Robot Wisdom WebLog for December 1998 (waning)

TV 2nite: Sarah McLachlan on Leno

Here's an excellent RealAudio of the Consortium's Robert Parry, where he discusses further how eye-opening he found Sally Quinn's recent anti-Clinton piece (7 Nov below): [last half of 30-min stream] http://www.igc.apc.org/MakingContact/

And, in an interview with Making Contact's Phillip Babich, investigative journalist Bob Parry talks about what he terms "The Washington Establishment." Parry, editor of I.F. Magazine and the on-line publication The Consortium, provides a unique perspective on power brokers in the nation's capital orchestrating the "conservative apparatus" behind investigations into President Clinton's private and public life.

Delightful Juliet Stevenson (Truly, Madly, Deeply) profile: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/12/19/39089.html

As her friend the actress Fiona Shaw once observed: "Juliet, you live your life as if you won it on the pools."

Three years later, Stevenson was to leave the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts with its most prestigious award, the Bancroft gold medal, but her time there was marked by a curious mixture of bolshieness and lack of confidence. Her resolute refusal to wear stage make-up has passed into academy legend, yet she says she felt intimidated by the place and its glittering alumni.

But although she announced that the stress of playing the part made her want to cry on her way to the theatre each night, she believed the play gave voice to "the kind of hunger to know what you are, be what you are...."

Right down to the rats in her flat, Nina in "Truly, Madly, Deeply" was modelled very closely on Stevenson, who Minghella describes as "a strong, intelligent, brave woman with an erotic, intensely vulnerable streak".

New Chomsky talk in three parts: [DejaURL #1]

[After WW2] similar problems arose throughout the industrial world. They were enhanced elsewhere by the prestige of the anti-fascist resistance which often had a radical democratic thrust and by the discrediting of the traditional conservative order which had been linked to the fascist systems. Reinstating that traditional order and its essentials was a primary task of the early post-war years.

It's taken for granted that the first beneficiaries of a country's resources should be US investors, their counterparts elsewhere and the local associates who do the management of these affairs in particular regions.

All of that spells crisis so unless there's some technological fix that nobody can dream of at the moment, the concern over who runs the Middle East is going to be even more crucial than it has been in the past.

Let's turn to something different - the institutional framework that was designed for world order 50 years ago... The institutional framework has three prongs: there was an international political order, a human rights order and an international economic order. ... The international political order is the United Nations, it's articulated in the UN charter. The human rights order was expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 1948, 50th anniversary's coming up in a couple of weeks. The international economic order is called the Bretton Woods system. ... I want to talk mostly about the third but a few words first about the first two.

In fact the US war with the United Nations for the last 30 years has been highly disruptive. It's way in the lead in vetoing Security Council resolutions, followed by the junior partner, with everybody else far behind, since the 1960s. That's not even worth reporting in the United States and the facts are basically unknown and constantly denied easily since they're not reported. It's hard to find them even in scholarly literature. Anyhow, that's the international political order.

If there is free flow of capital, that is no control, that leads to what some international economists have called a 'virtual Senate' of financial capital which can impose social policies on governments and their populations simply by the threat of capital flight.

[DejaURL #2]

...he's speaking mostly of South Korea and Taiwan. He points out that in order to achieve this economic miracle governments took major responsibilities for the promotion of economic growth, abandoning the "religion" that markets know best and intervening to enhance technology transfer, equality, education and health along with, we may add, industrial policy coordination and strict capital controls, until they were forced to drop them a few years ago.

The scale is so great that if you consider the number of the population in jail it actually adds about 2% to the official unemployment rate.

The proportion of foreign exchange transactions that is connected to the real economy, trade and investment, is now estimated roughly at 5%. That's 95% speculative.

There's a law called Super - 301 which the US can invoke whenever it likes effectively to block exports. It just threatens other countries with loss of the US market unless they accept cutbacks in exports. That's part of US trade law and used repeatedly.

But it is a fairytale for some, the top 1% of the population are doing magnificently. The top 10% are doing reasonably well. If you look at the next 10%, it turns out that during the fairytale economy their net worth has actually declined. Their debts have increased faster than their assets. If you go below that it, gets worse and worse the farther you go down.

The founders of modern economics gave a supposedly scientific grounding to all of this, not incidentally Adam Smith who was pre-capitalist and, in my opinion at least, anti-capitalist both in spirit and content, but Ricardo and Malthus and other early 18th century figures who said straight out that people had to be taught that they have no rights apart from what they could gain in the labour market. They have no right to live, essentially. If they can't survive they could go to the workhouse prison or they could go to the new colonies that were being cleared of the native population...

So free market capitalism was essentially abandoned by the beginning of this century in favour of the system of administered markets of the corporate era.

Business leaders understood very well that the industrial system was forcing people into meaningless lives and that they might revolt, seek to take control of their own lives and work and that had to be prevented somehow. ... The best way to do so, it was quickly understood, was to identify liberty with the liberty to consume, so people were supposed to perceive their needs in terms of consumption of goods rather than quality of life and work. So leaders in the advertising industry explained. The idea that they might control their own lives and work, that had to go.

Q&A: [DejaURL #3]

If I were the American President the first thing I would do is convene a war crimes tribunal to try me for the very likely war crimes that I'm going to commit because that's inherent in the office. ...it doesn't really make sense to ask what the President would do as if the President were an independent agent.

Some of the richest parts of the world in say the 18th century were Bengal and Haiti and Bengal is now Bangladesh. Have a look at them and you see a dramatic indication of what these [neoliberal] policies lead to.

India become a de-industrialised agricultural economy while England flourished. Well that's one example. The same with France and Haiti. A good part of France's wealth comes from Haiti, the same with Holland and the East Indies. A very substantial part of Holland's wealth came from what is now Indonesia.

Wage slavery, which is what they called it, was not very different from chattel slavery and that was not an exotic opinion. That was actually the slogan of the Republican party. That was Abraham Lincoln's position. In fact you can even read it in editorials of the New York Times, believe it or not. It was taken for granted that in a decent society people don't have to rent themselves to others.

Have a look at what happened when the British Empire collapsed. In India alone probably 10 million people were killed in the next couple of years. That alone makes the end of the Soviet empire look pretty tame.

In fact about 80% of the population, (there's regular polls in the US on everything and you know pretty well what public opinion is) when asked on an open question "what's the government for?" over 80% say it works for the few and the special interests, not the people.

More updates from Michael Moore: [Deja URL]

...Paid another visit to the Impeachment hearings and interviewed the Clinton-obsessed Congressman Bob Barr about the whipped cream he licked off two women's chests at a fundraiser in 1992. We wanted the impartial Judiciary Committee member to show us how that was done.

Smart Win95 utilities for speeding websurfing: http://www.pcworld.com/pcwtoday/article/0,1510,9092,00.html

5. Legion: This program finds Web site IP addresses faster than your local DNS server. Simply import your Navigator bookmarks or Internet Explorer favorites, and Legion hits each Web site, finds the IP address, and enters it into the host's file.

New Science News includes a superb overview of the state of cosmology, especially the gaps: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/12_19_98/Bob1.htm

Although entirely unexpected, that recent finding and others appear to unify elements of a cosmic portrait that have emerged over the past decade, Turner says. Stitching together such disparate concepts as energy associated with empty space, invisible matter in the universe, and the curvature of the cosmos, the new reports may turn out to mark a watershed for cosmology.

This growth spurt captured chance subatomic fluctuations in energy and inflated them to macroscopic proportions. The action transformed the fluctuations into regions of slightly higher and lower density. Over time, gravity molded these variations into the spidery network of galaxies and voids seen in the universe today.

If the universe is flat, then there must be something else -- a special form of matter or energy (the two are equivalent according to Einstein) that makes up the missing 60 percent of the critical density. Turner dubs this component "funny energy."

And fossils as fine art: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/12_19_98/Bob3.htm

Instead, viewers encounter a series of 6-foot-tall stony slabs, mounted vertically like paintings and illuminated from above by spotlights. ... One piece bears the name "Shrimp Burrow Jungle" and looks like a Jackson Pollock drip painting stripped of its colors. Another jagged slab, called "Nature as Fingerpainter," is covered with curvy wrinkles that bring to mind thumbprints or the fleshy folds of an infant's skin.

LA lawfirm steals a page from Nixon's plumbers: (long) http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=262

In addition, two other attorneys besides Sharp say their offices were burglarized and their files ransacked during periods when they were locked in court fights with Haight, Brown. And alleged illegal intelligence-gathering evidently backfired in one major Haight, Brown case, forcing the firm's client, a public utility, to pay tens of millions of dollars more in settlement costs.

A shameless nitrous-oxide enthusiast: http://www.fromorbit.com/drutter/nitrous.htm [via NTK]

I have been buzzed by cloaked UFOs on the beach in the middle of the night (they tried to beam me up, or scan me, or something, as well). I have seen the gates of Hell inlaid into the ground in a suburban backyard, where a bush assembled itself into some kind of plant-spirit thingy and all my friends turned into Satanic stormtroopers in cool grey suede pants and shiny boots...

