[Current Weblog]

Robot Wisdom Weblog for December 1998 (waxing)

Short backgrounder on the Mining Company: http://www.atnewyork.com/news.htm

One of the most ambitious local content ventures, the Mining Company has long relied on 600 guides -- essentially company trained but predominantly amateur Webmasters -- to maintain sites devoted to subjects like classic rock, children, barbecue, and yes, celebrity nudes.

Drudge hyperventilates: http://www.drudgereport.com/

WHITE HOUSE HIT WITH NEW DNA TERROR; TEEN TESTED FOR CLINTON PATERNITY

The results from the DNA test are not known. But Danny Williams and his immediate family have reportedly been moved to a secure location, away from media onslaught. [Pic source]

Don't miss: The Legend of Linus Hood: http://www.opensource.org/halloween4.html [Slashdot]

Sheriff: We need a cunning plan. Some way to trap and crush those outlaws. Hmmm...

Vinod: Master, I have an idea. Why don't we write software so complicated and protocols so obscure and undocumented that only we can figure them out?

Sheriff: Yes! Then we will use our superior marketing forces to cram them down everyone's throat, and neither Linus's outlaws nor any other competition will be able to get a toehold in any IT shop anywhere, ever again!

No Need To Know today I guess

Good morning for HoneyGuide includes this archive of very old recordings: http://www.tinfoil.com/archive.htm

Key    Title           Category      Performed by   Circa
07/98  The Charge of   Descriptive   Columbia       1898
       Roosevelt's     selection     Orchestra
       Rough Riders

Teenage girls invade art-comix world: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-01/01/045r-010199-idx.html [OSRR]

To be a high school girl in Los Angeles and be listed as one of the coolest people in this city, well, it is enough to say that for some people that would be the high point of their entire lives. But Maggie is taking advanced-placement European history. So she has seen the mighty come and go. Napoleon, for example. The girl has perspective.

She writes her Bohos in a single marathon session, and then the plots and dialogues go to Flypaper, where artists (John and Jason Waltrip and Byron and Ron Penaranda) do the drawings. Then they get inked and lettered.

Her advice? "Be opinionated. Be true to yourself. Who cares about your little shiny dress thing? Do something productive. Being a teenager is fun. But there's so much pressure now. So much to do, good and bad..." [Pic source]

Surprisingly hip survey of new words: http://chicagotribune.com/leisure/tempo/printedition/article/0,1051,SAV-9901010139,00.html [OSRR]

Shibuya-kei: "A style of Japanese pop music, now successful on the international scene, which copies Western styles in an unorthodox way."

From the Dept of Kibological Edutainment, a semi-serious critique of WebTV: [Deja URL]

The only font on WebTVs is Helvetica (in regular, bold, and <BLACKFACE>); you have three settings for your preferred size, "Small", "Medium", and "Large", which are (I think) 18, 21, and 24 points tall. (Or they would be on a computer with a 72-dots-per-inch screen like an old Mac; on a TV set they would usually be much larger.) The default, of course, is the gigantic "Large".

New Atlantic includes a nice poem, a cute image, and this don't-miss look at revisionist views of the origins of Islam: [multipage] http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99jan/koran.htm

Puin, who had been sent by the German government to organize and oversee the restoration project, recognized the antiquity of some of the parchment fragments, and his preliminary inspection also revealed unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and rare styles of orthography and artistic embellishment. Enticing, too, were the sheets of the scripture written in the rare and early Hijazi Arabic script: pieces of the earliest Korans known to exist, they were also palimpsests -- versions very clearly written over even earlier, washed-off versions. What the Yemeni Korans seemed to suggest, Puin began to feel, was an evolving text rather than simply the Word of God as revealed in its entirety to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century A.D.

"The Koran claims for itself that it is 'mubeen,' or 'clear,'" he says. "But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn't make sense. Many Muslims -- and Orientalists -- will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible..."

Bummer of the Year: Guardian requires registration (RW Weblog says reluctant bye-bye): http://www.guardian.co.uk/about.html

It costs you nothing, and once you have registered for one Guardian Unlimited site you can use them all without filling in another form.

(It would mean I'd have to warn my readers every time I linked, and I'm not willing to do that.)

So... What's the second hippest daily on the Web?

Webcams 2nite: [Messy URL]

Some negative reports on Patch: http://www.graffiti-wv.com/story1.htm [OSRR and Steve Rhodes]

"Other than a mediocre first aid kit they had no way of providing health care for anyone except by calling 911," Johnson said. Johnson said he found only a farmhouse serving as quarters for Gesundheit staff and a composting toilet that didn¹t work. Volunteers were put up in yurts that Johnson considered substandard. He said some slept on mattresses on the floor.

Plus a positive one: http://www.illinimedia.com/di/archives/1996/March/26/opin-patel.html

Currently, Gesundheit is a functioning community with lots of land, beautiful gardens, a lake and a wood shop (the hospital is still a long way off!). Between March and October they have a volunteer program where people from all over the world come and work on the land in return for free room and board for the length of their stay.

Buzzword Watch: Bioinformatics: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/news/trends/t981231a.html

"The huge stockpiles of data on cells, chemicals, microbes, proteins, and DNA sequences are mere bits and bytes until they are turned into usable information by scientists with a solid background in bioinformatics," says Sandra Nierzwicki-Bauer, professor and chair of biology at Rensselaer.

PalmPilot plus cellphone: http://www.qualcomm.com/pdQ/benefits.html [Slashdot]

Also included are custom e-mail, web and Alert Manager applications created for the pdQ smartphone.

Short Patch Adams interview w/Quicktime stuff: http://cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Movies/9812/31/patch.adams/index.html

I tried over a thousand foundations and none of them would fund a hospital that doesn't carry malpractice insurance. I tried, I think, every possible means, from writing stars and politicians that said they were interested in healthcare delivery issues, and I had no luck, and so I made a Faustian contract and now I'm going to the people.

Cool-looking graphic novel: http://www.apbonline.com/mediapatrol/1998/12/17/jinx1217_01.html

In Bendis' new series, Torso, he examines Elliott Ness' time as Safety Director for Cleveland. "Elliot Ness is folklore," says Bendis. Fans of Ness, the real-life inspiration for The Untouchables, will get a real treat as Torso explores a web of prohibition busts, internal corruption and the chilling work of the Torso Killer, whose dismembered victims pop up at Ness' every turn.

We'll see: http://www.thestandard.net/articles/display/0,1449,3015,00.html

Gens envisions Yahoo entering a partnership with Time Warner or CBS, while Microsoft jumps into the fray, buying a major portal to round out its Internet portfolio. Compaq might sell AltaVista, and Infoseek and Lycos might merge. A major global financial services company could buy E-Trade, which enables users to buy and sell stocks online.

NEAR problem diagnosed: http://www.flatoday.com/space/today/n98228.htm

An investigation by mission personnel revealed that the brief engine burn exceeded certain safety limits associated with the onboard system that autonomously controls the spacecraft. This resulted in the engine abort. Reprogramming of these values is now being completed and the spacecraft will be ready for the Jan. 3 burn.

Good day for Obscure Store includes Jim's (and others') doubts about Patch Adams: http://www.nypost.com/gossip/pagesix.htm

One former volunteer says he confronted Adams. "I said, 'Twenty years you've been taking money for this hospital. Where's the money going?'"

I'm going to keep the poll up for a week, to fill out the lower frequencies:

How often do you visit the Robot Wisdom Weblog?
- This is my first time. (4) 6%
- Less than once a week. (1) 1%
- Once or twice a week. (7) 10%
- Almost every day. (26) 39%
- More than once a day. (29) 43%
67 Total Votes

(BillH points out PhilG offers ad-free free polls here.)

Warren Buffett takes a bath of oil: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/99/0111/6301264a.htm

Oil below $10 a barrel is biting into Mexico, Venezuela, Indonesia and all the Middle East oil producers, also Norway. Their 1998 budgets were based on $17 oil. Ten-dollar oil spells deficits in the billions...

All this suggests Buffett is likely to press for another big acquisition before long in order to get some growth.

