]

At the UNU/IAS UNL Centre, the following tasks were accomplished as July 1997:
-- Development of UNL: UNL Specifications (Version 1) including the definition of framework of UNL, definition of set of relations, definition of set of attributes to restrict meanings of UWs, definition of set of attributes for tense, aspect, mode of English. -- Development of Universal Words: 220,000 UWs entries for English.
-- Development of core software, comprising: General Parser (Ver.1): basic function (SJIS version), morphological analysis, structural analysis (syntactic analysis) including structural rules (synthesis, modify, shift, backtrack, etc).
-- General Generator (Ver.1) basic function (SJIS version) Decompositional Generation: decompositional rules (Insertion, Backtrack, Shift, etc), loop treatment.
-- Dictionary system (Ver.1): IBAM (Index Based Access Method), Utilities, dictionary creation, backup, etc.
-- Knowledge base system: basic access function, basic utilities, inference mechanism.
-- Development of Data: Knowledge Base and Thesaurus.
-- UNL editor / viewer (Plug-in)

Here's the prologue of the new Tom Wolfe: http://www.cnn.com/books/beginnings/9811/man.in.full/index.html

Charlie Croker, astride his favorite Tennessee walking horse, pulled his shoulders back to make sure he was erect in the saddle and took a deep breath ... Ahhhh, that was the ticket ... He loved the way his mighty chest rose and fell beneath his khaki shirt and imagined that everyone in the hunting party noticed how powerfully built he was...

CNN has a ton of first chapters, including these and many more: http://www.cnn.com/books/beginnings/

Barondes, Samuel: "Mood Genes"
Buffett, Jimmy: "A Pirate Looks at Fifty"
Keillor, Garrison: "Wobegon Boy"
King, Stephen: "Bag of Bones"
Klein, Joe: "Primary Colors"
Levin, Jerome: "The Clinton Syndrome"
McCourt, Malachy: "A Monk Swimming"
Posner, Gerald: "Killing the Dream"
Saramago, Jose: "Blindness"
Tobin, James: "Ernie Pyle's War"
Wilson, Edward O.: "Consilience"

New Village Voice

Top 200 search words at Yahoo: http://eyescream.com/yahootop200.html

#159: polymyalgia rheumatica (39,640 queries)

               To: e/y/e/s/c/r/e/a/m - mark grimes
               From: Joseph Glosz 
               Subject: Why rheumatism on the list? I'll tell you.
 
               The reason the weird polylm--whatever rheumatism--
               whatever was on the 200 top list was likely to find out
               who leaked the list.
 
               This is an easy and typical way to find out. You put a
               "red herring" in the list, different for everyone you
               suspect and then when the XYZ item comes out on
               the list, bingo, you got the guy...

Sex lives of the Ancient Greek philosophers: http://www.nervemag.com/JacksNaughtyBits/Plato/

...and so without waiting to hear more I got up, and throwing my coat about him crept under his threadbare cloak, as the time of year was winter, and there I lay during the whole night having this wonderful monster in my arms...

Literary experiment consists of 253 train-riders, each briefly described: http://www.ryman-novel.com/car1/home.htm

PASSENGER MAP Car 1 This map shows you WHO is in the car, WHERE they are sitting and WHAT are their interests and concerns.

Duh: Five signs you're depressed: http://www.cfah.org/website2/newsrelease/981124a.htm

Less enjoyment from usual activities
Disappointment with self
Hopelessness
Irritability
Difficulty sleeping

The Monica-bio site is still playing games: [multipage, some password-protected] http://www.atlanpro.demon.co.uk/outlinetext.html

NewMedia (below) gives some production background on their best-of-show CDs: http://newmedia.com/newmedia/98/13/feature/best.html

"We were shaking in our boots. Before we met them we'd seen every X-Files episode 43 times and did a test shoot." They even used the show's original director of photography to make sure their footage looked perfect. After a four-person HyperBole design team developed an interactive story, Roach locked himself in a room for almost a month and wrote the script.

Forbes looks at NewMedia's best-CD competition: http://www.forbes.com:80/forbes/98/1130/6212346a.htm

But then we looked at DroidWorks from LucasArts. The game's objective: cobble together a wacky robot from spare parts and guide the critter through a series of thankfully nonviolent Star Wars missions. George Lucas' software wizards have outdone themselves. The game is as witty as it is intellectually challenging.