NTK pursuing an interesting privacy question: http://www.ntk.net/

Yamiz asked ISPs what their policy was on the police inspection of e-mail. Did it require a warrant? Or (as anecdotal evidence to NTK implies) are the police able to gain access without legal restraint? For such a clean-cut question, ISP reactions have been most peculiar...

Book-a-minute condensed classics include: (sci-fi classics on separate page) http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/classics.shtml [NTK]

Beowulf by Anonymous
The Odyssey by Homer
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Collected Work of Edgar Allan Poe
A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

Lots more great stuff at the Progressive Review

If this was a just world, Bill Clinton would resign, Al From and the New Democrats would settle a product liability suit for selling defective politics by taking a vow of perpetual silence, the entire Democratic congressional leadership would be arrested for loitering on federal property, and every journalist who told us how wonderful life would be under Clinton would commit themselves to at least 1000 hours of community service. -- The Progressive Review, December 1994

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

- The Physics of Christmas, by Roger Highfield. Explains everything -- except for how the wise men became wise.
- When the Wind Blows, by James Patterson. His latest thriller.
- Movies and Money, by David Puttnam. A veteran studio executive explains why the combination is combustible.
- Confessions of a Late-Night Talk Show Host, by Garry Shandling. Or is it really by Larry Sanders?

Ridiculously slow day for interesting news...

Online Journalism Review is still the recordholder in the Slow-Load Olympics (22 Sept below), but I found this variant on the URL that bypasses the obnoxious picture-frame: http://olj.usc.edu/sections/index.shtml

Yahoo has a nice design for news photos: [multipage] http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/g/ts/

Why we drive on different sides of the road: [Deja URL]

Horsemen were in the habit, however, of pulling over to the left in order to be able to use their swords in case of an unfriendly encounter. ... When the French Revolution broke out and all old privileges were abolished, Robespierre proclaimed equality for all; every citizen would henceforth use the right side of the road...

This Day in Joyce History: In 1884, brother Stannie was born. In 1904, After the Race was published in the Irish Homestead.

Fun opinions on the Impeachment Bomber, from especially articulate celebs: http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/12/cov_18newsa.html

[Fran Leibowitz:] I'm in favor of nothing. I hate all these people. I think the Congress is a disgrace, I think the president is a disgrace. It's embarrassing to be a human being in this era. I feel disgraced by my fellow man -- all of them.

AP: http://www.foxnews.com/news/international/1217/i_ap_1217_104.sml

Look at a new list compiled by German intellectuals of the 100 words that best reflect the 20th century: AIDS, beat, bikini, camping, comics, computer, design ... Holocaust, image, jeans, pop ... single, sex, star and stress -- just some of the English words and ideas that have wiggled their way into German during the past 100 years.

Breaking netnews: [Deja URL]

RESULT: moderated group rec.music.artists.hanson fails 29:64. There were 29 YES votes and 64 NO votes, for a total of 93 valid votes.

In the new The Nation, Alex Cockburn preaches a text from Genesis (mostly the same old): http://www.thenation.com/issue/990104/0104COCK.HTM

His youngest son, Ham, sneaks into the tent, sees Noah passed out naked and issues the censorious Ham Report. The other two-thirds of Noah's male progeny, Shem and Japheth, take a garment, go backward into the tent and cover their father's nakedness. Ham draws a motion of censure from Noah: "A servant of servants shall he be to his brethren."

There is no cynicism more incandescent than in the hearts of those who see a three-time loser draw life without parole for stealing a pizza, while the bank president draws a second home in Lake Tahoe for looting a savings and loan.

When the uproar of the elites over the Starr report was at its most pompously intense, I remember writing that it was hard to take an affair set forth in the idiom of A Midsummer Night's Dream and dress it up as a somber tragedy like Macbeth.

And what can we learn from Ventura's victory? http://www.thenation.com/issue/990104/0104SIFR.HTM

But now Jesse Ventura has shown that an independent candidate can appeal to these same voters without having to charge to the right. While he made distrust of big government a central theme of his campaign, he also promised to defend and improve the biggest government program of all: public K-12 education. And he showed that voters will rally to a candidate who is forthrightly in favor of choice and gay rights--if he is "one of us" and not another "suit."

From the NY Post: (agc)

Sinead O'Connor is jealous of Monica Lewinsky's tryst with Bill Clinton. The formerly bald balladeer tells the Irish Independent she thinks the impeachable chief executive is "the sexiest man in the universe" since dirty details of his dalliance emerged. If given half a chance, O'Connor says, "I'd bring my own cigars, absolutely. My mouth is watering at the thought of it. I thought he was sexy anyway but now ... my God!"

Optical logic chips on horizon: http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/123239.html [Slashdot]

Tatum says devices using optical logic chips, based on the switch circuit announced this week, could start to appear as early as the year 2000.

Goofy-canny suggestions for making US politics work better: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98dec/basics.htm

So why not declare the continental United States to be a no-fly zone for the President?

The Althing was ahead of its time in one other important respect: it was empowered to keep no more laws on the books than the presiding speaker could commit to memory.

A partial list of those who have served as movie President during the past decade would include Harrison Ford, Michael Douglas, Bill Pullman, Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, Donald Moffat, Nigel Hawthorne, Stanley Anderson, Jim Curley, Kevin Kline, and Anthony Hopkins.

Biological detective work: http://www.uc.edu/www/info-services/crinoid.htm

Uintacrinus lived in dense mats in the shallow seas during the Cretaceous about 85 million years ago. Classic fossil finds include several table-sized slabs with hundreds of organisms intertwined in an odd spoke-like pattern. Typically, marine fossils are preserved lined up in parallel rows when a storm or currents smother them in sediment. The spoke-like pattern is unique to Uintacrinus and a real puzzle to Meyer.

But what do cats say about this? http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/SCIENCE/SCIENCE/t000115105.1.html

Dogs really are man's best friend, according to a new book that says canines and humans formed a common bond more than 140,000 years ago. DNA evidence shows that dogs evolved from their wolf ancestors at just about the same time that early humans first left Africa.

Warhol's World: [multipage] http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/16887.html

Brook Riddick won't be able to watch when a day in his life is broadcast live to the world next month. But the 27-year-old computer programmer, who lost his sight as a teenager, will certainly be able to feel the US$50,000 check he'll be handed as the grand-prize winner in RealNetworks' "Real Life, Real Stories" video contest.

I didn't want to forever expire this headline: http://www.variety.com/article.asp?articleID=1117489415

Disney milks Bug's's faux bloopers

Odd: http://www.drudgereport.com/

due to extreme internet traffic... the drudge report is not being updated at this time...

Found fine-art: http://www.cnn.com/

Director Kevin Smith shares his reaction to a test-screening: http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=2674

My thoughts on last night: it was nice to finally hear strangers reacting to something I wrote oh so long ago. Five years is a long time to wait for a reaction, and I was happy as hell with what I heard. Listening to the audience, I got to find out what was working and what wasn't, and using that info, Scooter and I will be able to pull out some more stuff, and craft a better flick for the world to see.

Rec.arts.books rumor confirmed-- this is the NYT obit: http://www.mrsite.com/gaddis/

William Gaddis, author of "The Recognitions" and "JR," and a novelist of immense range, complexity and satiric humor, died Wednesday at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. [Pic]

Before his death, Gaddis finished his fifth novel, also titled "Agape Agape." It is, said his son, an extension of that original idea in "JR," a novel about "the secret history of the player piano." The player piano was an early obsession of the author, who considered it to be an example of a "a nonparticipatory art form." In other words, the new Gaddis will be about the destructive elements of mechanization and the arts.

(I liked "JR", but never could get into "The Recognitions".)

Aggravating PJ O'Rourke interview: http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/paper/1998/1217/fea1.html

O'Rourke gleefully finds the 10th commandment ("Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods" or "Don't envy your buddy's cow. Get your own cow," as he interprets it) a charter for property rights and the free market. But if the Old Testament is republican, the New Testament has obvious democrat leanings and, pressed about Christ's advice to the man with two coats, O'Rourke admits he hasn't thought much about it.

Salon has an interesting bunch of net-tech tidbits: http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/log/1998/12/15log.html

Both the MSNBC and ABC News sites were a lot harder to get through to than the CNN site. As it happens, both MSNBC and ABC are using Windows NT-based servers; CNN relies on a version of Unix.

And a bad experience with Peapod: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/reviews/1998/12/17review.html

But this time, I wanted the groceries delivered to my house, not my boyfriend's -- and there was no way to change my personal preferences or address on the Web site. Instead, I had to call a 1-800 customer service line and sit on hold before a human being manually changed the delivery address.

Hypertext Spoon River Anthology: http://www.teleport.com/~rutisent/Spoon/ [OLB]

Myself grown tired of toil and poverty
An beholding how Old Bill and others grew rich in wealth,
Robbed a traveler one night near Proctor's Grove,
Killing him unwittingly while doing so,
For the which I was tried and hanged.
That was my way of going into bankruptcy...

Forbes continues its gaming issue with this look at Ultima Online: http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/98/dec/1217/side1.htm

The game was lawless to the point that the inventor of it, the founder of Origin Studios -- Lord British, as he was called in the Ultima world -- was assassinated by a rebellious player.