TV 2nite: Patti Smith on Letterman

No Ernie Pook's Comeek this week, apparently

More Progressive Review:

Tony Snow points out that "high crimes and misdemeanors" comes from the 13th century trial of the Earl of Suffolk and refers to the status of the offender rather than the nature of the crimes. In other words, the crimes and misdemeanors of public big shots are de facto "high."

A few new items at the New Scientist include lunar helium mining: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/981219/nhelium.html

The team thinks there is about a million tonnes of helium-3 on the Moon as a whole, compared with an estimated 20 tonnes in the Earth's deep interior. Miners would need only to heat the lunar soil to liberate helium-3 gas from the pores in the crumbly particles. "There is potentially enough helium-3 on the Moon to power the world for thousands of years," Johnson says.

And a wacky project to build a ten-thousand year clock: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/990102/clock.html

But even elinvar cannot make a torsion pendulum consistent enough to keep time for 10 000 years. So Danny Hillis plans to incorporate a mechanism for synchronising the clock with the Sun. The idea is to catch the Sun's rays at exactly midday every day and focus them onto a metallic plate that will expand and bend. The bending motion will adjust a cog inside the clock, rather like nudging the hands of a conventional clock towards noon.

The clock will have to be cleaned, maintained and possibly even repaired. To this end, all the parts of the clock will be replaceable using skills that have been around for thousands of years -- sand casting with bronze and perhaps some hammering.

New Consortium includes a Dark Alliance update, and a review of the crimes of George Bush: http://www.consortiumnews.com/c122898a.html

In other words, George W.'s foreign policy would likely be an extention of his father's. So, the lingering suspicions about President Bush's involvement in a variety of illegal acts are reasonable issues to weigh when considering George W. Bush's candidacy for the Republican nomination.

Here's that biotech article: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=425826216

Using what scientists call biolistics, a "gene gun" that fires microscopic gold or tungsten cannonballs coated with genetic material into living cells, they had managed to create a cotton plant that manufactures bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), a micro-organism deadly to insects which occurs naturally in the soil and is one of the very few pesticides even organic farmers are allowed to use.

...Growing in laboratories are even more weird and wonderful creations. The Swedes have spliced a gene from a mustard plant into an aspen tree to make it grow faster; the Americans are trying to engineer vaccines into bananas which would immunise the consumer against tropical diseases; the Chinese have "crossed" a flounder with a sugar beet to make it more resistant to cold; mouse genes have been spliced into tobacco, and a chicken gene into potatoes. Human genes have been added to salmon, trout and rice, playing on our darkest dreads.

The first transgenic animals, 21 varieties of fish from abalone to shrimp and rainbow trout, are already being bred in the US, including a supersalmon which has a growth hormone from a Chinook salmon spliced into it. So concerned is British Columbia about the unguessable consequences of these fish escaping into the wild that it has banned their farming in sea pens.

Misguided morons aim to hack Iraq: http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/politics/story/17074.html?wnpg=all

Iraq has no connection to the public Internet, though Iraq Net, an official government homepage, is based in New York. Group members claim to be targeting an older, nonpublic network inside Iraqi borders that they say runs on a vintage protocol called X.25.

(This has to be a put-up job!)

Search-pattern "ICC" retrieves both International Criminal Court and Internet Content Coalition: http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/1998/12/3001-ira.html

Founding member companies of ICC include Adobe, BPI, CBS New Media, CNET Inc., Collier Newfield, ConEx, Digimarc, Digital Strategies, Infonautics, MSNBC, Marvel Online, Playboy Enterprises, Qpass Inc., Reuters New Media, Sony Online, The New York Times, The Weather Channel, Time Inc., Warner Bros. Online, Warner Music Group and ZDNet.

Good backgrounder on Book Magazine: http://chicagotribune.com/leisure/tempo/printedition/article/0,1051,SAV-9812300268,00.html [OSRR]

"We've had runs of 100,000 for the first two issues," Gleason said. "Next year, we hope to be at 150,000, and our goal is to have a circulation of 350,000 in five years."

How the scary half live: http://www.observer.com/cgi-win/homepage.exe?nyo1/gg122898

She was asked if she felt fortunate. "No," she said. "I kind of always feel like the have-not." "Does that mean you feel neglected?" "It means I don't have a jet. It means I don't have a Gulfstream!" She laughed.

(The really scary 0.01%, more like.)

I went looking for a great article at this site about biotech, called "Guess What You've Been Eating", but all I found was a very cool animated gif of twirling DNA: http://www.zero.com.au/agen/

Howard Zinn's ten real reasons to impeach Clinton weren't all familiar to me: http://www.commondreams.org/howardzinn.htm

2. Also in that first year in office, in June of 1993, he sent bombers over Baghdad, claiming it was in response to a planned assassination of former President George Bush, visiting the Middle East. The "evidence" came from the notoriously corrupt Kuwaiti police. The U.S. claimed to be aiming at "Intelligence Headquarters", but the bombs fell on a suburban neighborhood in Baghdad. At least six people were killed, including a prominent Iraqi artist and her husband.

Strongly worded reversal at Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1998-12/30/015r-123098-idx.html [CDreams]

It is time for Congress to admit that it has acted recklessly in pushing FDA to loosen drug approval standards, and to act expeditiously to force the agency to tighten them.

Perl regular expressions continue to evolve: [Deja URL]

Here are some new escapes:

    \z      Match only at end of string, irrespective of \n
    \pP	    Match P, named property.  Use \p{Prop} for longer names.
    \PP	    Match non-P
    \X 	    Match eXtended Unicode "combining character sequence", \pM\pm*
    \C 	    Match a single C char (octet) even under utf8.

A good day for the Moonies: http://www.washtimes.com/politics/inside.html

Serge Schmemann of the New York Times spotted this T-shirt in Moscow: "The I.M.F. Gave My Country $45 Billion, and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt!"

The insurance industry is starting to freak out about global warming: [Deja URL for a bunch of quotes]

"The insurance business is the first in line to be affected by climate change... it could bankrupt the industry." --Franklin Nutter, President of the Reinsurance Association of America

(Unfortunate name!)

Musing: I want an economic system where smalltime independents can safely compete with soulless chains. (How does "You've Got Mail" resolve this?) 'This Is Hell' has been protesting that the neighborhood around the Biograph Theater here in Chicago is getting invaded by chains, and losing its soul.

Meta: One of my goals in starting this weblog project was to scour the Web, compiling a library of URLs that I could refer people to on various topics. This is starting to pay off, though my biggest coup so far was a debate about whether poor people in the USA are better off than middle class people in most countries (that Heritage Foundation study) where I had convenient URLs from the Nation and the Atlantic. In a sense, it's just a more useful way to maintain bookmarks (annotated, chronological).

What I missed on Monday's SCTV: (ats)

1) People's Court: Road Runner Cartoon Defense (J. Flaherty, A. Martin) #109
2) Farm Film Celebrity Blow-up w/Dustin Hoffman/Tootsie (J. Candy, J. Flaherty, M. Short #112
3) Edison Gum Commercial w/Pavarotti (J. Candy) #102
4) Al Peck's Used Fruit (E. Levy) #110
5) Promo: Stretch your Arm- various repeats (orig. Season 3- Show 11)
6) The Days Of The Week- episode 7 #116

This looks very cool: http://hybris.netpedia.net/ [SN]

Hybris is a structured document editor in pre-alpha phase. It begins its existence as a simple text-tree editor, alias a "knowledge base editor". It aims to become strongly-typed, and to be used as a abstract UI tool for applications. It is covered by the GNU General Public License (GPL). It is being written in the Perl language, using the GIMP ToolKit (Gtk) GUI libraries.

NEAR's next trick: http://near.jhuapl.edu/news/flash/98dec28_1.html

The NEAR spacecraft will attempt a rendezvous maneuver during a window of opportunity opening Dec. 31, 1998, and closing on Jan. 10, 1999.

An outsider's view of a commercial-website agency: [multipage] http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/98/dec/1230/feat.htm

John Gaylor, the CEO of Gaylor Electric in Carmel, Ind., said that one company tried to charge him $70,000 to build a web site. "I didn't want some superfancy web site," he says. "Now I pay $25 a month and I pop up on everything." [meaning search engines, I think]

(For the insider's view, read Philip Greenspun's book!)