And IBM uses Rankdex-algorithm to explore clustered 'communities' on the Web: [multipage] http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/98/nov/1123/feat.htm

Clever has uncovered more than 100,000 different communities -- groups of sites organized, in one way or another, around almost every topic under the sun -- and more are tumbling out all the time. While Raghavan and his team have only had time to sample a few hundred of these groups, so far they have identified a bewildering range of communities, from paint ball aficionados to fans of Venezuelan baseball, from people interested in Muslim student resources in the U.S. to Brazilian karate boosters.

TV 2nite: Letterman primetime special includes Drew's dance and Farrah's meltdown

Canonical natural-language representation sought: http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,29199,00.html?pfv

Unlike machine translations, which translate one language into another, a text in one language would go through a software application called an "editor" that "enconverted" it into UNL and could then be "deconverted" into other languages.

On beyond Rastas: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/11/24/34756.html

In its modern context, the brew has been renamed 'daime' and the spiritual visions it produces are the raison d'etre of a crop of Brazilian religions that mix shamanism with virtually every other religion that has reached the area.

DNA analysis rewrites plant-family tree: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/11/24/34781.html

The Kew team are about to publish - in the Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden - a new classification for 30 or 40 per cent of the families. So roses are now seen not as related to saxifrages or the bean family, but to buckthorns and nettles. Orchids are no longer grouped with lilies but with a group called the yellow star-grasses.

New Progressive Review bits:

The Landmark Legal Foundation has raised the question of whether Sam Dash's behavior violates Rule 1.3 of the District of Columbia's Rules of Professional Ethics applicable to lawyers practicing in that jurisdiction. The rule states that "A lawyer shall not intentionally . . . prejudice or damage a client during the course of the professional relationship." Says LLF: "If Mr. Dash felt he could no longer represent Mr. Starr and the OIC, he was free to resign, but not in a manner damaging to his clients. Yet, Mr. Dash's timing and statements - perhaps before he resigned and at the time of his resignation -- couldn't have been more damaging to Mr. Starr and the OIC if they had been planned by a political partisan like James Carville."

What do you call it when 10,000 persons in Central America die because of a hurricane? "A great human tragedy."
What would you call it when 10,000 persons in Iraq die because of American bombing attacks? "A medium case scenario."

New New York Magazine: http://www.nymag.com/This_Week/view.asp?id=1962

Meta: I've opened a thread in the weblogs newsgroup (linked above) about the NewHoo category for weblogs. I forgot to mention that the YMMV entry omits its on-hiatus status.

Zine-provocateur Jim Goad under lockup: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=414597297

The persecutor has already made good on his threat to use Jim Goad's writings against him to cause him harm. At Jim's bail reduction hearing, Underhill used ANSWER ME! #4 (the "rape" issue) to change the mind of a key witness: The sheriff in whose hands Jim's freedom lay. The sheriff said he had intended to recommend Goad be set free -- as is standard for a defendant who has no prior ciminal history, whose guilt is in serious doubt, and who poses no flight risk. But, the sheriff told the Court, after reading the materials selected and provided to him by the persecutor, he now agreed with Underhill that Jim Goad should never see the light of day.

A piece about Goad's zine: http://www.xmag.com/xmag/answer.html

Answer Me! appears once a year, with a print run of about 10,000 copies. Each issue highlights a single theme. Previous issues have dealt with suicide and serial killers; this year's issue will focus on race.

Nifty application for pseudo-VR: http://www.pcworld.com/pcwtoday/article/0,1510,8857,00.html

Using a combination of 2D imagery of the Earth and elevation data, the company's Carterra 3D can generate 50 square miles of virtual landscapes you can "fly" over and inside. [6Mb demo avi]

(I read an okay bioterrorism thriller recently, where the investigator used commercial satellite sources to determine exactly when a remote site had been pillaged. Here's the highest-res satellite (oops-- not satellite-- 'aerial') pix I've seen yet.)

Don't miss: The best lines from Hollywood Squares: http://jvm.com/cbt/comic_outpost/msgbd/joker/messages/17.shtml [via Bradlands]

10. According to Robert Mitchum, one thing has ruined more actors than drinking. What?
CHARLEY WEAVER: Not drinking.

Happy St Clement's Day: [Messy URL]

So a pot against the 23rd of November for the feast of St. Clement, from the ancient custom of going about that night to beg drink with which to make merry.