And analyses long-distance pricing mysteries: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/98/1228/6214065a.htm

Every time AT&T -- or any other long distance company -- routes a call to your home, it must fork over about 4 cents per minute to local phone monopolies for the courtesy of completing the call. ... It's a blessing because the Bells' true cost of the connection is barely a penny per minute.

Still more new Computer Gaming World reviews:

- Pro Pilot 99
- Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator
- Hexplore
- Rage of Mages
- Need for Speed III

Human pheromone-ome project? http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_236000/236350.stm

Kiotech International, one of the firms behind plans for a self-diagnosis kit which gauges illness by analysing human breath, expects to have developed the technology needed to map an individual's pheromones by the end of 1999.

Hi-tech human sacrifice in progress, Wm J Clinton presiding...

Celebrity beancounters: NY Observer ranks star-power by counting mentions in gossip columns: [40k table] http://www.observer.com/500a.htm

1 President Bill Clinton
2 Monica Lewinsky, former intern
3 Kenneth Starr, independent counsel
4 First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton
5 Madonna, singer-actress

New Ernie Pook's Comeek:

Mode a la Marlys!

New New Scientist

I caught this ad on the news yesterday, and it totally looked like part of the newscast to me! http://www.suntimes.com/output/feder/feder13.htm [OSRR}

And here's the kicker: Lardner closes out the commercial by saying, "I'm Lonnie Lardner for CBS 2 Chicago."

How TV series' stars drift toward cosmetic uniformity: http://www.teevee.org/archive/981209/index.html?PERSIST_FRAMES=yes [via Windowseat]

Look at the actors who star in any of the longer-running top shows, and their appearances have changed perceptively in the years since their Season One debuts. Neve Campbell and Helen Hunt have both morphed into tightly toned versions of their former selves, with the transformation riding on the same upward curve as their movie careers. George Clooney and Anthony Edwards both look as though they're no strangers to self-heating clay masques.

Nice format for a weblog sources-page: http://www.windowseat.org/weblog/sources.html

[ditherati] I visit ditherati.com fairly often, but have yet to quote the quotes in a web log. Seems silly to quote people quoting other people, and hurts my head when I think about it. Check it out on your own.

I've been suggesting that topical keywords should be useful in headlines, but this site uses them just the way I imagined... and I'm finding it very hard to get used to: http://www.oneworld.org/news/today/front.html

CONFLICT/ANGOLA: Civilians trapped in a spiral of violence
HEALTH/INDIA: US residents lobby for action on cholera epidemic

I collected my thoughts and resources on 'parsing browsers' into a new page: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/net/parsing.html

One should subscribe to a website as to a newsgroup, declaring a killfile for it, and the browser should detect and download new articles, deleting them only after they've been checked out.

A surprising timeline of dedicated high-level-language computers: [Deja URL]

1965 (April) Melbourne and Pugmire propose microcoded FORTRAN machine

Heh: [NASA Watch]

REDMOND, WA (API) --- MICROSOFT (MSFT) announced today that the official release date for the new operating system "Windows 2000" will be delayed until the second quarter of 1901.

This year's demographic: The apotheosis of teenage girls: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/12/16/38586.html

Young women of the nineties are so strong that Hollywood simply can't behave the way they did to Judy Garland. And in a stunning example of emotional networking, the power starlets even have their own mother figures watching out for them. Diane Keaton scouts scripts for Drew Barrymore and Sally Field does the same for Minnie Driver.

Forbes has been looking at the computer game industry, but nothing special so far: http://www.forbes.com/

(Two sites regularly cause Sudden Netscape Death if I load multiple pages at once: Forbes, and UK Guardian.)

Interesting new NY Observer includes Sidney Blumenthal, Ira Glass, Barnes and Noble, etc

This Day in Joyce History: In 1902, James sent postcards from Paris to Byrne and Cosgrave (Cranly and Lynch in Ulysses). In 1913, Ezra Pound rode in to save Joyce from poverty, in the form of a letter requesting poems.

TV 2nite? Natalie Merchant on Letterman

Longer Egyptian-writing story: http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/nwstue08.htm

Two-thirds of the tablets have been deciphered as accounts of linen and oil delivered to King Scorpion in taxes, short notes, numbers, lists of kings' names and names of institutions. Although the records are made up of symbols, they are considered true writing because each symbol stands for a consonant and makes up syllables.

Fun gift ideas for Mac people: http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-460.html

25 different meta-search engines: http://www.webscout.net/cgi-bin/meta_links.cgi

I started rereading "Little Drummer Girl" and felt compelled to do a LeCarre page: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/jorn/lecarre.html

Excellent new Onion:

Gus Van Sant Prepares Shot-For-Shot Teen Wolf Remake

Yay! Peter Jennings did a very hard-hitting piece about the FDA and bovine growth hormone... plus they showed this image of the newly discovered Egyptian writing system (below)

Plenty of good stuff as always at the Progressive Review

(Amazing netwide leap in article-quality today!)

New Village Voice appears early: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9851/

Including more details about the Pinochet situation: http://www.villagevoice.com/features/9851/vest.shtml

"What's 6000 people dead in two years -- maybe 10 a day -- I don't call that genocide," Henry Kissinger said of his old pal Augusto at a recent New York dinner...

Hoberman does Moses: http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/9851/hoberman.shtml

This homage to The Lion King notwithstanding, Prince of Egypt's weakest aspect is Stephen Schwartz's stale, sub-Godspell score -- filled with simpering ballads and tremulous inspirationals. The movie is bold enough to cap the 10 plagues with a burst of fireworks over the Nile and the two brothers singing a duet. (Moses: "You must let my people..." Rameses: "I will never let your people..." Together: "GO!")...

Robert Wilson does 3-D: http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/9851/carr.shtml

A computer-animated 70mm film visible only through 3-D glasses, Monsters is about perception itself. The very first scene appears to be desert, but as the background mountain range turns white and a bare foot slowly descends, it becomes beach. This transformation is mysterious, not banal, supported by the usual Glass-Wilson tropes -- repetitive arpeggios, glacial pacing, and sets that seem more dramatic than the action unfolding in them. Finding magic in the ordinary is really the whole point.

And Austin Bunn's don't-miss comparison of Clancy's Ruthless.com to other business sims: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9851/bunn.shtml

"You can read excerpts of Bill Gates's e-mail and the way he talks about business, like we'll crush you, we'll drive you out of business. We just animate the rhetoric." ...You can order the murder of another executive, but rather than showing the deed, the game reports on it with a fake business headline.

..."When we were developing the game Entrepreneur, we called it 'Quicken, the Game.'"

Not quite from the Voice, this may be their next week's Red Meat comic: http://www.redmeat.com/redmeat/comics/rm_401.htmlx [Chgo Reader]

"I thought of this funny idea for a TV show..."

A good day for Spike: http://olj.usc.edu/indexf.htm?/sections/news/98_stories/spike_121598.htm

Including a new Wharton MBA who says 'obdurate': http://www.adweek.com/features/brandweek/brandweek.asp [Spike]

You're dealing with an industry in which there are bribes and kickbacks right and left. They didn't care to mention any of that in school. And you know what? I was shocked to learn after having conversations with some of the professors when I started to experience it, how little they knew about these practices. Entire industries are supported by it. I mean the whole brokerage community is supported by how impure the system is...

We have something to feature as a competitive advantage that cannot be duplicated by our much larger competitors. When big companies try to do it, it's just too slick. They have difficulty not being slick. The harder they try to not be slick the more slick they appear.

And 43 reasons why Wired sucks: [multipage] http://www.upsidetoday.com/texis/mvm/story?id=367541820 [Spike]

3. Wired is not really wired. The new owners bought the magazine, they weren't interested in the online service. Huh? For clues to this disconnect and for a good chuckle, check out the Conde Nast online site.

Portal implements topical multiple-inheritance: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/firstlooks/9812/f981214_b.html

What's different about GO Network are the three tabs that cut across the top of the page. Labeled GO Center, Web Sites, and Community, these tabs offer a kind of lateral navigation unavailable in other portals. After you drill down through the GO Network directory to a news story about golf, for example, you can click on the Web Sites tab to get a list of recommended related sites. Click on Community, and you'll instantly find yourself at the front door of the Golf chat.

(Actually, is this revolutionary at all? Is it just the tab-metaphor that makes it seem so cool?)

Loadtimes for NewsLinx have been abysmal lately: http://www.newslinx.com/ (Could it be related to their sale to Meckler?)

Fun thread on rec.arts.books about strange experiences in bookshops: [Messy URL]

Goodlooking issue of New York magazine: http://www.nymag.com/This_Week/view.asp?id=2002

Incredible new techniques applied to pirate wreck: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/12/981215080722.htm

A second effort is to establish whether artifacts such as ballast stones and hull planks have shifted in the last 50 years. Since radioisotopes such as cesium-137 and plutonium-239 and 240 from atmospheric nuclear testing have accumulated in most marine sediments worldwide, Martens should be able to detect any later wreck movement by analyzing sediments cored from beneath the oak hull.

Teeny-tiny science: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/12/981215081028.htm

Many researchers believe, for example, that complementary charge distributions can generate steering torques that act like tiny tractor beams that pull proteins into the right orientation for binding.