Kibological edutainment, about "garlic's retarded little brother": [Deja URL]

Asafetida is usually sold as a 'compounded' powder, where it's mixed with something like 99.99999999% wheat flower and anti-caking agent so that you can add microscopic quanities of it from a shaker -- and the flour helps keep it visible so you won't accidentally overseason. One company sells it also mixed with tumeric (a.k.a natural yellow dye, fake mustard, and/or fake saffron) as "YELLOW POWDER".

No NY Observer this week?

Gorgeous clear Astropic of a misty galaxy (and I figured out how to keep these links from expiring next day!): http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap981230.html

This Day in Joyce History: In 1891, after the fight depicted in Portrait I, Dante Riordan left the Joyce household. In ?1893 in Ulysses, Rudy Bloom was born. In 1916, Portrait was published. In 1931, Jack Joyce (father) died.

Funny recap of 1998 in the UK: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/12/30/40309.html

When he was a boy, Rupert Murdoch supplemented his pocket money by catching water-rats and selling their skins at sixpence a time. Little Rupert's other lucrative wheeze was to collect horse-dung from the family's paddocks, put it in bags and flog it to the neighbours. Hasn't changed much, has he?

No new Onion for two more weeks!

TV 2nite: The funniest Simpsons I've seen yet is the really early one where they go to family therapy and end up shocking the bejeezus out of each other.

Awesome inventory of specialty search-engines includes these categories and many more: http://www.leidenuniv.nl/ub/biv/specials.htm [Coppersky]

American political rhetoric - Archaeology - Audio, Midi, MP3 - Birds, birding - Books - Celebrities - Cheese - Cigars - Cybercafes - Dance - Fashion - Humor - Mysticism - Orchids - Weather - Women - Work - Y2K

New Village Voice includes these depressing items on Washington politics: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9853/ridgeway.shtml

Take the C-130 transport, built near Newt Gingrich's Georgia district. Although since 1978 the Air Force has requested only five of these planes, Congress has authorized the purchase of 256 of them, leading Republican senator John McCain of Arizona to remark that so many have been bought that "we could use them to house the homeless."

And enough Silicon Alley blind items to make your head spin: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9853/bunn.shtml

What homegrown million-dollar content project -- a book, television show, and game partly underwritten by Microsoft -- has vanished without a trace, even while its radio broadcast continues on NPR?

Woo! First chapter of "Word Virus: the William S. Burroughs reader": http://cnn.com/books/beginnings/9812/word.virus/index.html

As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.

...Fact is, I had gotten a real sickener -- as Paul Lund, an English gangster I knew in Tangier, would put it ... "A young thief thinks he has a license to steal and then he gets a real sickener like five years maybe."

Rabbi okays deleting name of god: http://www.foxnews.com/news/international/1229/i_ap_1229_55.sml

According to Jewish law, printed matter with the word -- "elohim'' in Hebrew, and its manifestations in any other language -- must be stored, or ritually buried.

The existence of the magazine -- a pun that means both "Good Computer'' and "Worthy Thinking'' -- reflects the growing incursion of modern implements into the world of the ultra-Orthodox.

December Harper's Index is unsurprising: http://www.harpers.org/harpers-index/listing.html

- Chances that a U.S. film with male Arab or Muslim characters depicts them as greedy, violent, or dishonest : 19 in 20
- Number of years it took before Disney's planned community of Celebration, Florida, experienced its first violent crime : 2
- Number of days this year during which Norway's Prime Minister Kjell Bondevik was "too depressed" to work : 24

Colors: I got enough 'no' votes to change this background color (2), but then I realised it's so close to the end of its natural term that I'm simply going to censure it, instead. "Bad CCFF66! You look icky on some platforms!"

TV 2nite: Later presents SCTV

New Russian sexual politics: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/12/29/40036.html

Zhirinovsky also proposes an official role for middle-aged women in deflowering teenage boys. 'This is the ideal sexual combination,' he writes.

New New York magazine: http://www.nymag.com/This_Week/view.asp?id=2032

Meta: Looking over the last few months, my major sources of links have been:

1. Obscure Store (by a mile)
2. Slashdot
3. Scripting News
4. Common Dreams
5. Arts and Letters Daily
6. Association of Alternative Newsweeklies
7. (tie) Drudge and Whump
9. Need To Know
10. (tie) NASA Watch and Spike

(HoneyGuide gets special mention because I don't usually borrow specific links. Also, the content publishers themselves will require a separate list. And I don't track NewsHub or NewsLinx links because they're so plentiful. See ShortTakes:Sources above for URLs... though I plan to redo that page shortly, in Windowseat style.)

Pay-per-listen audiobooks require special plugin: [Messy URL]

Now he's busy creating technology that lets you listen to publications such as the Wall Street Journal as well as such audio treasures as John Cleese reading Dante's "Inferno" or Walt Whitman reading his own "Leaves of Grass," with Thomas Edison on the sound board.

(The Whitman recording is suspect, actually.)

Yay! Secrets of NewsLinx and NewsHub revealed: http://www.brandweek.com/interactive/iqnews06.asp

[NewsLinx:] When the bots bring in headlines, Lexington, Ky.-based human editors go over them, rewriting some, discarding most because of duplication or because they aren't of interest to Net pros, ending up with about 100 headlines a day reported within minutes of their posting.

Millennial History making up missed days: http://www.guardian.co.uk/millennium/day130.html

NT virus ups the ante: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/98/12/27/stiinnnws01004.html?1334425

"This new virus is thousands of lines long. It's got half a megabyte of code in it. We've been through the code now and it is clear this guy really knows what he is doing and probably has a lot more tricks up his sleeve. It is worrying."

Alex Cockburn defends Rigoberta Menchu: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/OPINION/t000118079.html [CDreams]

One comes to the end of Stoll's book with the thought that he should have learned from Rigoberta to be more open about his own political agenda, which appears to stem from America's culture wars and a desire to demolish an icon of the left. Menchu survives his scrutiny, and even Stoll is forced in his conclusion to acknowledge her achievement...

The Diet Coke conspiracy: http://www.dorway.com/guilford.html

Gulf War Syndrome is aspartame poisoning. Approximately 45,000 to 100,000 of 697,000 Americans who served in the Gulf War, Desert Storm are suffering from aspartame (Equal, NutraSweet) poisoning because they drank diet soda which, unstable in the desert heat changed into a toxic cocktail of methanol, formaldehyde, formic acid and DKP.

They shoulda thoughta this thirty years ago: http://www.cdrepair.com/ [MacWorld-approved]

Wipe Out! removes the scratches which cause your Music CDs, CD-ROM Data, or Multimedia Discs to skip or misload. With Wipe Out!, you will restore CDs that were lost forever...

Gorgeous Astropic: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap981227.html

M2-9, a butterfly planetary nebula 2100 light-years away shown in representative colors, has wings that tell a strange but incomplete tale. In the center, two stars orbit inside a gaseous disk 10 times the orbit of Pluto. The expelled envelope of the dying star breaks out from the disk creating the bipolar appearance.

Still opportunities to kick Dick Nixon around a little longer: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1998-12/27/045r-122798-idx.html [Drudge]

Lawyers for the Nixon estate took the assault calmly. They are seeking as much as $213 million for the late president's tapes and papers...

Later, after expressing his low expectations for Mexicans, Nixon added: "That's the problem, finding a Mexican that is honest. And Italians have somewhat the same problem."

Matt Groening interview: http://www.nytimes.com/partners/aol/mag/article8.html [OSRR]

Q: How do you respond to critics who consider Bart Simpson a dreadful role model for children?

A: I now have a 7-year-old boy and a 9-year-old boy, so all I can say is, I apologize. Now I know what you guys were talking about. My standard comment is, If you don't want your kids to be like Bart Simpson, don't act like Homer Simpson.

