Radio Free Blogistan: Miscellany Archives

It was actually trackback spam: Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product....

How To Start Your Very Own Blog In Fifty-One Easy Steps! (kuro5hin.org)...

PurpleSlurple can slurp up any web page and add purple numbers to each paragraph (that is, paragraph-level permalinks). For example, here's RFB purpleslurplerized: Purpled Blogistan. (via Jonas Luster)...

This is a standard blogapology for my absence from this bastion of blogness. I've been having a whale of a time posting at my own, c u l t u r e k i t c h e n, especially after my hits literally ten folded thanks to Mr. Filkins' pinged...

Should we have a meeting? Maybe by irc? Just to check in. We've got some pending business: redesign, site architecture, link logging, access to this blog. Some have been too busy to post much lately. Is that a problem, anything to worry about? Should we invite more contributors? Or, as I...

Hmm, TypePad munged the first few characters of my entry, turning "Boo-hoo. Biggest blog-news day of the war..." into this: ...that's even weirder, now the munged stuff just disappeared. The post was supposed to say this: Boo-hoo. Biggest blog-news day of the war in Iraq so far and my server that...

Living will? Don't know. Last will and testament? Who needs it? But i've gotta have my mylastemail.com. Is this the latest in web services? Still, as the New York saying goes, "Hey! you never know..."...

Six years ago today I started a project of writing something live on the web every day. Back then we called that keeping an online journal or diary. Over time, what I was doing evolved, influenced by the software that started appearing, into something more closely resembling blogging. In fact, Breathing...

I would like to make Radio Free Blogistan a more inclusive resource and less of a one-man show. There are a few ways that people can contribute. Anyone with a weblog- or metablog-related category in their own blog can set up an RSS feed for the category and tell me about...

I'm trying to show an imported version of the OPML file my RSS newsfeed reader ("aggregator") NetNewsWire exported for me - as one of my typelists, "Feeds I Read." At first it just showed five of them, the last five alphabetically. I got it to display the whole list, more or...

It took longer than I'd hoped, but I've just posted 105 pictures to a new photo album called Robots....

Adding jwz, noting Tinderbox 2.0, blurbing an RSS article, thinking about Mediajunkie.com

OK, so now I can talk about TypePad's awesome template builder feature. It's not easy to build a good interactive interface for something as nuanced as design, but given the standardization of weblog layouts and some very neatly executed preview routines and what I assume is DOM-driven interactivity, the TypePad beta...

Per @TypePad's communitarian rules for joining the Yahoo mailing list: Simply copy and paste... You can also post an entry on your blog... confirm you are the owner of the claimed blog....

I'm posting this entry from Zempt. Slick little interface going on here. I like the xmlrpc autodiscovery. When they port this to OS X it's going to give kung-log (a very cool tool itself) a run for its money. Well, they're both free so I don't know what that means. I...

I forget, isn't there a bookmarklet for this thing? It seems like it would be safer to link to some other beta blogs to test the trackback process, though I gather it's more-or-less identical to MT's....

OK, the photo album should be linked from the sidebar now....

So is there some accepted practice for linking new photo albums into the weblog? Do I just post the link here in a new entry. No wait, while I was fiddling with test blog No. 2 I noticed that photo album(s) is an optional design element, so I'll hop over there...

Just thought I'd kick off this TypePad thingy with the traditional first words of every newborn computer utterance-making system....

Hey, I'm headed to New York next week (after the 4th of July holiday). I arrive on Wednesday, July 9 and I'm returning to Oakland late on Wednesday, July 16. Before then, I have some brutal deadlines. While in New York I'll do some work (mostly reviewing manuscript for my current...

My heart is taken it's not lost in space And I don't want to see your mooney mooney face I say why on earth do you revolve around me Aren't you aware of the gravity Don't need another satellite I'm happy standing on my feet of clay I have no wish...

I'm looking forward to reading Al Franken's new book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Here's the BuzzFlash interview that whetted my appetite....