The fullsize version is four megs, not that much better than my 'detail' here: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap981123.html

Click on the above image and watch a Leonid meteor explode... thirty 1-minute exposures showing the explosion cloud dissipate.

More presidential Alzheimer's: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/981130/30whis.htm [WTimes]

Clinton recently claimed that his grandmother's grandmother was Cherokee. "My grandmother was one-quarter Cherokee," said Clinton. His claim came as some Indians were criticizing his initiative on race for ignoring them... But tribal authorities doubt his claim... Worse, the White House didn't find his kin's name to compare against the official Cherokee rolls.

Zippy is articulate today: http://www.sfgate.com/sf/zippy/

"Zippy, tell me again why we're going to Grandmother's house?"
"To receive unconditional love!!"

December Fast Company is up early (I think): http://www.fastcompany.com/online/20/index.html

Can You Compete On Internet Time? Two leading business-school professors explore what the battle between Netscape and Microsoft means for the rest of us - and manage to deliver substance, rather than subpoenas.

TV 2nite: Goofiest X-Files yet; "Get Shorty" on NBC; and Kevorkian on 60 Minutes: http://www.nydailynews.com/1998-11-21/News_and_Views/Beyond_the_City/a-11548.asp [OSRR]

The man was identified as Thomas Youk, 52, who suffered from Lou Gehrig's disease. The man in the video appears to be Youk, although CBS does not name him.

Tomb of the Amazons found in Russia? http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/11/23/34648.html

"They are buried with womanly things - mirrors of silver and bronze; necklaces of gold, glass or clay; earrings; and sometimes a symbolic spindle," Dr Gulyayev said. "But alongside these are weapons - a quiver, bow and arrows, and often two throwing spears."

An eclectic collection of quotes about cats: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/Nov/catlines.html

"You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats." --Colonial American proverb

TrendWatch: Trendspotters: http://www.phillynews.com/sunmag/1122/feature2.shtml [OSRR]

So who cares what Barbara Coulon thinks, anyway? Lots of people, from CEOs to suburban skateboarders, because Coulon is a cool hunter, which means she gets paid to track down tomorrow's trends.

She limits her shopping to the hippest locales in America, which means she often travels to Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, Seattle and Providence, R.I., a town she swears is crawling with trendsetters.

Cool hunting is far from an exact science, but at Youth Intelligence it's been codified into a three-level marketing theory. "First, we find macro trends," Buckingham says. Those would be societal changes in attitude, which, in turn, lead to micro trends and then to specific products.

The current 70-page document declares that bad haircuts, swap meets and salsa dancing are hot among females in the 25-30 age range. It also states that henna tattoos are already out among that same crowd.

"See how it's like an art gallery and it has clothes and housewares and cosmetics and everything?" Coulon asks. "This is selling a lifestyle, and that's going to be very big." For example, she says, young people who consider themselves enviro-types will flock to stores that offer them not only earth-friendly fashion, but tree-loving music, animal-cruelty-free cosmetics and even vegan fast food.

Wildly over-designed animated comix from the author of the legendary "Understanding Comics"... one of which is also moving: http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/comics.html [HtB]

NINETY-FIVE - 06/29/98. A true-life vignette that pretty much sums up a year of my life. Click on the closed doors to reveal the hidden panels.

An interviewee for the MS antitrust polls reports strong slanting in the questions: http://www.macosrumors.com/archive359.html

One other theme that I noticed throughout the questionnaire was that they changed the order of response many times during the call -- one moment 1 would be favorable and 5 would be unfavorable, the next, it would mean the opposite. As an advertising professional, it struck me as an interesting tactic, although it's hard (without knowing who initiated the process) to deduce the reason for using it.

And an analysis: http://www.macosrumors.com/archive360.html

The phrasing of the questions, as they've been presented on your page, is very illuminating. In trial terms they constitute "leading the witness"; that is, very subtlely directing the subject towards a particular response. For example, the question "Should the judge be allowed to make an order that will only benefit a few companies that are unable to compete in the marketplace with a very popular company?" positions Microsoft as the successful player and choice of the people within the rhetoric of a competing on a level playing field. Given that choice, who do you think most people would choose? In the political arena this constitutes "push polling" and any data returned should be considered biased.