Arcade game for dancers: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/12/27/39944.html

There are four flashing foot panels on the floor and the screen to tell you when and where to hop on them. Whether you flop or pass on to the next level depends on how closely you can follow the directions - a complex and exhausting task. "It's great fun," says Miki Yamada, a schoolgirl with dyed hair and blue contact lenses. "I never bothered with video arcades before as they are a bit gloomy, but this is bright and lively and you get to use your whole body."

Two big thumbs down for Patch, from Siskel and Ebert

Strong opening for Patch: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

1.  PATCH ADAMS         $8.090  OPEN
2.  STEPMOM             $5.925  OPEN
3.  YOU'VE GOT MAIL     $5.015  -17%  $034.555 SINCE OPENING
4.  FACULTY             $4.270  OPEN
5.  PRINCE OF EGYPT     $4.145  -04%  $028.881
6.  MIGHTY JOE YOUNG    $3.140  OPEN

(Prince has legs, too.)

Jakob Nielsen's site-a-day-or-less weblog is a tad heavy on the self-congratulation: http://www.useit.com/hotlist/spotlight.html

It is particularly interesting to notice that almost every single press release announcing the redesign of a major website states that faster download was one of the main design goals.

..."AOL.com" is a completely personality-driven book that spends more paragraphs on the restaurants people dined at while negotiating a deal than on analyzing the implications of that deal for how people use networked computers. As an example, the book has multiple portrait photos of Steve Case and other AOL executives but no screen shots of the changing design of the service over the years (or comparative screen shots showing how CompuServe and Prodigy looked at the time - even though such screens would have been compelling evidence for why AOL won).

(And why doesn't he leave whitespace between items???)

Smart preview of Thin Red Line: http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=2717

Malick has made a $70 million poem about any number of themes. The film deals with the idea that man's nature is to be at war while our ideal is to be at peace. It deals with the idea that nature is a constant, beautiful force that no war of ours can truly touch. It deals with the way men make an island of themselves during war, holding on to whatever image or memory or desire they need to get them through alive. And that's just scratching the surface. This is a film that is literally drowning in ideas... and that's a good thing.

Department of Unforeseen Consequences: http://www.foxnews.com/news/international/1226/i_ap_1226_65.sml

Rising juvenile crime, suicides and other behavioral problems have many Chinese questioning the wisdom of the government's policy of controlling population growth by limiting most urban families to one child. In just a single generation, five-child extended families have shrunk to single-child nuclear families in the cities. Some "little emperors'' end up smothered by the attention of their well-meaning parents. Others are left with little supervision or emotional support.

Enlarged detail of a nifty 500k map of the Net: http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/~ches/map/ [via Wired]

These paths change over time, as routes reconfigure and the Internet grows. We are preserving this data, and plan to run the scans for a long time. The database should help show how the Internet grows. We think we can even make a movie of this growth.

...If you view it with the Unix tool xv, you can press the center button of your mouse and point at an interesting pixel. The RGB values displayed are the first three octets of the IP address.

The centrally located pinkish mass is MCI...

A pretty good anti-millionaire-balloonists rant: [Deja URL]

Excuse me, but could someone please tell me exactly why I should give an airborne fornication about a couple of rich white guys who periodically get into a large balloon and attempt to travel 'round the world?

South Park topples Spice Girls: http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/8800.htm

Despite getting little or no radio airplay in some markets, the controversial song by "Chef" is rushing up the charts. In Britian, the song - called "Chocolate Salty Balls" - is expected to topple the Spice Girls as No. 1-selling single this week. [Lyrics] [RealAudio]

I mailed and posted my suggestions to Dvorak: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=425924871

John Dvorak has issued a call for proposals for a new Dewey Decimal System, for the Web. It's clear to me that the only place to start is by copying Yahoo's hierarchy, with a meta-tag like:

<META name="yahoo" content="Computers_and_Internet:Internet:World_Wide_Web:etc">

But in the longer term, this will need a lot of work...

Don't miss: Excellent long backgrounder on the Furby: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.09/furby_pr.html [via HG]

"There was a real schism," recalls Stewart Sims, a balding, buttoned-down senior vice president of marketing at Tiger. "Some of us absolutely loved it, and some felt it was outside our normal area of success. We'd never done a plush before."

Not many toys get the green light at Tiger. Of every 200 that are presented to the company's inventor relations rep, only about 10 make it to the executive committee. Of those, Tiger proceeds with just two. And as the development process continues, one usually gets dropped...

At Toy Fair, every showroom contains a television to screen the ads that will accompany each toy, and buyers tend to devote more time and attention to the ads than to the actual toys in front of them. "On a lot of toys, especially new introductions, the TV commercial is more important than the toy itself" ... Analyst McGowan estimates that Tiger spent as much as $5 million developing Furby and shooting its prototype commercial but that it will spend at least another $10 million - 25 percent of the toy's projected first-year sales - introducing it to children on TV.

Using a CAD and manufacturing system called Pro/E, Hasbro technicians have helped Tiger convert 2-D design drawings to 3-D. This enables Tiger to send a Zip disk of Pro/E schematics directly to its factories. There, the disks will be fed directly into a machine that cuts the tools that make Furby.

Furby Autopsy FAQ: http://www.phobe.com/furby/faq2.html

Are you aware that the empty furby skin (pictured on the Cause Of Death page) looks a lot like "Dogbert" from Scott Adams' "Dilbert" cartoons?

(Guaranteed: We'll see a line of Dilbert-furbies before the millennium...)

9am to 1pm CST: This is Hell live RealAudio progressive funny talk radio, with reruns of interviews with: Gary Webb (Contra-CIA-crack conspiracy), April Oliver (CNN-Tailwind), Andrew Ross (Salon editor), Terry Jones (of Monty Python), Kelly Beatty (of Sky & Telescope magazine), Reed Brody (Human Rights Watch), Mark Potok (Southern Poverty Law Center) and Professor Lawrence Marshall (death penalty opponent)

Here's a comment from February: [Deja source]

Back before electricity, people used to send messages from hilltop to hilltop, over long distances, by building signal-fires...

This new network of web-surfers who maintain newspages (mostly using Frontier scripting language, as far as I can tell) are the web reincarnation of this-- scanning each others' pages to pick up hot tips (http's!) that we can then pass quickly along...

American Heritage salutes the inventor of TV-syndication-- Desi Arnaz: http://www.americanheritage.com/98/dec/022.htm

When Cinderella, the only television musical written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II (grandson of the impresario), had its one performance, on March 31, 1957, 107 million Americans watched it. That's more people than had seen all the theatrical productions of Rodgers and Hammerstein's first musical, Oklahoma!, throughout the world since the original had opened on Broadway fourteen years earlier to the day.

And they give three long (somewhat muted) pages to the Rat Pack: http://www.americanheritage.com/98/dec/052.htm

Frank Sinatra was named Pack Master; Lauren Bacall, Den Mother; Judy Garland, Vice President; Swifty Lazar, Treasurer and Recording Secretary. Humphrey Bogart was Rat in Charge of Public Relations. He declared the Rat Pack was formed "for the relief of boredom and the perpetuation of independence. We admire ourselves and don't care for anyone else."

Like the Pony Express and the cattle drives, the Rat Pack's legend seems all out of proportion to their fairly skimpy history. In 1960 there was the Vegas Summit, a Miami Summit at the Fontainebleau, a TV special featuring the much-ballyhooed first post-Army appearance of Elvis Presley, and the premiere of their first movie, Ocean's 11. That summer they sang the national anthem to open the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles...

(Is there a tape of that!?)

Professional complaint-letter writer: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1226/d_ap_1226_19.sml

She charges $20 per 100 words and $50 per hour for preparation. It's money well spent, according to some of her clients.

Kibo's Excellent Adventure: [Deja URL]

As a certifiable billionaire, it is my duty to announce that I plan to be the first person to travel all the way around Usenet in a hot-air balloon. I will start at the first newsgroup, 3dfx.d3d.drivers, and progress in a zee-ward direction through alt.* and comp.* and sci.* and so on up to zippo.general, at which point I will return to 3dfx.d3d.drivers and attempt to land...