Major breakthru on archeology of writing: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/health/121598/health1_10239_noframes.html

The inscriptions, presented to reporters on a slide projector, were of animals, plants and mountains. Dreyer said they referred to plantations belonging to various kings, as it was common for ancient kings to take animal names such as scorpion or falcon.

Cool imagery emerges from drought: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1215/d_ap_1215_9.sml

Standing on soggy earth that usually lies under 20 feet of water, the 76-year-old retiree sees the scattered remains of home: a few broken gravestones, a pair of hardy roads, stumps of once mighty maples -- the remains of Corydon, a town "now swallowed up with water and seldom spoken of," in the words of one native.

The real impeachment question is: Do we accept Clinton's approach as acceptable for everyone, under similar circumstances? http://www.washtimes.com/nation/nation1.html

If President Clinton walks away unscathed after lying about Monica Lewinsky, four of every 10 criminal defense lawyers surveyed by a New Jersey professional magazine say they will raise the double standard when defending their own perjury cases.

In a dark street... http://www.foxnews.com/news/international/1215/i_rt_1215_29.sml

Clinton, on a break from Middle East peacemaking, lit up a Christmas tree near the Church of Nativity, the center of Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem.

Suppose the workers in each industry got to elect the government overseer (including safety inspection) for that industry? That Art Kleiner book (I think) said that when workers get a voice in their own safety standards, they set them higher than OSHA et al. So it would be the people who understood the issues who got to make the choice.

???: MS picks a long-distance provider, and their stock declines? http://www.wired.com/news/news/business/story/16819.html [SN]

In late morning trading, Qwest shares were down $1.56 at $41.81. Microsoft dropped $3.88 to $130.13.

Why don't the pollsters ever ask what issues people would rather see Congress addressing?

Meta: Parsing web-browsers will treat sites like newsgroups, downloading just the new 'posts', filtering based on killfile-entries specific to that site, and creating an index-page that allows you to tag the items you want to see.

Excellent hands-on critique of the Rio MP3 player, by Stephen Manes: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/98/1228/6214126a.htm

One source of music is the Web. But unless you stumble on a site with pirated popular songs, you're likely to find mostly artists you've never heard of. And unless you have a high-speed connection, your patience will wear thin. With a 56K modem, downloading 4.5 megabytes, enough for a five-minute cut, took me more than half an hour...

Adam Engst's deep think-piece on Doug Engelbart: http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-459.html#lnk3

He feared that as technology improved at a rate far surpassing improvements in non-technical fields, we would use it to automate intellect, rather than augment it. In short, merely automating simple tasks, though useful, doesn't lend itself to collaboration and solving the big problems.

...Wouldn't you think a large software company would try to knock off two birds with one stone by creating products that radically improve the productivity of its own employees, with the understanding that doing so would result in products that would better meet the needs of other customers? Yet it seems uncommon for large companies to consider the needs or desires of their employees as in any way typical of the needs and desires of their customers. As a result, these companies tend to ignore the feedback that is both closest and easiest to collect.

(Cool meta-thing: Because Adam uses setext when he posts these to netnews, and my Frontier-filters handle no-tags markup, his italics converted automatically!)

I find today's Zippy inexplicably funny: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/sfgate/zippy.cgi?weekday=2

"Zeep?" "Yes, Peep?"

(But what are they standing on?)

This Day in Joyce History: In 1940, the Joyces fled France for Switzerland.

Computer Gaming World finally fixed the broken links for reviews of Shogo [decent screenshot] and Klingon Guard

A great bookstore for literary remainders is online: http://www.daedalus-books.com/ (rab)

Nerve's excellent recent nudes-of-the-day are included in a gallery with an improved design: [multipage] http://www.nervemag.com/Tillmans/

It's of the utmost importance to the photographer that his work be contextualized, and while the detritus of his restless life as a fashion photographer and youth-culture documentarian -- dirty laundry, untouched fruit platters, dirty ashtrays, unmade beds -- weren't strewn around the Rosen gallery, they did grace the walls as subversive still lifes...

Hendrik Hertzberg pines for the good old days of sexist New Yorker cartoons: [no images, alas] http://magazines.enews.com/magazines/new_yorker/archive/981207-001.html

The spread of the ideal of gender equality during the nineteen-seventies radically changed the social world that the cartoonists chronicled. The fond indulgence (or sexist cluelessness, depending on your point of view) with which Arno and his contemporaries viewed the codger/gold-digger paradigm became at best an anachronism, at worst an offense.

(Hertzberg did one of my alltime fave books c1970, consisting of one million dots, annotated with statistics.)

Newspapers' websites losing tens of millions of dollars: http://www.mediainfo.com/ephome/news/newshtm/stories/121498n1.htm [OSRR]

Central Newspapers -- which owns the Arizona Republic and Indianapolis Star/News -- contended that it is breaking even on the Web, spending $12 million and making $12 million. But, when asked for more specifics, Central admitted that virtual job fairs, run through a subsidiary company, account for as much as half of the earnings. Without that income, the newspaper Web sites are running a loss of several million dollars.

Why does Obscure Store sometimes get whiteout-disease? (fixed)

A convenient headlines page for gossip: http://www.showbizwire.com/ (asg)

Ethnic-stereotypes variant: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/Dec/islands.html

There are nine beautiful deserted islands in the middle of nowhere where the following people are stranded:

2 Italian men and 1 Italian woman
2 French men and 1 French woman
2 German men and 1 German woman...

Custom Egyptian Sesame Street: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/world/121498/world11_1867_body.html

The puppets on the weekly, 30-minute show will learn about pharaohs and mummies. They'll find out the desert can be navigated using the moon, the stars and the wind, and that the Nile fertilizes their food. They'll also get acquainted with refrigerators and washing machines.

An interesting-looking issue of the London Sunday Times book review arrives a day late: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/stiboocon01001.html?1334425

Decent look at the delays in NT: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/98/1228/6214055a.htm

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft began work on the original NT -- for "New Technology," rather than "Not Timely" -- in 1988, hiring legendary programmer David Cutler from Digital Equipment Corp. His charter: Create a product powerful enough to displace Unix...

Betting against net.stocks is a hopeless strategy: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/98/1228/6214101a.htm

Speculators have lost $2 billion in six months betting against just two stocks, Amazon.com and Yahoo!, to judge from Nasdaq filings.

...Yet Rickert, who has been in and out along the way, is still short both Inktomi and eBay. He figures that of $100 billion in Internet stocks "only 10% are worth anything."

Excellent AlertBox (with a dumb title) suggests what a real Internet OS should be: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981213.html

I am not a good enough programmer myself to choose or to architect the scripting solution for the Web, but I do know that we need one.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1867, Patrick Casey (Kevin Egan in Ulysses) helped blow up Clerkenwell prison.

I got a day ahead of myself in the Millennial History, where Sufism and the Inquisition have just been simultaneously founded: http://www.guardian.co.uk/millennium/day117.html

Texture demapping: The feeling I get from the impeachment hearings is that our cardboard politicians have now succeeded in completely erasing each others' painted-on features.

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

This Day in Joyce History: In 1982, Lucia (daughter) died, after half a century of institutionalisation.

TV 2nite: Chomsky's new talk on C-SPAN 2100 CST: http://www.c-span.org/guide/society/perspectives/

In an issue of the NYT Sunday Magazine dedicated to design, there's a great multi-multi-page survey of 100 years of cool design: http://www.nytimes.com/partners/aol/mag/article3a.html [OSRR]

Plus 18 NYT-approved trendsetters pick their favorite objects of all time: http://www.nytimes.com/partners/aol/mag/article9.html

beads - black Braun travel clock - Karuselli chair - Concorde - umbrella - half-frosted A-lamp - chopsticks - Rialto plastic spectacles - Sojourner - Schwinn Black Phantom - Wearever no-stick aluminum pan - pie watch - Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pen - laboratory beakers - Eskimo mask image - Arne Jacobsen faucet - Braun calculator - 'The White Album'

And a chair is followed from design to manufacture: http://www.nytimes.com/partners/aol/mag/article10.html

None struck home until 1995, when Rashid sold Umbra on a swoopy, curving wastebasket that came to be called, in a pun mingling Hollywood and garbage, Garbo. The can has been a huge hit, a success with critics and customers. People like Garbo so much they use it as a clothes hamper, a flower vase, a Champagne cooler.

Exploring SearchEngineWatch for the first time in ages, I find an interesting table: http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/directories.html

Service  Type Editors Categories  Listings   As Of
 Yahoo    D      80+      ?       About 1    11/98
                                  million

The best way I know to compare search-engine performance is with http://www.dogpile.com/ and I was surprised to find, in testing it on my authors' names over the last few days, that the winner by a mile was: http://www.infoseek.com/ which only has one-quarter as many pages and rarely scores well in the ratings!??

SimCity sequel focuses on individuals: http://go2.guardian.co.uk:80/technology/913210785-doors.html

"Basically you design and furnish house, and you design a family to live in their house, so you actually run their lives. They work at jobs, they earn money, and you buy things with the money they earn. You have to keep them happy." You can simulate your own family, or people you know, which starts to sound somewhat voyeuristic.