Thomas Perry [qv] is one of our best thriller-writers, and in his last four books he's found a unique, paranoia-driven niche that might be called the "hide-and-seek procedural". His heroine is Jane Whitefield, a Native American whose specialty is helping good, powerless people hide from evil, all-powerful ones. And in the new one, she faces a nemesis who does the same thing for the bad guys. The tricks that Perry invents are witty and deep, and he throws in cool (pseudo?) Native American mythology like this (heard in her dream):

"You win, and Hawenneyu, the Right-Handed Twin, gets a point. Or you lose, and Hanegoategeh, the Left-Handed Twin, gets a point, and the brothers grow another player to take your place."

I'm so out of touch with the music scene that I get tips off the AP: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/enter/112298/enter34_1645_noframes.html

Like fellow superproducer Sean "Puffy" Combs, Timbaland has sent urban radio in a new direction. Not by just remixing old songs, a style that has worked for Combs. Timbaland's about creating songs that have layers of different beats and sound effects, that can change tempo midway through the record.

Sound samples (I like Up Jumps Da Boogie): [Messy URL]

Scumbag federal prosecutors investigated: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/NATION/t000106822.html

"It's a result-oriented process today, fairness be damned," said Robert Merkle, who served as a U.S. attorney in Florida from 1982 to 1988 and is now a defense lawyer in Tampa. "The philosophy of the past 10 to 15 years [is] that whatever works is what's right," he told the Post-Gazette. The U.S. Justice Department, which oversees federal prosecutors, denied the newspaper's allegations. "Our prosecutors live by strict, comprehensive and effective ethics rules," Myron Marlin, a department spokesman in Washington, told the Associated Press.

Pathetic Gates-antitrust details: http://www.seattletimes.com/news/business/html98/micr_112298.html [OSRR]

"This is a witness who wasn't shown e-mails and internal documents that his lawyers had to have known were going to come up," said Rich Gray, a San Jose lawyer. "If he'd been shown them, he wouldn't have been boxed in."

And text excerpts: http://www.mercurycenter.com/business/microsoft/trial/breaking/docs/gatestst111798.htm

Q: Do you know what he means by jihad?
A: I think he is referring to our vigorous efforts to make a superior product and to market that product.

And the MS lawyers, described: http://www.sjmercury.com/columnists/gillmor/docs/dg112298.htm [SN]

Questioning Weadock for Sullivan & Cromwell, Microsoft's powerhouse outside law firm in this trial, was a young lawyer named Richard Pepperman. Like other trial lawyers, he has perfected the art of embedding utter contempt into the word ``sir'' -- ``Did you understand the question, sir?''

Soyring was cross-examined by Steven Holley, who reminds you of the super-smart, condescending kid you hated in high school.

Shareware Windows-only update-bot app, from the originator of the Bill Bixby haiku contest: [multipage] http://www.boutell.com/morning/manual.html

When Morning Paper has finished summarizing the web pages in your list, your web browser will be launched if it is not already running, and the "newspaper" page will be displayed. Here you can read a summary of what's "new" on each page.

TV lastnite: I put Billy Madison on as background, and ended up laughing my head off (at Steve Buscemi, especially). But then, I liked Kingpin, too...

BotSpot would call my NewsWolf project an "Update Bot": [multipage, 50 bots!] http://botspot.com/search/s-update.htm

WebPluck is a tool that will automatically fetch bits of information off your favorite web sites, and present them in a way that saves you time, and prevents you from missing information that you would like to see. WebPluck will allow you to create your own "My Yahoo" like web pages from an unlimited number of sources.

(How can anyone waste time on XML when this update-bot domain is already so far advanced??? It will even let us ease into XML, by experimenting with semantic tags, anywhere they might be useful. It doesn't crash anybody's browser if I put some arbitrary tags here, does it?)

(I re-stumbled on this BotSpot page by a reverse-search on 'webpluck' plus 'webwhacker'. BotSpot would be on my indispensibles-list, if it just included price and platform info. As it is, most of these are obvious commercial hype, others are academic hype...)