Those Harvard schmucks, they get the best graduation speakers. This year Will Ferrell serenaded them as \"shiny little very smart pieces of dust.\"...

Senator (and Democratic presidential candidate) John Edwards takes the incumbent administration to task for its oligarchic, anticapitalistic policies (On Rewarding Work And Creating Opportunity)....

Joshua Marshall is doing his usual bang-up job of covering every angle of the ongoing Tom DeLay scandal dealing with misuse of Homeland Security resources in the Texas redistricting conflict, and subsequent attempts to cover tracks....

I find myself standing in my room, narrating out loud to no one the fact that I am thirsty, instead of going and getting myself the glass of water I've been wanting for the last hour at least. The day is not going like it was supposed to. The day is...

Off to the Greek Theatre (in Berkeley) today to see a three-act show headed by Beck, whose journal is remarkably ordinary and down-to-earth, for a cockeyed Scientologist art-family rock superstar....

I first heard "off the hook" meaning "totally wild" or "out of control (in a good way)" a few years ago. (Example: "We're hiring bellydancers and fire jugglers for the party - it's going to be off the hook.") Like so much innovative American language, it seemed to arise from the...

I am reminded that Mickey Hart is maintaining a Trip Diary for the Dead's summer tour. The Flash-based interface is a little wiggy (doesn't work at all for me in Mozilla) but the first journal entry is worth the effort to find (here's a direct link to it), just for Mickey's...

It was the day Clinton was impeached. That day I attended the second of two live-CD release concerts by a now disbanded band called Zero. My review of those shows, typos and all, can still be found at JamBands.Com. Been doing a little more music writing lately. Want to do more....

Well, this LiveJournal post showing pictures of a slug navigating a maze of salt has been circulating now for months but it only just hit my inbox yesterday....

I was reading B headlines from the Times this morning and I saw that in the wake of the priest-molestation scandals the Boston archdiocese is announcing a fiscal crisis and impending layoffs. "They're going to lay off Jesus," I said. "No," said B, "they're going to lay off some disciples." "That's...

Credit where Credit is due. Orcinus finds something to praise the Bush administration for: tamping down anti-Muslim rhetoric and avoiding the "clash of civilizations" interpretation of terror and middle-east politics....

Well, that took longer than expected. I'm still getting things re-configured and re-set up at ol' Open Publishing / ezone / x-everything industries, but most of the sites are at least now visible, and I may hope that we've cured the hacked-so-easily problem we had going there. In the meantime, off...

Journalist Peter Maass confirms the suspicions of the "Salam is real" camp: Salam Pax Is Real - How do I know Baghdad's famous blogger exists? He worked for me. Maybe this will help me convince my Kurdish friend Delshad that there's an audience for more than just one Iraqi blogger?...

His playpen his rules, if you ask me (and you didn't, and it's too late now): Sam Ruby reserves the right......

Hey, it's an RSS flood as my various sites come back online and blogs start updating themselves as if by magic. I liked this piece by Dave: DaveNet : New York Times Archive and Weblogs, but as with all revolutionary visions, I find it to overstate the new equilibrium point, which...

No saw like an old saw: bass player offenses and fines...

Oakland happy hour wednesday. Deadlines have killed my urge to blog lately. I've been in more of an unblogging mood. But news that Gwen's Ladies (and Gents) Who Lunch is having its long promised post-work happy hour edition this week, Wednesday night have got me back typing into this here teeny...

David Kolodney sends us an update on a suspicion he had:Good Eye!This is mainly of journalistic interest, but I'm sending it around anyway, (It won't be on the midterm):I guess I'm gloating. In the Washington Post yesterday, it came out that the NYT's main WMD reporter, Judith Miller, has been channeling...

As seen on the Freemasonry Watch Discussion Forum. from Michael Z....

diamond joe. now playing:"Diamond Joe (Previously Unreleased)" by Bob Dylan [Exclusive]...