Appropriate architecture: http://www.usnews.com:80/usnews/issue/981228/28susa.htm

She will ask clients to carry a tape measure and notebook for several weeks, to record the dimensions and details of spaces that make them especially comfortable -- or squirmy. She also has them keep a precise log of where they currently spend time at home. The analysis often surprises people...

Her website is way hip: [multipage] http://www.notsobighouse.com/box.html

Kids understand implicitly the pleasures of a cozy nook. Adults can learn something from our children as we go about designing our homes.

Mr Greenspun Builds His Dream Office (and learns a lesson about Gateway): http://photo.net/wtr/collaboration-machines.html

My architectural wish list since 1993: Every place that people congregate should have a Web browser, permanently connected to the Internet, with a display large enough to be seen by all present...

Meta: One thing I really like about keeping a weblog is how it mirrors aspects of my personality I couldn't see any other way.

Extra-savvy predictions about next year's buzz: http://www.atnewyork.com/atny10.htm

Interactive Connection: Has staked out an important niche -- streaming licensed content between Web sites so the seems don't show -- and is now prepared to leverage its early advantage.

And last year's newest buzzwords: http://www.atnewyork.com/viewpoin.htm

- Value Proposition
- Monetize: "How do you intend to monetize your audience?"
- Pre-revenue
- Viral

Fun Need To Know includes 1999 predictions: http://www.ntk.net/

Job's rumoured disdain for the buying public confirmed when he refers to Macs as "The Computer For The Rest of You".

Cute Anti-Math wannabe from a Media Lab overachiever: http://www.ventrella.com/Ideas/grammar.html [via NTK]

ADJECTIVE NOUN VERBING ADVERBLY

And another: http://www.ventrella.com/Ideas/attractions.html

An accidental "-" where a "+" should have been caused the two planets to chase each other around the solar system like a pair of cartoon characters. The effect of this simple program, and this serendipitous bug, was so amusing, and depicted so much "character", that I decided to develop it into a microworld, where a user could tweak the "+", and "-" values. These variables constitute the fear and desire knobs in the present system.

I love this pic of Earth and Moon: http://komadori.planet.kobe-u.ac.jp/~inada/MIC/0718_e.html

Excellent, bitter Chiquita wrap-up: http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=271

Anonymous sources said that Beaupre had reported Gallagher's actions to Enquirer lawyers, but no one thought the actions were serious enough to derail the Chiquita project.

So Gallagher agreed to give up the names of his anonymous sources - people, it's assumed, he promised he would not name in the Chiquita stories - in exchange for less or no jail time. ...He will be sentenced in March.

The Onion's AV Club makes prank calls to drug hotlines: http://avclub.theonion.com/avclubarchive/drugwar.html

Council on Drug Abuse: Have you noticed any changes in him? What made you suspicious?
Onion: Well, he's been awfully creative lately. He's been drawing a lot, writing poetry, and playing in a rock 'n' roll band.

The first chapter of Pagan Kennedy's novel is pretty readable slacker sociology: http://www.sjmercury.com/books/chapter1/docs/chapter1_kennedy.htm

"Jesus," Sean had said, touching the marks. "What did she do to you, man?" "It's her bed," Hank had explained, glowing with that new-relationship optimism. "Her bed is like the five-cent box at the Salvation Army. You wouldn't believe it. She does all her projects while she's lying under the covers. She's got everything in there -- glue stick, scissors, toys."

Apparently-unused Yahoo-like name:

AnyHoo

(I was gonna use Me2Hoo.)

A Truman Show that might have been: http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=2708

He is beginning to suspect all is not right with his world, and that everybody around him knows his identity. So he grabs Annabella Sciorra's baby and this is where Gary Oldman went nuts, screaming: "SAY MY NAME! I KNOW YOU KNOW ME! SAY MY NAME!"

Kibo presents Spot's Eighth First Christmas, including a Siamese twin with a tattoo that says, "I'm with stupid": http://www.kibo.com/kibofic/spot_xmas_8.html

Then Spot caught mange from his Furby and died.

December Boardwatch includes Dvorak's call for a Web-wide content-classification system: [multipage] http://boardwatch.internet.com/mag/98/dec/bwm33.html

I'm open to any suggestions and white papers that may touch on this subject. And I may put together a foundation myself. Anyone interested in helping can email me at content@dvorak.org. Apparently, this is the only way that darn Zinfandel site will ever be found by anyone.

Yay! NEAR spacecraft delivers asteroid pix: http://near.jhuapl.edu/iod/000/index.html

The smallest resolved detail is approximately 1650 feet (500 meters) across.

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

- Four novels from historical romantic novelist Nora Roberts: The MacGregor Brides, The MacGregor Grooms, The MacGregors: Serena and Caine, and The Winning Hand.
- The Stone Raft, by Jose Saramago. The latest from the acclaimed Portugese novelist.
- Dr. Atkins' New Carbohydrate Gram Counter, by Robert C. Atkins. You'd think he'd have answered all our diet questions about 20 books ago.
- One Man's Chorus, by Anthony Burgess. A collection of previous uncollected writings from the author of A Clockwork Orange.

Even more fashionable math: http://www.phillynews.com:80/inquirer/98/Dec/20/lifestyle/MATH20.htm

Next year, Givenchy will introduce nationwide a fragrance for men it calls Pi. Named after the Greek symbol, it represents the number 3.1415 (ad infinitum) and, proclaim its marketers, "never-ending exploration."

Lots of fun glitches in the new Risks Digest: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.13.html

New The Nation features European leftism, and this Calvin Trillin ditty:

In every century, it seems,
The Constitution's put to test.
Important questions must be asked,
And ours is, "Did he touch her breast?"

And Lester Thurow foresees risks to the US economy from the start of the Euro: http://www.thenation.com/issue/990111/0111THUR.HTM

But after January, the Federal Reserve Board may need to raise interest rates to prevent a run on the dollar just when it should be lowering them to prevent the economy from slipping into a recession.

(I think my New Year's resolution will be to understand the global economy.)

Drudge sneaks Enquirer scoop: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

"Hillary just snapped. She lost it and smacked the President upside the head. He was stunned. The hit was so hard it left a visible bruise, and he put on makeup for several days to cover the red spot."

X-Files sneak preview (partial spoilers): http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/7398.htm

Sources close to the show say the revision of the "X-Files" deliberately confusing plot line will begin in February with a two-part episode that will tie up loose ends in the show about aliens and government conspiracies.

Steve Bogart's fine weblog got moved without me noticing: http://nowthis.com/log/ [Windowseat]

Very neat one-page review of 1998's highlights for Linux-fans: http://www.lwn.net/1998/1224/timeline.html [Whump]

(Especially "Linux according to Jesse Berst"!)

Mind-It encourages you to sign up subscribers to your own pages. http://www.netmind.com/html/webmasters.html

Thousands of Webmasters are using Mind-it's "change detection" technology to provide their site with a free automatic update service requiring very little work and no monetary investment. All you do is copy the HTML source code for one of the Mind-it buttons shown later on this page.

(I'm not sure which of my pages I'd use this on. Maybe my site-tour, or my page of Joyce-links.)

Musing: I think I favor some form of school vouchers, as a solution to public-school mediocrity. There'd have to be a guarantee that a certain level would be maintained in the public schools, though. And schools that got the vouchers would have to guarantee the human rights of every student, so if a black kid went to a white-power school, and got picked on, their voucher-privileges would be revoked. (This should work better than the current system, for inspiring tolerance!)

Cute four-letter-word Xmas joke: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/Dec/innkeeper.html

A primary school was putting on the Christmas play with the full Mary, Joseph and wise men in a manger stuff. There was an argument between two boys (aged about 5 years) as to who was to be the Inn-Keeper and who was to be Joseph...

I bought the December MacWorld for its fantastic game-demos CD, but the magazine-content is so lame I have to predict doom for the platform. Unless, maybe, OS X inspires a stronger hacker community.

False-color pyrotechnics: http://exosci.com/news/120.html

Resembling an aerial fireworks explosion, this dramatic NASA Hubble Space Telescope picture of the energetic star WR124 reveals it is surrounded by hot clumps of gas being ejected into space at speeds of over 100,000 miles per hour.