Academia's first Furby: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/98/11/22/stiinnnws02004.html?1334425

The robot uses two high-resolution cameras and a sound sensor to interact with a "care giver". It has eyes, eyelids, a mouth and ears to allow it to show expressions. Emotions such as fear, anger and sadness have been programmed into the machine, and it can display these if it detects the correct conditions.

Official Kismet homepage (and pic source): [heavy graphics, videos] http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/kismet/

Kismet's active vision platform is attached to a parallel network of digital signal processors (Texas Instruments TMS320C40), as shown in the figure below. The DSP network serves as the sensory processing engine and implements the bulk of the robot's perception and attention systems.

(By using vision, they pretty well guarantee failure.)

Flat review of a bio of a fascinating Victorian couple: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-11/22/061l-112298-idx.html

Isabel, however, turned out to be Richard Burton's mainstay. Not only did she love him without stint and put up with his absences for years at a stretch, but she organized his papers, dealt aggressively with his finagling publishers, and marshaled kin and contacts to advance his cause. She became a skilled writer herself, with a special knack for polemics, and among Victorian unions the Burtons' was uncommonly equal. This was a couple who fenced together until age made them put up their rapiers!

Bland new Jules Feiffer: http://www.uexpress.com/ups/opinion/cartoon/jf/index.html

"I'm an artist... with no good ideas..."

Steven Seagal, reincarnated Tibetan lama: http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=222

Immediately following Seagal's elevation, gossip erupted that he had made contributions to Penor Rinpoche's organization, and that respected titles were up for sale to the rich and famous (or the infamous, as the case may be). A year earlier, Seagal had hosted the Rinpoche at his expansive Montana ranch, and since then the movie star has repeatedly announced his financial support for "the cause of Tibetan Buddhism."

Short fun nonfiction review about an oddball cryptographer in WW2: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/11/22/34464.html

Many readers who think they are allergic to maths will be astounded to find themselves reading and even grasping the devilish poetry of figure-ciphering. Leo Marks invented a new code-key for agents printed on silk, undetectable in a body-search and easily destroyed after use. He went on to devise "Lops", a dazzling advance on the old "one-time pad" code which used letters as well as figures.

Alex Cockburn shows Nike sweatshop agreement is a sham: http://www.wald.com/news/cockburn112098.html [CDreams]

Similarly, the touchy subject of whether factory workers would have the right to organize was dealt with only in passing. According to the plan, members of the partnership have generously agreed to "not affirmatively seek the assistance of state authorities to prevent workers from exercising these rights." In other words, you can't be too loud in your request that the Indonesian military massacre your striking workers if you want that "No Sweat" label.

Can someone explain to me why this central Perl document claims to describe all modules, when they're almost entirely UNdescribed? http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/CPAN.html

You can also use your computer's searching capabilities to find resources in this document. I've written short descriptions of all the Perl modules on the CPAN...

(I'm finding it highly frustrating to get started.)

New Computer Gaming World

New This is Hell was a great best-of. (RealAudio, funny progressive). They say they'll be on regularly for the next seven weeks!

State-of-the-art CGI: http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=2547

Cute virtual-pet fantasy from Mr Slashdot (Unix overachiever): http://slashdot.org/malda/nerds.shtml [Windowseat]

So my child is now 58 weeks old. He is perfectly happy, he receives his allowance in clock cycles, is scolded when he is not nice, and is played with when he is bored -- all automatically. I haven't actually intervened since his first birthday -- I added him to my system's init files last summer.

How Warren Buffett made the Buffalo daily paper so profitable: [multipage] http://www.cjr.org/year/98/6/buffett.asp

The second area on which Buffett has left his stamp is the size of the paper's news hole, which in the first six months of 1998 represented nearly 60 percent of the total content -- extraordinarily high. While the Butlers had followed the industry standard of 40 percent news and 60 percent advertising, Buffett insisted on a news hole of at least 50 percent. He sees this as a business decision: a large and intelligently utilized news hole, he wrote in his 1989 letter to Berkshire shareholders, "attracts a wide spectrum of readers and thereby boosts penetration. High penetration, in turn, makes a newspaper particularly valuable to retailers since it allows them to talk to the entire community through a single megaphone."