I managed to start a pretty contentious thread, asking a dumb-seeming question on sci.space.science: [Messy URL]

Suppose while assembling the ISS, they drop a wrench, meaning accidentally propel it towards the Earth just below them, at a slow speed like 32 ft per second... Would it burn up before hitting Earth? How long would it take?

(Consensus seems to be that very slowly it will orbit lower until it finally reenters and burns up.)

The Responsible Party supports Stephen Gaskin for President: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/flulf/gaskin.html

Plank 1: Universal Health Care. Everyone gets taken care of while we argue about the money.
Plank 2: Campaign Finance Reform. The Airwaves belong to the people. The networks will give up enough time for the people to run their elections, free.
Plank 3: Decriminalize Marijuana and give Amnesty to all simple Marijuana prisoners who are not involved with guns or hard drugs.
Plank 4: Let's Educate the Kids Now and argue about the money later.
Plank 5: A Corporation is Not a Person.

(He's the original conservative leftist, rather more conservative than us.)

9am to noon CST: This is Hell live RealAudio progressive humor and talk, highly recommended. Guests included RU Sirius and:

- Mark Potok, editor of the "Intelligence Report" of the Southern Poverty Law Center (zzz, imho)
- Lowell Boileau, an artist behind the website The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit (heavily Detroit-only)
- Patty Burleson on the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Interesting hypertext Bible in a new translation with lots of notes: [multipage, extreme frames] http://www.bible.org/netbible/index.htm [Atlantic]

More new reviews at Computer Gaming World already:

- Quake II Mission Pack: Ground Zero
- Shogo [? not there yet]
- Klingon Honor Guard [not yet either]
- Trespasser: Jurassic Park [devastatingly bad!]
- Return Fire 2 [fairly positive]

Revealing Forbes loveletter to Jerry Bruckheimer: [multipage] http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/98/1214/6213292s2.htm

Budget for Bruckheimer's top ten action features: $580 million
Box office take to date, including rentals: $2.9 billion

Question of the day: What are the most overhyped science-news topics?

- New dinosaur species found
- Most distant galaxy found

A painter whose name (John Alexander) you should apparently take note of: [multipage] http://www.marlboroughgallery.com/artists/alexander/alexander3.html

And a profile of him, if you're interested: http://www.nymag.com/this_week/view.asp?id=1992 [ALD]

"I think a lot of people in the art world are sort of put off by his aggressive heterosexuality. I've heard people in that world complain about what they take to be John's vulgarity and his swamp-hogginess and say that he's not an intellectual painter. The fact is, he's not. But neither are his contemporaries. What John is, is an aesthete who plays up to the provincial thing."

Ambitious art-nude of the day: http://www.nervemag.com/photoday/

This Day in Joyce History: In 1890 in Ulysses, Bloom helps Parnell storm the United Ireland's offices. In 1902, James's first review was published in the Daily Express. In 1918, James sang at the opening of an Englsh Players production.

TV 2nite: Garbage on Leno

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

The Science of the X Files, by Jeanne Cavelos
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King
Oona: Living in the Shadows, by Jane Scovell [Chaplin's daughter]

And this, that looks promising: "Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death", by Susan Moeller: http://chicago.digitalcity.com/cafe/books/chapter/moeller.htm

The newsroom truism goes: "One dead fireman in Brooklyn is worth five English bobbies, who are worth 50 Arabs, who are worth 500 Africans."

For its 75th anniversary issue, Time magazine compiled a list of its ten worst-selling covers since 1980. They included: "Anguish Over Bosnia" (May 17, 1993), "Benjamin Netanyahu" (June 10, 1996), "Boris Yeltsin" (March 29, 1993) and "Somalia: Restoring Hope" (December 21, 1992). Only two foreign stories made the covers of Time's best sellers of all time -- the death of Princess Diana and the start of the Persian Gulf War.

Stories traditionally are published or fronted or aired depending on the answers to a range of questions:
- Timeliness...
- Proximity...
- Prominence...
- Significance...
- Controversy...
- Novelty...
- Currency...
- Emotional appeal...

New Science News looks at Mars ice; and the worm (17 Sept below) whose genome is now solved: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/12_12_98/Fob1.htm

To identify all the nematode's genes, the researchers had to spell out a DNA sequence of 97 million bases...

And a microbe that's immune to radiation: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/12_12_98/Bob1.htm

Pinkish in color and giving off the smell of rotten cabbages, the bacteria were originally isolated in the 1950s from tins of meat that had spoiled despite supposedly sterilizing irradiation.

It's a very slow news day so I'm doing a Joseph McElroy fanpage: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/jorn/mcelroy.html

And a Peter Dickinson fanpage: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/jorn/dickinson.html

You don't have to be a mystery fan to love PD's mysteries, nor a young adult to love his YA fiction. These are extremely well-written tales, with great characters and always some interesting, educational complication involving science or anthropology or history.

NAFTA-abuse continues: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=420572346

"If our government has any hope or intention of preserving Canada's fresh water as a publicly-owned and controlled resource, it has to plug the holes in NAFTA now or risk sinking with the ship. The push to privatize water is on..."

Secrets of the Internet Masters: Kibo uses 700 filters to rate news articles: [Deja URL]

The whole thread was docked points for certain orthographical/mechanical/typographical characteristics of the "Subject:" header, most notably the "!!!" part. Poor B. Eable got an astoundingly low score for an article which quoted a lot of text, added a few lines of capitals, and appended the standard DejaNews .signature -- and more importantly, the article was cross-posted to three newsgroups, was a followup to a followup to a followup to a followup, and it's relatively old compared to some of the other articles listed.

Tonight's Pacifica has a reply from Mumia's lawyer to last night's extremely one-sided 20/20 (with Sam "Hang 'em High" Donaldson) [20/20 transcript]

Drudge sneakpeeks a 60 Minutes segment on Clinton's use of focus groups: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

Luntz gauged the reactions of the St. Louis residents who were of all political stripes to the phrases in Clinton's speech admitting the Lewinsky affair. "Answered questions truthfully, nobody believes him. Answered questions about his private life and it goes positive," he demonstrates to Kroft. "It's almost like an EKG."

Yay! Susie Bright is back, defending the girls who hired the stripper: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/brig/1998/12/11brig.html

I know some of those young women were probably embarrassed by the nudity and the erotically charged atmosphere, although the only one who has gone on the record has called the experience "awesome."

New Scientific American features Nobels, Y2K, and flu viruses

New The Nation includes:

EDITORIAL Birds & Bees & Clinton: Gore Vidal
Bertelsmann's Nazi Past: Hersch Fischler and John Friedman
ARTICLES The Aging of Aquarius -- Retiring boomers and the Politics of Compassion: Theodore Roszak
BOOKS & THE ARTS Writing Robeson: Martin Duberman

And this nice inquiry on parental rights and responsibilities: http://www.thenation.com/issue/981228/1228poll.htm

Peter Wallis, 36, says he agreed to have sex with Kellie Smith, 37, only if she took the pill, and now charges her with "intentionally acquiring and misusing his semen" by secretly discontinuing her medication.

The ten best Mars shots from the Surveyor are great, but they don't use jpegs so the accessibility is awful: [multipage] http://www.msss.com/mars/global_surveyor/camera/images/top102_Dec98_rel/index.html

Computer tutor uses SOAR AI-engine (I think): http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/usc-ttias.html

The cognitive module includes general pedagogical software enabling the softbot to monitor students, explain actions and demonstrate tasks. For each subject he teaches, Steve is given a set of task plans. These task plans do not prescribe a fixed ordering of steps or specify how the task should be taught. A single task plan allows Steve to demonstrate the task, coach the student as he or she practices it, and answer questions about it.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1918, James peeped at Marthe Fleischmann.

TV 2nite: Mumia on ABC's 20/20

New reviews at Computer Gaming World:

- Israeli Air Force
- Warbirds 2.01
- Jewels II
- Mega Solitaire

Great, emotional audio as Pacifica celebrates the Pinochet decision (The Haitian guy is a riot! But he's about halfway into the 30-min RealAudio.)

Wise insights about the SF power-outage, and much more, in a very excellent new Risks Digest: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.12.html

The 8 Dec 1998 SF outage may be subject to as much scrutiny as the 10 Aug 1996 western states blackout. Electric system deregulation has caused numerous changes in priorities. This outage is attributed to human error, a construction crew not knowing a pipe was acting as a ground. It could be considered an information error, if no sign, tag or other label were present and this sort of pipe is not routinely used (e.g., noted in standards and training manuals) as substation ground. ... Study of major outages suggests among key issues faced in electric system reliability are aging infrastructure and loss of the knowledge base on details of transmission and distribution systems when staff retires or is downsized out as part of deregulation. Starting a project to catalog and label every wire in every city has no glitz and few major consulting firm requirements. Yet this simple course of action will prevent many problems with the energy infrastructure...