The Bible gets the graphic-novel treatment: http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/paper/1998/1224/fea5.html

...see (and hear) the transformation by which evil spirits afflicting the man called Legion are transferred to the herd of squealing pigs and enjoy the wry comment that this was "a fact not unnoticed by the pig keeper", who, as he leaves us, screams, in the idiom of the genre, "Yaaargg!"

Grrr: Mind-It let me down wrt Lingua Franca, for at least the last two issues, which included the strange economics of endangered species: http://www.linguafranca.com/9812/fn.html

For example, using contingent-valuation surveys (a series of questions wherein people are asked to put a value on their preferences), one study showed that the average person was willing to pay $95 for spotted owl preservation but only a measly $6 to save the striped shiner (a fish).

Put another way, to preserve all currently threatened species we would have to be willing to pay more than half our GDP.

And a don't-miss look at the biology of death-and-sex: http://www.linguafranca.com/9811/hypo.html

Other parts of the picture -- like the Hayflick limit, the number of times a somatic cell can divide before its self-destruct program goes into effect -- have been supplied since. A complete and superbly written account of it all can be found in Sex and the Origins of Death (Oxford, 1996), by UCLA microbiologist William R. Clark.

Our brains -- the seat of our consciousness, of our selves -- are made up of components intent on commiting suicide as they become genetic garbage.

In the mid-1960s it was discovered, to the horror of medical researchers, that hundreds of published scientific papers supposedly describing how certain heart cells or liver cells behaved were actually about HeLa cells. ... The number of them around the world today (and in space!) defies comprehension. Each contains a genetic blueprint for constructing Henrietta Lacks -- who died back in 1951.

And another don't-miss piece, on the academic study of vibrators: http://www.linguafranca.com/9811/fn.html

The sometimes eyebrow-raisingly medieval-looking thrummers were designed for doctors, to speed up a laborious task they had performed for centuries -- the medical production of female orgasm, a.k.a. "the hysterical paroxysm."

At one point, her dean in liberal studies publicized a grant she had received by announcing merely that she would study "the impact of small appliances in the home."

Nice PG-rated nude of the day: http://www.nervemag.com/photoday/

And unique views of a rocket takeoff as the Astropic: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap981224.html

This Day in Joyce History: In 1902, James interrupted his Paris adventures for an Xmas trip home.

TV 2nite: Later presents SCTV

Excellent newbie-intro to Linux and the GNOME desktop project, with plenty of tidbits for non-newbies, too: http://www.techreview.com/articles/jan99/mann.htm [Slashdot]

By the early 1990s, though, the GNU project was foundering. It had created scores of programs that were used all over the world -- but had not produced the heart, or "kernel," of the GNU operating system. Part of the reason was that Stallman had chosen not to duplicate the tried and true Unix kernel but to base the GNU system on an advanced, experimental kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University.

"One hour of work on Windows 98 means 15 minutes of working on functionality, and 45 minutes of checking on DOS compatibility, Windows 3.1 compatibility, and Windows 95 compatibility. One hour of work on GNOME is one hour of functionality."

No new New Scientist this week

Brand new Chomsky comment on Iraq: http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1998/12/21/981221-nc.htm (map)

In this case there was not even a pretense. Rather, the US and its client simply informed the world that they are criminal states, and that the structure of binding international law and conventions that has been laboriously constructed over many years is now terminated.

Comparison-shopping-for-books utility is a little sluggish but very effective, sorting by total price and including shipping details: http://www.acses.com/i2b.htm [Whump]

New NY Observer

Scriptable meta-boardgame engine: http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/17001.html [SN]

While the 292 plug-in games and puzzles shipped with the software are a far cry from a zillion, the company hopes that the framework will encourage users to create new games, as well as to download others from the company Web site.

Its artificial intelligence engine is designed to be a strong opponent in all games, not just one.

New Ernie Pook's Comeek is readable:

"Today we're in Trailer 74 making holiday ornaments with Twistina..."

Norman Solomon's 1998 P.U.-litzer Prizes: http://www.sfbg.com/MediaBeat/44.html [OSRR]

Silliest Poll Question: In January, Fox News asked the public to rule on Monica Lewinsky: an "average girl" or a "young tramp looking for thrills"?

TV 2nite: Later presents SCTV

Solar-storm studies converge: http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/msfc-swsm.html

"This is the first time we've been able to observe the Sun hurling these roiling bubbles of plasma, see the storm hit Earth's upper atmosphere, and measure the effects of low-energy oxygen and other gases being blown into space," Spann said.

More new computer music RealAudio samples: http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_240000/240642.stm

One of its most ambitious compositions has been a symphony in the style of Mozart, which some have called the Austrian composer's 41st.

A news story on the real Patch Adams, with pic: http://www.thedartmouth.com/issues/012498/1.23.n.laughter.html (Steve Rhodes)

He and his wife turned their home into a hospital open 24 hours a day. Adams, who said he feels more like a clown than a doctor said he never charged any money for the services he and his team provided for the five to 50 people staying at his home every night.

No new Onion tonight

TV 2day: Tori on Rosie O (bogglingly good); Lily Tomlin on Roseanne (unwatchable)

Request: Is there any speculation on the Net about hacking Bill Gates' new house?

The Voice calls Patch Adams "the year's most repugnant movie" which is unfortunate because the real guy is heroic (I think). His website is apparently in flux: http://www.well.com/user/achoo/

The Gesundheit! Institute mission is to inspire people to change their world through sustaining joyful service.

TV lastnite: Alt.tv.sctv has analysed last night's episode: [Deja URL]

Liberace Christmas Special Promo- (#1, from #94/ Staff Christmas Party)
The Fella Who Couldn't Wait for Christmas- (#3, from Christmas #111)
Libby Wolfson's Hannukah Show- (#13, from Christmas #111)
Great White North:Beer Nog- (#3, from #94/Staff Christmas Party)
Lola's Love Spirit Christmas Promo- (#2, from #111/ Christmas)
Pre-Teen World Christmas Promo- (#10, from #111/ Christmas)

(I can't stay up that late, alas, nor do I have a VCR.)

New Village Voice includes an excellent look at how pure biochemistry has produced a miracle cure for the flu: http://www.villagevoice.com/features/9852/schoofs.shtml

Elizabeth and her daughter had been sick for a day and a half when they took the experimental drug, called a neuraminidase inhibitor, made by pharmaceutical giant Glaxo Wellcome. "Twenty-four hours later, or even less, we were up and walking around," Elizabeth recalls.

Finally, after testing thousands of these variants, they hit the jackpot: a decoy that operates only in infected cells. Amazingly, one of the virus's own enzymes activates the drug, which then paralyzes the virus and kills the infected cell.

And Hoberman on Malick's Red Line: http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/9852/hoberman.shtml

Malick's version -- which unavoidably references the great, flawed Vietnam visions of Apocalypse Now and (especially) Platoon -- is, however, anachronistic in a different way. Not exactly timeless and not primarily a narrative, it's a head movie about death and dying.

Question: When the new IPv6 scheme is adopted, won't that be worse than cookies, because your precise identity will be associated with your IP number?

Hot gossip re Livingston's resignation: http://www.nypostonline.com/gossip/travis.htm

The allegations reportedly are that Livingston had his extramarital affairs with female lobbyists and/or women paid by lobbyists. These charges are far more serious than "casual" adultery. It could be alleged Livingston was swapping access to himself and fellow lawmakers for sex - quite possibly an impeachable offense.

Online Journalism Review seems to be down today

Prince of Egypt disappoints at box office: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/BUSINESS/t000116552.html [Drudge]

But competitors say that given what DreamWorks is believed to have spent on producing and marketing, the movie would need to gross well over $100 million domestically to turn a profit, which may prove challenging.

Because of its serious subject matter, "Prince of Egypt" had no toy or fast-food tie-ins, which studios like Disney count on to boost revenue and promote the movie.

Some industry observers suggest there's a direct correlation between DreamWorks' spending on "Prince of Egypt" and Katzenberg's personal involvement in making and selling the movie.