CJR looks at five news sites that are (almost) profitable (CNN, WSJ, Channel 4000, National Journal's Cloakroom, The Electric Times Union): http://www.cjr.org/year/98/6/profits.asp

[Cloakroom:] This niche site is aimed at political insiders, including consultants and journalists, and its traffic is relatively low compared with CNN Interactive -- some 600,000 page views per month. But its readers appeal to advertisers like AETNA US Healthcare, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the National Cable Television Association.

Kibological newsbite: [Deja URL]

Sheriff Joe Arpaio announced today the capture of some guy who confessed to the mutilation of hundreds of cats somewhere in Maricopa County, Arizona. They say they confiscated a large quantity of devil-worship-related paraphenalia. And while they were saying this, among the items shown was... you guessed it, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition.

Another good intro to the Kibo/Archimedes-Plutonium Show: [Deja URL]

AWARD THAT MAN THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR DIETING!

Meta: I added a bunch of afterthoughts to the blurbs below. They're marked "**".

Poem of the day is, um, memorable: [Messy URL]

On my tenth birthday I had a really
dirty party -- whoopee cushions, the lot.

Semi-cool astropic of the day: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap981121.html

This carrot-shaped track is actually little more than 5 hundredths of an inch long. It is the trail of a meteoroid through the high-tech substance aerogel exposed to space by the shuttle-launched EURECA (European Recoverable Carrier) spacecraft.

New Science News

New first chapters: http://chicago.digitalcity.com/cafe/books/chapter/

The Story of American Freedom, by Eric Foner. How the most important word changes its definition, over and over.
Blue Light, by Walter Mosley. The man who gave you Easy Rawlins now goes sci-fi.
King of the World by David Remnick. How Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali
Customers.com: How to Create a Profitable Business Strategy for the Internet and Beyond, by Patricia Seybold. Rules by a leading high-tech consultant.

Net.angel saves NewsBlues: http://olj.usc.edu/indexf.htm?/sections/news/98_stories/ojrnews_bluesres.htm

"NewsBlues has a home on one of my servers for as long as Mike needs to get the site on its feet," Thompson said. "No strings, no fees, no rules. It's his to use as he sees fit. He has a site that makes people nervous. I like that."

TV 2day: Roseanne sitcom reunion on Roseanne talker (flop sweat)

Depressing Progressive Review looks at creeping big-brother-ism:

But Clinton's flagrantly anti-constitutional scheme surfaced again at the recent National Governors Association meeting. It turned out that many governors were not opposed to giving up their state's constitutional prerogatives, they just wanted to help draft the surrender terms.

"...it's going to require a bank to determine a customer's source of funds for transactions ... Then we're going to determine the particular customer's normal and expected transactions involving the bank ... Then we're going to monitor all of your transactions ... And based on this monitoring of your account, we're going to determine if any of your transactions are unusual or suspicious. And if any of them appear to be, we're going to report them to the appropriate authorities."

The latest variants on 'yuppie': http://cnnfn.com:80/hotstories/bizbuzz/wires/9811/18/nipples_wg/

Others include SITCOMS (Single Income, Two Children and Oppressive Mortgages), SINBADS (Single Income, No Boyfriend, and Absolutely Desperate), PUPPIES (Punjabi Upwardly-mobile Professionals) and PANSES (Politically Active and Not Seeking Employment).

**(Yay PANSES!)

Need To Know delivers a hilarious e-commerce bug: http://www.ntk.net/doh/gandv981120.gif and an unsourced gossip item about NetSkink's apotheosis:

BILL GATES meets REBECCA EISENBERG, describes her as "most offensive person I have ever met"

Elephants have a wide range of subsonic calls: [not-terribly-impressive audio available] http://www.abcnews.com:80/sections/science/DailyNews/elephants981118.html [HG]

The field biologists in Africa had seen indications that elephants communicate with one another over inexplicably long distances. In Tanzania, Iain Douglas-Hamilton had wondered about the ability of elephants to silently organize themselves when no organizing cue was visible or audible. Laughingly, he'd suggested they had extrasensory perception.

**(I have a page about ESP as possibly subsonic. I apologise for the bragging-- it was a 'bozo filter' to repel unsympathetic readers, coming at my argument with zero context.)

Details of the Matthew Shephard killing: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/1120shep2.shtml [OSRR]

Sgt. DeBree also said McKinney told him that although he and Henderson knew Shepard was homosexual, the 5-foot-2, 105-pound Shepard did not "hit on him or make advances on him at the bar." The pair lured Shepard out of the Fireside Lounge by pretending to be gay. But minutes later, as the three rode in a pickup truck, McKinney struck Shepard in the head with a pistol.