"Joan Osborne Wakes the Dead". From RollingStone.com: "People like that social aspect of listening to the band," Osborne says of the road legends. "You're not just fan of the music, you are part of this community of people who are interested in seeing them in all different ways and collecting tapes,...

I'm getting tired of these "anti-blog screed so please, bloggers, all link to me" pseudcontrarian protobacklash articles. Most of them are as glib and boring as the worst blogs and they don't tend to even get the facts right. For example in, Blog eats blog, the author talks about ETCon and...

Alerted to tonight's lunar eclipse, B and I started looking outside around 8:40 pm hoping it wouldn't be too hazy to see the moon clearly. It came up looking kind of vague, not nearly light enough to register on my camera lens, but after about 10 or 20 minutes the...

The always-delightful Ubuweb site has assembled an anthology of conceptual writing. [via A.P. Crumlish]...

Today marks the tenth anniversary of my first post to Usenet (May 11, 1993). I actually posted four times that day, all to rec.music.gdead. None of the posts are especially memorable (though one gives a fair idea of my other favorite bands of that time), but I still find it noteworthy...

Psychedelics reconsidered. John Horgan makes the case for legalizing entheogens (psychedelic drugs) in Slate....

Jeff Green exposes how some companies pay to have their products mentioned on the TV news....

Geoff Faulkner has posted an informative article describing how he set up a computer-mediated entertainment center. His solution converges the functionality of his TV and stereo system with a computer for controlling everything....

Over the years, one of the most popular articles at Enterzone has always been the Unguided Tour of Pompeii by co-founder Richard Frankel, which appeared in our second issue, in early 1995. Rich had been on a dig in Pompeii a little whiel before before, and he wanted to show some...

Jeff Green, who's been on a roll lately, has some choice words for us about iLoo. I suggest he go back and read my "Information pooper-highway" entry from The Internet Dictionary (Sybex, 1994, now sadly out of print). Weirdly, just a few weeks ago I was riffing with another friend about...

This 404 error file makes good use of Comical Ali....

Chris Pirillo’s preaching the Word about RSS. Can he get an amen, somebody? [Note: This post is destined for RFB, but I don’t remember how I set up the email-to-blog system and I’m away from the desktop client where I have Radio set up and it’s behind a firewall on a...

Mark A.R. Kleiman points to a "fun fact" that reminds me of my idea for a liberal tax-cut initiative that I think would call the bluff of the plutocrats running the show these days. Let's stipulate that it's important to cut taxes by $350 billion, or $550 billion or whatever fakey...

Back when we started Enterzone, a "hyper web text media zine art" project, the goal was not just to produce a kind of 'zine without paper or distribution costs but also to take advantage of the new internetworked medium to publish writing and art that simply couldn't be represented fairly or...

Bruised my esophagus. If life were supposed to be fair I suppose I could complain the arbiter or ombudsmand that it's completely unfair for me to have contracted yet another nasty flu within one month's time. Then again, the answer might come back that I was just too happy in New...

Bad Attitudes journal reports on Rumsfeld's triumphal tour and the search for deadly precursors of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq:"Listen," said the threateningly affable defense secretary, "wouldn't you expect a man like Saddam to hide his weapons of mass destruction? Last time I checked, hidden means you can't find them....

I knew I wanted to have a seat in the Jazz tent for Ornette Coleman's headlining set, but the question was how far in advance I'd need to squat there to manage it, because there were a few other acts scattered around the other stages that we wanted to see...

Scot Hacker is all over the new iTunes store story, dropping wisdom on theory and practice left and right. Caveat: a man who calls OK Computer "Radiohead's lamest album" is a man who has outgrown cannabis. [UPDATE: Scot begs to differ, insisting that the album was merely dull. Great minds, it...

Promoters of regime change in the US who run the fooled-ya GATT.org website have developed an alternate deck of cards for quick identification of their most-wanted list....