Christian Movieguide finds Prince of Egypt "exemplary": [Messy URL] (ark)

...violence done very effectively but tastefully so that the audience knows that the first born are being killed & that the angle of death is passing by but don't see the gruesome act of violence...

Dvorak silliness on domain names: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak/jd.htm

For goofy lovey-dovey sites, hellokitty.com is gone, but hellodoggy.com is available. So is ilovejoanie.com (not that I love anyone named Joanie!). This sounds like a Valentine's gift idea, if you ask me! Showing that the Web is used mostly for good rather than evil, lovelove.com and lovelovelove.com are taken while hatehate.com and hatehatehate.com are open. As of this writing, though, lovelovelovelove.com is available! (But not for long, I'd guess.)

A smart synopsis of Shakespeare in Love: http://magazines.enews.com/magazines/new_yorker/archive/981221-001.html

And at that point I stopped fighting "Shakespeare in Love," which, as you may have gathered, is a fantasia about the composition of the world's most famous love story. The filmmakers proceed from the philistine but undeniably useful idea that Shakespeare could not have simply imagined an overpowering and tragic love, that he must have experienced it, and that what happened between him and Viola in bed and in conversation shaped "Romeo and Juliet." (Actually, Shakespeare lifted the plot from a well-known poem, which was based on Italian and French prose versions.)

Meta: Among the Frontier users here, do people use outline mode or text mode? I couldn't deal with the unwrappable paragraphs in outline mode, so I use only text... but the word processor really sucks. I guess I have to figure out how to link BBEdit or Nisus...

eBay's growing dark side: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/12/22/BU32382.DTL [OSRR]

Yet a growing number of critics -- who derisively call the company "eBad" and "ePay" -- say what's keeping eBay aloft is hot air and charge that fraud is rampant on the popular online auction site.

"They don't have a central file of suspensions, so the thieves are on an honor system."

No new NY Review of Books till next Monday

The Onion's bestsellers of 1998: [image only] http://www.theonion.com/onion3420/infograph_3420.html [HG]

5. Chamomile Tea For The Broken Heart

Chomsky on Iraq, the UN, 'rogue states', and Cuba, from earlier this year: http://www.worldmedia.com/archive/articles/z9804-rogue.html [CDreams]

A liberal dove who reached national prominence as an opponent of the Vietnam War, Senator John Kerry explained that his current stand was consistent with his earlier views. Vietnam taught him that the force should be used only if the objective is "achievable and it meets the needs of your country." Saddam's invasion of Kuwait was therefore wrong for only one reason: it was not "achievable," as matters turned out.

...But the common charge that Israel, particularly its current government, is violating UN 242 and the Oslo Accords, and that the U.S. exhibits a "double standard" by tolerating those violations, is dubious at best, based on serious misunderstanding of these agreements. From the outset, the Madrid-Oslo process was designed and implemented by U.S.-Israeli power to impose a Bantustan-style settlement. The Arab world has chosen to delude itself about the matter...

There were no passionate calls for a military strike after Saddam's gassing of Kurds at Halabja in March 1988; on the contrary, the U.S. and UK extended their strong support for the mass murderer, then also "our kind of guy." When ABC TV correspondent Charles Glass revealed the site of one of Saddam's biological warfare programs ten months after Halabja, the State Department denied the facts, and the story died; the Department "now issues briefings on the same site," Glass observes.

In passing, one might note that the destruction of Iran Air 655 in Iranian airspace by the Vincennes may come back to haunt Washington. The circumstances are suspicious, to say the least. In the Navy's official journal, Commander David Carlson wrote that he "wondered aloud in disbelief" as he observed from his nearby vessel as the Vincennes -- then within Iranian territorial waters -- shot down what was obviously a civilian airliner in a commercial corridor, perhaps out of "a need to prove the viability of Aegis," its high tech missile system. The commander and key officers "were rewarded with medals for their conduct," Marine Corps colonel (retired) David Evans observes in the same journal in an acid review of the Navy Department cover-up of the affair. President Bush informed the UN that "One thing is clear, and that is that the Vincennes acted in self-defense... in the midst of a naval attack initiated by Iranian vessels...," all lies Evans points out, though of no significance, given Bush's position that "I will never apologize for the United States of America -- I don't care what the facts are." A retired Army colonel who attended the official hearings concluded that "our Navy is too dangerous to deploy."

(Is there a comparison anywhere of Microsoft with the US State Department, in their approaches to world domination? And a calculation of the reparations they owe to each 'enemy'?)

14 new rocket designs, presented in a leisurely slideshow: [multipage] http://www.discovery.ca/Space/spacecraftslideshow.cfm [NASA Watch]

CooperShip is a triangle-shaped airship, whose top surface area would serve as a launching point for a shuttle that would reach a maximum height of 115 km.

TV 2nite? Late Show News claims SCTV reruns this week after Conan!

Very clever theory on the origin of life: http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_239000/239787.stm

The birthplace for life on Earth may have been labyrinthine networks of tubes on the surface of rocks.

Here's some of the Muslim editorial cartoons mentioned yesterday: http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/98/12/22/timfgnmid02005.html?1124027 [Drudge]

Iceland volunteers for scary science: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/12/22/39543.html

For such medical researchers, geographically isolated Iceland is a treasure trove. Not only has it got a gene pool that is little changed since the original Viking settlers arrived more than 1,000 years ago, but detailed medical records have been kept on every Icelander since the first world war, and tissue samples - which can be analysed for DNA - have been stored since the 1940s.

Yet opinion polls show Icelanders 58 per cent in favour of the database. Whether they will feel the same after a few years under the genomic microscope remains to be seen.

Nerve excerpts the fabled sex scene from the new Tom Wolfe: http://www.nervemag.com/JacksNaughtyBits/Wolfe/

Snorting, highly agitated, the stallion walked into the stock and right up to the rear end of the mare...

Joe Bay's new kibological protest-cheer:

Urlap, futplex, doidy, beable!
Soylent Green is made out of people!

Pacifica reports Julia Butterfly is turning her tree-- Luna-- into an Xmas tree (ie, with lights) starting tonight!

Action alert: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG19981217S0011

"The issue before the FCC is whether law enforcement will be able to use Calea as a back-door means to expand existing wiretap capabilities and whether consumers in their monthly bills will shoulder the multibillion dollar costs of that expansion..."

Bibliografiends will rejoice that 50 years of Studies in Bibliography are now online. Of special interest to Joyceans are deleted passages from Exiles, a Ulysses notebook (transcribed, but weirdly still in jpegs), and letters from Harriet Weaver and various publishers.

Second biggest waste of newstime in 1998: Millionaires trying to circle the globe in balloons.

Probably the most feted 'troll' of all time dealt with Tamagotchis and airport x-ray machines... but Kibo's trying to top it: [Deja URL]

Newsgroups: alt.toys.virtual-pets,alt.religion.kibology,alt.toys.my-little-pony

...Taking apart the Furby proved my theory: The Furby is filled with extra gears which are not connected to anything! These are for activating its secret powers in the Year 2000!

Asteroid mission loses radio contact at 11th hour: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1221/d_ap_1221_61.sml

Orbiting the 25-mile-long chunk of rock is to culminate a journey of almost three years, according to Robert W. Farquhar, a Johns Hopkins University scientist and the NEAR mission manager. NEAR is to spend almost a year orbiting down to within nine miles of the surface of Eros, a brick-shaped object 25 miles by nine miles by 8.8 miles in size. Using six instruments, the robot is to probe the asteroid and determine its chemistry, mineral content, mass and density. The craft then is to be lowered until it skims within 390 feet of the asteroid's surface.

Online professional-training pricewars: http://www.thestandard.net/articles/display/0,1449,2911,00.html

Marks says YipiNet will compete on price, offering professionals "all you can eat" access to its library of 100 courses for $495.

The black hand of Chiquita extends: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1221/d_ap_1221_59.sml

Among the items targeted for 100 percent tariffs are: Pecorino cheese made from sheep's milk, sweet biscuits, bath salts, candles, handbags, felt paper, folding cartons, greeting cards, lithographs, cashmere sweaters, cotton bed linen, batteries for electric vehicles, coffee and tea makers and chandeliers. Scher said the list was compiled with an eye toward "minimizing any negative impact on U.S. jobs ... while at the same time inflicting cost on the EU for failing to meet their obligations.''