Here's that CounterSpin I mentioned. The Stone segment is under ten minutes: [RealAudio] http://www.webactive.com/webactive/content/cspin.html

When it was learned that ABC's entertainment division was planning a show produced by Oliver Stone, reporters at ABC News raised objections about the line between news and entertainment. But did they get their facts straight themselves when reporting about the program? Tom McMahon, one of the executive producers of the cancelled program, will join the show.

From a few days back, Salon reviews media jingoism re Iraq: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/poni/1998/11/17poni.html

Leading the pack was Sam Donaldson, who practically accused Berger and the joint chiefs of being light in the loafers: "It's not clear why, if (Iraq's) letter is unacceptable," he barked, "you would not have gone ahead and (attacked)? Why wouldn't you 'proceed on your own timetable,' as you put it?" One half expected him to offer to push the button himself, if the administration was too chickens___ to do it.

Ditto from Norman Solomon: http://www.fair.org/media-beat/981119.html

The New York Post scornfully editorialized that Clinton had not been able to "act like a man." The newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch, added that "whenever circumstances have demanded that this president rise to the occasion and really be president, he has failed the United States and the world."

This Day in Joyce History: In 1903, James proposed starting a new paper in Dublin, called "The Goblin".

TV 2nite: Star Wars trailer on Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood; Jewel on Leno

New The Nation includes a rabid-but-knowledgeable conspiracy skeptic on the new batch of JFK books: http://www.thenation.com/issue/981207/1207HOLL.HTM

The collection includes documents the likes of which one seldom sees unless 85 percent of the text has been blacked out, and records so sensitive the government normally neither confirms nor denies their very existence.

Then, at the eleventh hour -- no, make it one minute to midnight -- House Select Committee on Assassinations staffers engineered an abrupt re-evaluation of a police Dictabelt recording. Suddenly there was a "95 percent probability" that a fourth shot had been fired, meaning another assassin was present. HSCA's conclusion underwent an amazing metamorphosis, from a finding of no evidence of a conspiracy to "probably." To their everlasting credit, one-third of the full committee refused to go along with this stunt.

And an angry plea to Clinton from Bianca Jagger: http://www.thenation.com/issue/981207/1207JAGG.HTM

A week after Mitch, the most devastating hurricane in two centuries, ravaged the same countries, you announced a mere $2 million in relief aid for the whole region. This was about what the US government was giving daily to El Salvador at the height of the war there.

I hope this changes, actually: http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,29078,00.html?pfv

For instance, it found that consumers are willing to accept that a news site's review of a new CD is followed by a button allowing online visitors to purchase that CD via a third-party e-commerce vendor. In fact, nearly 70 percent of online news consumers polled said they were unconcerned about the objectivity of news sources that also sell goods online.

**(What's necessary is that the reviewers not lose credibility, that the maximum profits go to the artist, and that if there's a store inbetween, it be run by honorable people.)

TV 2day: Michael Moore does Roseanne (she was too dazzled by Donald Trump to engage MM!??)

Poem-of-the-day is from the new NBA-winning book: http://www.poems.com/today.htm

...nor could he
exactly remember his sorrow except when he pressed
the lilacs to his face or when he stooped
to bury himself in the bush, then for a moment
he almost did, for lilacs clear the mind
and all the elaborations are possible in their
dear smell and even his death which was so
good and thoughtful became, for a moment, sorrowful.

**(This was about Allen Ginsberg, but the linked poem changes daily.)

Kibo covers the new UN elephant statue: [Deja URL]

alt.binaries.pictures.bestiality.plaster-mummification.united-nations

I see a great need. WITHIN THE NEXT TEN SECONDS!

Michael Moore is at the impeachment hearings, in baseball cap and unshaved, I think. (I'll try to get a vidcap.) NBC said he's doing a film about the hearings. I have strong opinions about some members of the committee, from closely watching the disgraceful Waco hearings a few years back. In general, the Democrats were heartless, while the Republicans were compassionate, paradoxically enough. Schumer was effectively an antichrist.

Meta: MCS was down for four+ hours this morning.