Employment trends in online journalism: http://olj.usc.edu/indexf.htm?/sections/features/98_stories/stories_jobprospects.htm

Here's a sampling of some annual salaries published by ZDNet's Interactive Week in September, 1998:
Internet Strategist - $115,000
Design Manager - $84,200
Web Technologist - $72,000
Web Producer (Marketing) - $66,500
Web Editor (Content) - $46,000

New New Scientist includes how Earth's rotation might have fixed biochemical handedness: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/981212/newsstory8.html

However, he believes the finding adds support to the idea that circularly polarised light created a small bias towards left-handed amino acids, and that chemical reactions later amplified this excess.

Fascinating questions about language and cave-art: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/981212/newsstory5.html

He suggests that by 20 000 years ago people had evolved the ability to name and talk about other people, but not about animals, plants and tools. When language finally evolved to include such things, art suffered--witness the stilted and formulaic images that began to appear following the end of the last Ice Age 11 000 years ago, Humphrey says.

After a couple of weeks' trial, I give thumbs-up to the free TracerLock service, that emails you whenever AltaVista discovers a new page with your specified search-pattern: http://www.peacefire.org/tracerlock/

(I suspect as I figure out what works best, I'll end up maxing out my free account. I'm growing disillusioned with My.Excite NewsTracker's awkward interface-- I'd rather get email notification, for zillions of possible obscure patterns.)

Corporate media types debate web news: [Messy URL]

Scott Woelfel, editor-in-chief of CNN Interactive said the Web site was another way for CNN to reach a wider audience. ``We reach audiences in a way the other (CNN) networks can't. A Web site can do a lot more than break one news event at a time.''

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

"Let's visit trailer #26!"

There's money in useless gizmos: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1214/6213082a.htm

A recitation of those projects reads like a page from the doodad hall of fame. There's the outdoor ultrasonic pest deterrent with flash; the water timer for home sprinklers; motorized tie racks...

He claims that $7 million of consulting fees, royalties and wholesale revenues came in last year.

The brains behind Pop-Up Videos: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1214/6213080a.htm

They managed to upset Oprah Winfrey when they appeared on her show, complaining when her producers nixed some of their ideas for a Pop-Up script and accusing her staff of being sycophants. "Needless to say, I don't think we'll be invited back," says Low.

New NY Observer media-gossip column includes NYer employees' dreams about their jobs (and more): http://www.observer.com/pages/offtherec.htm

At her going-away party, on Dec. 2 at Bar d'O on Bedford Street -- Ms. Kaminer recently landed a job editing the front of the book at The New York Times Magazine -- she handed out little Ziploc baggies stuffed with the printout of her final project, entitled Dream Works: A Journal of Unconscious Labor.

[Also:] "Nobody knows the stuff that she knows," said rock writer Danny Fields, who once managed Iggy Pop and the Ramones, and has known Ms. Robinson since the 1970's. "She can speak the language of both the executives and the roadies with equal fluency."

New Onion:

FDA Declares Munchos To Be Good Source Of Disodium Guanylate

I don't get this, but it sounds interesting: http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/sandia-smms.html

Working from that commonsense basis, Osbourn and colleagues tested 12 subjects (Sandia employees who ranged from 20 to 50 years old) over a five-year period to determine how they grouped points scattered on a graph. Without exception, the responses of the subjects to complex dot patterns could be predicted from their responses to simple, three-dot patterns. The subjects reacted as if putting an invisible shape resembling a dumbbell around each pair of points. Each pair grouped together only if all other points - any potential third point - were outside the invisible dumbbell - a shape that operated as a region of influence.

Nice MS-zinger (etc) in the new Risks Digest: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.11.html

Just imagine... [wavy dream lines] You live in San Francisco and go to New York for business. You enter all your business meetings in MS Outlook's calendar on your Windows laptop before you leave. You fly to New York and adjust your location (time zone) so your computer will know what time it is. Then you miss a crucial appointment because the calendar claims a meeting is at 3pm even though you said it was at noon.

All your appointments get time shifted when you change your location. They claim this is a feature. I kid you not. I can only guess that somebody decided appointments should be stored as GMT and then displayed as local times depending on the time zone the computer thinks it's in. As to why they thought this was a good thing, I have no clue...

[And this beauty:] Before the last election here in the UK, the Labour party was against controls on encryption, and promised, on their website, to oppose them. Now that they are in power, they are planning to introduce a law controlling encryption - all the usual key escrow, TTP stuff. And they've quietly removed the pages on their site which promised opposition to such legislation.

New Village Voice still has some bad links, but includes a definitive Psycho review (sequel a yawn): http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/9850/hoberman.shtml

Those who first saw Psycho during the last weeks of June 1960 describe a unique atmosphere of excited dread. Nor did the movie disappoint them. Psycho featured not only an impressively sordid opening and a boffo shock climax, but a highly graphic (not to mention visceral) sex crime, the early exit of a star, and the first flush toilet in a Hollywood production.

Awesome spacewalk photos: [multipage, expires soon, not full resolution yet] http://www.flatoday.com/space/explore/manspace/shuttle/sts88/met/88eva1.htm

NASA Watch finds science-howlers in a Web Q&A feature: http://www.reston.com/nasa/watch.html

"Since no such (gravity) force exists in outer space, the object (in this case the shuttle) falls around the Earth continually."

Space station assembly being documented in IMAX format: http://www.calix.com/nasamail/May_1997/msg00468.html [Slashdot]

The historic, on-orbit construction of the International Space Station will be documented in 3-D by the Imax Corporation in a large-format (70-mm) feature film to be seen around the world.

($20 says they include Zarathustra in the soundtrack!)

ClicheWatch: "send in the clones" [AltaVista pattern]

AltaVista found about 500 Web pages for you.

Kibo presents "The Okra Show": [Deja URL]

GIANT TALKING OKRA (holding a space bazooka): Greetings, Earth humans. I come in peace.

(THE OKRA VAPORIZES ANDY. CONAN SCREAMS AND WETS HIS PANTS. THE OKRA VAPORIZES CONAN. THEN IT VAPORIZES THE AUDIENCE.)

GIANT TALKING OKRA: Now the stage is all set for... The Okra Show.

Good day at HoneyGuide: http://www.chaparraltree.com/honeyguide/

I've been busy making a Robert Stone fanpage: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/jorn/stone.html

Dog Soldiers (1974) Working title: "Skydiver Devoured by Starving Birds"
Made into Nick Nolte movie called "Who'll Stop the Rain" [IMDb entry] (Stone hated that title)
I think this is his best after Damascus Gate, and recommend it as a starting place.

A random image of the Chicago Zoo... from a SimCity card game! [multipage] http://www.acs.oakland.edu/~jjhoxsey/simcity/display/chicago/cs/021.html

Hilarious nude of the day: (expires at midnight) http://www.nervemag.com/photoday/

This Day in Joyce History: In 1895, James was elected to the Sodality of the BVM. In 1902, he attended his first medschool lectures in Paris. In 1921, Shakespeare & Co held a 'seance' for Ulysses, with a lecture by Larbaud.

Nice Norman Solomon about Pinochet and Kissinger: http://www.fair.org/media-beat/981203.html

It's easy to toss off platitudes about people in another society -- how they should face up to their past. But it's always much more difficult to implement such principles closer to home. So, Kissinger has never been compelled to answer for his role as a key architect of policies that caused a total of more than 1 million deaths in Chile, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, East Timor and elsewhere.

Long, fine Chomsky interview from last month, about political psychology, etc etc etc: http://www.worldmedia.com/archive/interviews/9811-wennerberg.html

One example that comes to mind is that even the most extreme neoliberals never defend income inequality in itself -- it's always supposed to benefit the poor. That's a kind of universal. Every proposal that's made is made because it helps the poor people. Doesn't matter what it is. Actually, that's something that's been noticed by mainstream economists, like Paul Krugman...

Look at what was called liberty in England, the first modern democratic revolution, in the 17th and 18th century. Liberty meant liberty for property, which meant taking away from people their traditional rights. Like their rights to the commons...

In fact, the modern public relations industry was in many ways an outgrowth of the increase in democracy--and consciously so. You read the manuals, they talk about it, in the 1920s and so on. With the extension of the franchise, with the bringing in of working people and others into the public arena, you can no longer ensure that the wealthy and the capable and the enlightened, us good folks, will run everything. So therefore it is necessary to use the techniques of propaganda.

There is no theory of financial markets. It's mostly amateur psychology. When you read economists - Alan Greenspan and so on - talking about economic policy, it's mostly, this is going to inspire confidence, or this will make people feel better, or something like that. You can sort of dress it up in formulas if you like, but it's a kind of amateur psychology, no real theory applied.

So in a rational market, investors are supposed to look for economic fundamentals, they're supposed to value solid manufacturing capacity and fiscal austerity and all that kind of stuff. They are not supposed to do what is called technical trading, to look for short-term patterns and see if you can make a tiny gain by playing this and that game over a period of weeks, or days, or even hours. But the latter is exactly what they do.

New "New York": http://www.nymag.com/This_Week/view.asp?id=1988

Excellent harvest of tidbits at the Progressive Review:

The Detroit Advertiser is reporting that local businesses are using caller ID to screen calls originating from mainly black neighborhoods. The Michigan daily's investigation even found a number of vendors hawking so-called Color ID Boxes specially programmed to detect a preset list of telephone prefixes.