Various theories of Gulf War Syndrome explored: http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=264

A 1998 report "Case Narrative: Depleted Uranium Exposures," published by three activist groups, estimated that 631,000 pounds of uranium shells were used in the war, and that up to seven pounds of uranium remained around each Iraqi tank they killed.

The best-maintained newsgroup archive I've ever seen: http://www.talkorigins.org/

This archive is a collection of articles and essays, most of which have appeared in talk.origins at one time or another. The primary reason for this archive's existence is to provide mainstream scientific responses to the many frequently asked questions (FAQs) and frequently rebutted assertions that appear in talk.origins.

Their page of recent hominid news: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/recent.html

In a stunning technical achievement, it appears that a portion of Neandertal mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has been successfully extracted for the first time. It differs by a surprising amount from equivalent modern human DNA, suggesting that Neandertals were not particularly closely related to any modern humans, and supporting (but certainly not proving) claims that they were a different species.

New Discover features quantum computing, plus these two great book reviews, one about Egyptology, one about the psychology of the hand: [awful site-design, but great links] http://www.discover.com/jan_issue/gthere.html?article=book.html

For starters, we should abandon the metaphor of the "learning curve." Jugglers, musicians, and magicians experience breakthroughs, not the smooth improvements that curve implies. After months of struggle with a three-toss routine, for instance, a student juggler may suddenly complete 11 tosses.

Programmable-chip price drops to $10: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/12/21/BU53683.DTL

Xilinx's products are known as field programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, and complex programmable logic devices, or CPLDs. Customers can program these chips to do all sorts of things, making them much more flexible than preprogrammed chips sold by companies like Intel or LSI Logic.

Personalised VR-mannequins: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/12/21/BU98953.DTL

Essentially you log onto the retailer's Web site, answer questions about your physical appearance and the virtual model takes on those characteristics.

Gateway's solution to the pc-systems-integration problem: http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/98/dec/1221/feat.htm

Only Gateway computers are displayed, and for items such as printers, Gateway narrows the choices down to a total of nine units from Hewlett-Packard, Epson and Canon.

(Will they configure your ISP connection, too, I wonder?)

This Day in Joyce History: In 1909, James's Volta Cinema opened in Dublin. In 1920, James finished the Circe episode.

TV 2nite: Sense and Sensibilty (NBC)

How the Muslim world sees the USA's Iraq strategy: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/12/20/39333.html

In Beirut the news magazine Al Kifah Al Arabi yesterday printed a cartoon of Clinton as a dog urinating missiles on the heads of Arab leaders. In Tehran the hardline daily newspaper Jomhuri Eslami condemned Clinton as a "morally corrupt person who allows himself to destroy a country to cover up his sexual corruption". "This new aggression should have been named Desert Monica and not Desert Fox," commented Al Hayat Al Jadida, the official newspaper of Arafat's Palestinian Authority.

XML still shooting blanks: http://www.xml.com/xml/pub/98/12/B-Trouble.html [SN]

Since XML+CSS doesn't look any prettier than HTML+CSS, the only reason I can see for sending XML to a browser is so you can run some code on it once it gets there, and you can't do that without the DOM. Or am I missing something?

What's up with the Left Business Observer: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/it/feature/1998/12/21feature.html

"I was reading Rock 'n Roll Confidential, an eight-page newsletter, and I thought, "I could do one of these!" While I had been doing my dissertation, I read the business press a lot, along with Marxian economics, so I had spent quite a few years immersing myself in financial matters. I thought I had developed enough expertise to tell the world." A friend designed a logo for the Left Business Observer (whose masthead reads "accumulation and its discontents"), and Henwood sent out the first 200 copies for free -- "some to famous people," he grins.

Partial answer to my GPS query-- the missiles don't depend on it: http://www.cdiss.org/tabtechs.htm

The GPS system utilises long-range satellite systems whose transmissions can be jammed using shorter range, more powerful signals...

Excellent short story about lite S&M: http://www.nervemag.com/HollandRogers/uncertainty/

The crop smacked his butt, the backs of his legs. Wherever it had been, his skin burned. Like the ache of muscles after hard exercise, the heat beneath his skin felt good, like something he had earned.

Kibo's obscene nonsense words: [Deja URL]

sil puh vup inkle freef doidy urlap woxwox beable slunch blarda lenort fütplex crontab poooooz bazpacho seaqweef bigfootf benefxfx blezmogon saxofungus nudibranch phlezofigle skyboxolajuwon searchenginebombing zeppelinzer-torture

(I see a tiny sheep where the umlauted 'u' in 'futplex' used to be! I have no idea why!?!? ...But it only shows up in Frontier's local copy of this page...?)

More drug-company hanky-panky: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/SCIENCE/SCIENCE/t000116055.html

The academic-science community, to be sure, has always had some links to business. But that trend accelerated exponentially under the Ronald Reagan and George Bush administrations, when federal budgets for basic research were slashed and scientists were strongly encouraged to forge ties with industry to make up the shortfall.

Today's AstroPic vividly shows how flat a galaxy can be: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap981220.html

WPost trashes Robert MacNeil's latest vanity-novel: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-12/20/025l-122098-idx.html

MacNeil's plot revolves around Grant Munro, a ruggedly handsome, older anchorman who, despite his refusal to have his face lifted, is irresistible to women.

Except when placed by John Updike into the head of Rabbit Angstrom, I have never been as conscious of the extent to which testosterone influences a storyteller's perceptions.

Don't miss: Doonesbury's webcam plotline: http://www.theadvocate.com/comics/default.asp

Michael Moore's meeting with and advice to the Clintons: http://www.dogeatdogfilms.com/message.html

Bill: "I have been a big fan of yours, Mike, since the beginning." At this point, Hillary interrupted. "Well, I'm a bigger fan!" Great. Now they're squabbling.

Finally, Bill, stop the bombing. The reason you were originally the target of the reactionaries is because you refused to go and kill Vietnamese. Remember? But you got elected and you spent a lot of time bringing peace to Northern Ireland and the Middle East. Now you have blood on your hands.

My new name for Cokie Roberts is "Cokie Dentata"

NetSkink eviscerates Disney's new "Go" portal: http://cbs.marketwatch.com/archive/19981218/news/current/rebecca.htx?source=htx/http2_mw

The Go Network does nothing right, unless you are one of those rare individuals who hungers for Mickey, Sabrina, ESPN and the ABC News team all the time. Modeled in appearance transparently after market leader Yahoo!, its similarities to Yahoo! end at front-door font color. Yahoo! offers services that users and advertisers want.

9am to 10:45am CST: This is Hell live RealAudio funny progressive talk radio, featuring the recent death-penalty forum sponsored by Northwestern University

Drudge offers a brilliant un-banner-ad to end all banner ads: http://www.drudgereport.com/

Click to Visit our Sponsor and Support DRUDGE...

(I bet he gets like 50% clickthru, instead of the average 0.05%)

If GPS is so easy to jam, why can't Iraq jam the missiles' guidance?

Ask Jeeves claims these were among the questions most frequently asked last month: http://www.ask.com/docs/funnyyoushouldask.html

How old am I?
How can I find someone?
Am I in love?

(I guess this means no questions are ever asked twice!)

Mercury Center has a HUGE archive of first chapters: [multipage] http://www7.mercurycenter.com/books/chapter1/chapter1_archive.htm

This week's selection of books:
The Physics of Christmas by Dr. Roger Highfield
Soon by A. G. Mojtabai
What Remains To Be Discovered by John Maddox

From NASA Watch :

Science magazine is reporting that the Editor-in-Chief of Discover magazine, Marc Zabludoff, found himself out of a job when he disagreed with Disney Senior Vice President Steve Murphy (Disney owns Discover magazine). It seems that Murphy wanted to have John Glenn's face on the cover of the year end science issue (now on sale). The magazine's staff seemed to feel that Glenn's flight did not seem to rate as being one of the year's top science stories.