Jeff Gustafson wrote a letter to the New York Times in which he said that 90,000 people were dying each years as a result of the sanctions against Iraq. The Times wanted to know where he had gotten that figure. He told them he had found it on the UNICEF web site and in back issues of the New York Times. When the Times printed his letter, however, it was changed to give "Iraqi officials" as the source of the numbers. When the media watchdog FAIR wanted to discuss the matter with Norma Sosa, the editor of the Times' letters section, it was told that the editing process was not open to "outside inspection," and said of the letters: "This is a dead issue."

Unmanned airplanes shoot for 20-mile altitude: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1207/d_ap_1207_55.sml

Pathfinder Plus, with a wingspan of 121 feet and eight motors, reached an altitude of 80,285 feet in August during testing over the Pacific near Hawaii. The altitude was a record for a propeller-driven aircraft. [Pic source]

Appalling profile of NYC's new PR-sorority/mafia: http://www.nymag.com/This_Week/view.asp?id=1978 [OSRR]

"You have no idea about the number of crashers here today," she complains in a hoarse monotone, fanning herself with a program listing the jockeys' names. "I'm gonna catch myself a crasher." "This is her favorite part of the day," giggles Misher. London turns to me expectantly: "Wanna have some fun?"

"They seduce you," sighs one magazine editor who is frequently on the receiving end of the publicists' largesse. "Every day, they send you this endless stream of free stuff, cell phones and facials and a month with a Mercedes, and all they want back is a tiny little item. Eventually, your whole social life starts to revolve around them. Let's face it: Most journalists are neither rich nor cool, and to sit at a table with an heiress on one side and a movie star on another -- it's hard not to fall for that."

"Like, it was funny -- tonight we were in a taxi, and I said, 'Jen, we're young ladies now. I feel like somehow we're little kids playing dress-up in fancy clothes, but we're not. We're at that age where we're real people.' And she said, 'I know! I know! How did that happen?' "

Free anonymous online public diaries: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2171694,00.html

This type of dialogue is repeated over and over again among the site's 1,300 diarists and an unknown number of readers. Some conversations encompass three, four, five people or more.

A Yahoo! search for online communities shows hundreds of older sites with names including "QuarryWorld -- the online community of crushed-stone and sand and gravel producers"...

Netscape's new layout engine: http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,29588,00.html

Standards support is a key responsibility of the layout engine, and today's release brings Communicator up to code with HTML 4.0, Cascading Style Sheets 1 (full support), and CSS 2 (partial support), the Document Object Model (DOM), Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0, the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the Open Java Interface, and image formats .png, .gif, .jpeg, .pjpeg, .art, and .xbm.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1933, Judge Woolsey declares Ulysses not obscene

Commodity-trading model applied to bandwidth: http://www.abcnews.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/bandwidth981205.html

But the age of freely-traded bandwidth is probably not far off. Soon enough we'll see bandwidth listed on the business pages, just above coffee and crude oil.

NASA Watch unhappy with today's space coverage: http://www.reston.com/nasa/watch.html

Last night, the crew of Endeavor performed what is probably one of the most daring feats ever accomplished in space by juggling huge spacecraft with flawless precision ... Did the TV networks break into regularly scheduled programing to make note? Did they broadcast special programs in advance of the mission? Did NASA have a large public education campaign in place ready to go? No. None of that.

New Laissez-Faire City Times

Excellent Tom Tomorrow on impeaching 'Indiana Jones': http://www.salonmagazine.com/comics/tomo/1998/12/07tomo.html

900-number personal ads aren't working: http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=243

...telephone service cannot be denied for non-payment of 900-number charges.... Many audiotext customers take advantage of the rule to avoid legitimate charges. They simply contact their phone company and contest the charges and, more often than not, that's the end of the story.

Adventures in Asian email: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/wlust/feature/1998/12/cov_06featurea.html

In true Indian style, Manoj and Ali stared unabashedly at the computer screen, reading all my e-mail along with me. As I traveled in India, I soon got used to this. There were very, very few things I could do without an audience.

It took over an hour to download all my e-mail. The true folly of this was only revealed to me the next morning, however, when I was presented with a $300 phone bill.

An argument against webpage parsing: http://www.clearway.com/AdScreen/ [Whump]

We have terminated the AdScreen software and we strongly recommend that Web users do not use any ad-blocking software now or in the future. Simply put: If you love free Web sites, don't block the ads.

(This reminds me of those appeals to click on ads, for the same reason.)

Clinton Body Count plus 33: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/NATION/t000111462.html

A veteran FDA medical officer assigned to evaluate Rezulin, Dr. John L. Gueriguian, recommended rejecting the drug after he documented its potential danger to the liver. Senior FDA officials took the extraordinary step of removing him from the review.

Lovely poem of the day by Louise Gluck: [Messy URL] (expires Monday, but copied complete here:)

12.6.71

You having turned from me
I dreamed we were
beside a pond between two mountains
It was night
The moon throbbed in its socket
Where the spruces thinned
three deer wakened & broke cover
and I heard my name
not spoken but cried out
so that I reached for you
except the sheet was ice
as they had come for me
who, one by one, were likewise
introduced to darkness

And the snow
which has not ceased since
began

Coens do Dickey? http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=2613

"It's in effect a silent movie about a tailgunner in a B-29 who gets shot down over Japan, so for the balance of the movie he's in Japan trying to make his way from the main island to Hokkaido, the north island -- and, for obvious reasons, not talking to anyone."

Overlooked gems of 1998: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-12/06/248l-120698-idx.html

HELL, a novel By Kathryn Davis
JUAREZ The Laboratory of Our Future By Charles Bowden
MYSTERIES OF THE BODY AND THE MIND Stories by John Taylor
CYBERVILLE Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town By Stacy Horn
WAITING IN VAIN, a novel By Colin Channer
THREE SEDUCTIVE IDEAS By Jerome Kagan
OUT OF SHEER RAGE Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence By Geoff Dyer
THIRST, a novel By Ken Kalfus
AND BOTH SHALL ROW Stories by Beth Lordan
EUCALYPTUS, a novel By Murray Bail
THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESS The Conflict Between Word and Image By Leonard Shlain
FRIENDLY FIRE Stories by Kathryn Chetkovich

Plus the best of 1998 in various categories (scandal, politics, Americana, war in the 1990s, medicine, science, literary fiction, writers of color, and thrillers): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-12/06/246l-120698-idx.html

One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, by William Greider (Touchstone). Lost in the shuffle of last year's books and yesterday's market euphoria, this penetrating analysis by a brilliant reporter tells us why the bubble was bound to burst, who has been paying the cost of "prosperity," and how the economic truths we live by are devouring us.

(What's the significance of newspapers' arts sections being so much more liberal than their editorial?)

This Day in Joyce History: In 1903, James asked Thomas Kelly for 2000 pounds to start a newspaper (mentioned in the Dana Portrait)

The five basic Internet emotions:

Yay! - Heh. - Duh! - (Sigh.) - Grrr...

Okay PJ O'Rourke interview: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/12/6/37006.html

Obs: Which of the countries you visited for Eat the Rich did you enjoy most?
PJO: Oh, Hong Kong. It's got that kind of energy to it that New York had back in the Sixties, or the way downtown Chicago was. There's this bustle, like everything's going on, and you see every kind of person imaginable on earth.

And various nominees for the best books of 1998: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/12/6/36970.html

J.G. Ballard: "The most interesting novel of the year was Alex Garland's The Tesseract (Penguin £9.99), a moody psychological tale set in the Philippines, and an intriguing follow-up to his bestselling The Beach. Could Garland be the new Graham Greene? He is now 28, Greene's age when he wrote his early thriller Stamboul Train."

9am to noon CST: This is Hell live RealAudio progressive talk and humor, highly recommended. Scheduled guests:
- Alan Caruba debuts his 'Most Boring Celebrities of 1998' list (awful, sorry)
- Ryan du Val, the Northwestern U student who painted his dorm ceiling like the Sistine Chapel (online pic soon)
- An insider's look at the NWU sports-gambling scandals (okay)
- Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch with their new annual world report (cool!)

Poem of the day is a nice translation of Horace: [Messy URL] (today only)

Faunus, who loves the Nymphs and makes
Them scamper, leap my boundary stakes,
Lightly and benignly pass
Across the sunny fields of grass...

Sweet meandering Studs Terkel interview: http://www.bookwire.com/bbr/bbrinterviews.article$26455 [ALD]

ST: My father was ill, so my mother was a seamstress. His sister married a pretty rich guy. He lent us money. So we bought a rooming house, and then a hotel. And that hotel became my college. The Wells Grand Hotel at the corner of Wells and Grand...

HB: The books don't always retain the interview format. You edit yourself out.
ST: That's the point, how do you make it flow as a soliloquy? The key thing is this: in no way do anything that will alter what that person has in mind. Do you change the sequence? Of course, I change the sequence....

Phone-bots: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1214/6213238a.htm

For smart phone services, the only real difference among the three droids is personality -- Webley speaks in the haughty tones of a British butler; Wildfire uses the voice of an eager-to-please young woman; and Portico, rather blandly, sounds like an upmarket executive secretary. A sign of the times: Phobot personas have sparked debate among the politically correct, with feminists demanding that engineers concoct "gender neutral" voices.

Discount digital cinema success story: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1214/6213168a.htm

The young producers got some help. Satellites and digital projectors for The Last Broadcast's Oct. 23 premiere were lent at no charge by Loral's Cyberstar, Digital Projection Inc. and Texas Instruments. The movie was encoded, beamed to a satellite 22,300 miles up, bounced back to dishes atop the theaters, piped into a Windows server and then shown on digital projectors featuring Texas Instruments' Digital Light Processing.

A Michaelangelo-esque Hubblepic: http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/1998/42/pr-photos.html

NGC 253 is a large, almost edge-on spiral galaxy, and is one of the nearest galaxies beyond our local neighborhood of galaxies. This dramatic galaxy shows complex structures such as clumpy gas clouds, darkened dust lanes, and young, luminous central star clusters.

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

With Ossie and Ruby, by Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee
Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace, by William Greider
The Rum Diary, by Hunter S. Thompson

Yay! Very excellent new first chapter by one of the good guys: http://cnn.com/books/beginnings/9812/fortress.america/index.html

Fortress America The American Military and the Consequences of Peace by William Greider

Defense spending, as one strategic analyst put it, has become "the new third rail of American politics." Most politicians are afraid to touch it.

...Another, perhaps more significant source of stress at Fort Hood involves machines, not people. The wondrous machinery of modern land warfare is assembled here in such gross abundance that it rises to the level of spectacle, an American marvel. The kind of attraction tourists might bring the kids to see. The Grand Canyon of armor power.

Operating a tank in the field, the Army calculates, costs $147 per mile in fuel and repair bills.

"The services appear to be giving away still useful equipment in order to justify procurement of new weaponry," Lumpe and Pineo asserted.

In the design room, the two of us look over the shoulder of Sam Kelley, a computer technician who is programming in code changes for a battle scenario the simulator will stage between the "Blue" forces and the "Red" forces. Blue forces are always the good guys in U.S. military training.

...Why, I ask, aren't they reprogramming the computers, since the Soviet Union no longer exists? Couldn't the simulators evoke a "virtual enemy" of the future? That would be too expensive, Bert Chole admits. "We've been working on it for nine years," he explains.

Millennial turning-point: http://www.guardian.co.uk/millennium/day109.html

King John was a cold, thoroughly dislikable man, indolent and vicious. The great irony of his deplorable reign was that in losing most of the Angevin inheritance in France and uniting the barons in opposition he did more than any of his predecessors to forge a national identity in England.

New Science News includes an interesting look at soy-based diesel fuel

Babe-sequel blame-game: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1204/d_ap_1204_89.sml

Sources said that on the basis of the focus group's responses, Miller shortened the goldfish and near-drowning scenes, toned down the musical score and reduced the screen time for Mickey Rooney's nasty clown. A second screening days later brought a considerably better response.

Duh: http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_228000/228279.stm

"The committee notes with concern that the government of Israel does not accord equal rights to its Arab citizens," the committee says in its observations, adding that Israel's emphasis on being the Jewish state "encourages discrimination and accords a second-class status to its non-Jewish citizens."

Titanic Quake: [multipage] http://www.planetquake.com/titanic/ [NTK]

Here's a list of interesting areas which are all included:
Bridge
Wheel house
1st class smoking room
1st class lounge
Both 1st class grand staircases
Both 2nd class staircases
3rd class staircase at rear
1st class dining room
"Millionaire" suite on B deck, with private promenade deck
Assorted passenger cabins
Crow's nest on front mast (where the lookouts watched for icebergs)
3 first class elevators (select any deck you want interactively)
1 second class elevator (as above)
1st class promenade deck
2nd class promenade deck
The famous curved fence at the bow
Deathmatch support for up to 16 players.

(Winners get a seat in the lifeboats?)

This input device should be combined with this brilliant VR-art project (12 July below): http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_227000/227970.stm

Patients are wired up to lie detector pads by nurses. By relaxing they can control their progress through a virtual bowel on the computer screen. The aim is to progress through the bowel to red spots of pain or bubbly areas representing the bloated feeling suffered by some people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Once the patient has broken through those areas, they emerge into a country scene with a free-flowing stream, symbolising a problem-free bowel.

What is Dan Rather on? http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

If Hillary does not make the nomination for president, Rather suggests that she might be the right choice for Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court!

Video-on-demand can't work with flat-rate access: http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,29533,00.html

The crunch is already biting into some high-bandwidth providers. Cable service @Home recently imposed ten-minute limits on its customers' downloads of broadcast-quality video, saying that the heavy data streams might otherwise interfere with the traditional cable TV signals.

Chaos or worse behind the scenes at Salon? http://www.aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=239 [OSRR]

I believe that the Salon code-phrases, "We're so chaotic here we can't cut you a check or even discuss money with you now!" and "We like you personally, so we'll pay you twice the amount of our initial kill fee agreement" are totally premeditated, well-rehearsed scams practiced by the diligently instructed editorial staff.

I had to look it up: "anodyne" = soothing, or insipid: http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/paper/1998/1204/fea8.html

Boyzone and The Corrs are stymied by their limited powers of expression: the twee cover of The Bee Gees' Words and the anodyne What Can I Do seem completely inadequate.

Trying to classify motives wrt hobbies: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/12/981202154437.htm

Based on surveys with more than 3,000 people about the satisfactions they get from various hobbies, Tinsley obtained numerical scores for values such as "challenge" and "hedonism," and grouped some 82 leisure activities into 11 categories. For example, dining out and watching movies fall into the "sensual enjoyment" category, playing soccer and attending sports clubs meetings satisfy participants' desires for a sense of "belongingness" and coin collecting and baking fulfill their need for "creativity."

This Day in Joyce History: In 1905, James submitted "Dubliners" to Grant Richards for publication.

TV 2nite: ABC spends two hours on 1968!? (nope, Yahoo-tv was showing next Thursday in error) Gump, and John Sayles' Piranha

Meta: A reader asks in the weblogs newsgroup where 'robot wisdom' comes from. I tried to answer there, but hit the wrong button and lost the reply-- basically, I made it up in 1978, and it means 'extreme artificial intelligence'. No 'bot yet, though!

New The Nation

I started boycotting Feed after their redesign, but I see they now have a Lo-Fi version that's pretty readable: http://www.feedmag.com/lofi.html

(They still haven't acknowledged the weblog as one source of their daily links, I don't believe, though.)

Mourning the death of childhood: http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_4_a1.htm [ALD]

"There is no such thing as preadolescence anymore. Kids are teenagers at ten."

The Nickelodeon-Yankelovich Youth Monitor found that by the time they are 12, children describe themselves as "flirtatious, sexy, trendy, athletic, cool." Nickelodeon's Bruce Friend reports that by 11, children in focus groups say they no longer even think of themselves as children.

Teachers complain of ten- or 11-year-old girls arriving at school looking like madams, in full cosmetic regalia, with streaked hair, platform shoes, and midriff-revealing shirts.

"Ninth and tenth grade used to be the starting point for a lot of what we call risk behaviors," says Brooklyn middle-school head Henry Trevor, as he traces the downward trajectory of deviancy many veteran educators observe. "Fifteen years ago they moved into the eighth grade. Now it's seventh grade. The age at which kids picture themselves starting this kind of activity has gone down."

Christie Hogan, a middle-school counselor for 20 years in Louisville, Kentucky, says: "We're beginning to see a few pregnant sixth-graders."

"You go on Internet chat rooms and find ten- and 11-year-olds who know every fashion model and every statistic about them," says Nancy Kolodny, a Connecticut-based therapist and author of When Food's a Foe: How You Can Confront and Conquer Your Eating Disorder. "Kate Moss is their god. They can tell if she's lost a few pounds or gained a few."

Middle school can be a quasi-Orwellian world, where each child is under continual surveillance by his peers, who evaluate the way he walks, the way he looks, the people he talks to, the number of times he raises his hand in class, the grade he got on his science project. If two kids become romantically linked, their doings are communal property....

Many parents negotiate diplomatic compromises, giving in on lipstick, say, while holding the line on pierced navels and quietly trying to represent alternatives. But a surprising number of parents, far from seeking to undermine their children's tweenishness, are enablers of it.

Lively day for progressive portal Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/

Nominees for coolest sites of the year in various categories: [multipage] http://www.coolsiteoftheday.com/csoty/98zine.html [Slashdot]

- Slashdot.Org
- The Digital Journalist
- Omni Magazine
- Vision
- SMUG

Great Progressive Review includes Nixon after the George Wallace shooting, and a don't-miss post-mortem on Espy:

Espy was made ag secretary only after being flown to Arkansas to get the approval of Don Tyson. In office, Espy backtracked on tougher chicken contamination standards.

I'm Joyce-hacking today: (very raw draft, frequent updates) http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/jj/portrait.html

First four anti-Dilbert chapters are up: http://www.freespeech.org/normansolomon/dilbert/book/

1. The Importance of Being Dilbert
2. Laughing All the Way to the Bank
3. A Zany Management Tool
5. A Humorist's View of Dilbert