Sue W. reminds me that WWOZ is broadcasting much of the Fest....

...took a bunch of pictures, here are just a few (insterspersed among a quick rundown of music and eats)... large iced café au lait 3 beignets Hackberry Ramblers (Fais Do-Do stage) ... their 70th anniversary, fresh back from Europe and the Today Show, their 16th straight year at Fest... some technical...

The feeling of vacation. "Are you going to do any blogging when you're here?" my friend S asked me. I told him probably not. Maybe I'll upload some digital pix from around town or from the crowds (or stage shots) at Fest. But I did have to get online to send...

"Are you going to do any blogging when you're here?" my friend S asked me. I told him probably not. Maybe I'll upload some digital pix from around town or from the crowds (or stage shots) at Fest. But I did have to get online to send a file I had...

I see lots of kvetching over at Instapundit today about details of the looting, convoluted meta-arguments about WMD, and the strange idea that Tim Robbins and Michael Moore have claimed that they've been repressed "by the system" while straw-liberals the world around have ignored Castro's crimes. (Has anyone compared Hollywood union...

I've noticed that many people found the declaration by an Iraqi quoted in the New York Times a few weeks ago to be a great slogan for western values of freedom and the pursuit of happiness. I prefer my spelling, in the title above, to the more typical "Whiskey" spelling. Why?...

What's Happening is yet another page that comprises a good list of sites that tell you what's popular now on the interwebnet. [via Anil's sidebar links]...

I thought this Anil Dash weblog entry looked familiar: I'm off to SF for O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference on Tuesday. I'm going against the grain this year by taking my laptop along, "blogging" in "realtime", and taking digital photos of people. If there's a box, I am out of it. If...

Levi Asher wrote this action poem, "What's Bothering Me," about our just-concluded (?) media war. Hey, and I just noticed that his novel, Summer of the Mets is finally out....

Paul Ford thinks the Senate should have an RSS feed, and the House, and the Supreme Court, and the White House. I think he's right, and I like his approach to raising the subject....

Speaking of New Orleans, I was sad to read this obituary for the legendary Earl King. (Times userid: mediajunkie, password: mediajunkie) Most famous outside of N.O. (and best compensated for) Jimi Hendrix's cover (as "Let the Good Times Roll") of his "Come On," and for the Mardi Gras standard "Big Chief,"...

Synchronicity, synecdoche, Schenectady. So I make this new category for my last entry ("Television") and what should come up in my iTunes rotation? now playing:"Little Johnny Jewel" by Television [The Blow Up]...

So I make this new category in my X-POLLEN blog for an entry ("television") and what should come up in my iTunes rotation? now playing:"Little Johnny Jewel" by Television [The Blow Up]...

Jeff Green wonders what we were laughing at, when we were laughing at the Sweat Hogs. All I know is that there was a time "sport shirt on the iceburg" chanted to the beat of a conga line could crack up me and my sibs without fail. Around this time we...

Just checked the weather report for New Orleans today, sunny and dry. B and I have been to Jazz Fest something like eight times in the last decade, and I think we've made it there for the last five or six in a row (it gets hard to keep track after...

This site published an allegation that the occupying troops declared open season on looting. Was this a propaganda effort (look! freedom!) that got out of hand? When you couple it with reports that much of the museum looting was "professional" in nature, it looks pretty ugly. (Not as ugly as maimed...

a note from Watchword: Please join us this Monday, April 21, for the Second Annual MFA Mixer. Students from 7 Bay Area MFA programs (CCAC, SF State, Mills College, St. Mary's, New College, USF, Cal State Hayward) are invited to participate in our Happy Hour, Open Mic, and Literary Exchange. The...

While he’s far from the the smartest man I’ve ever met, and nobody would call him an absolute genius, any blogger who is willing to say that “Scott Baio is my personal hero” deserves some credit. Dan Benjamin is looking for a job....

Since I started Radio Free Blogistan last July I'd managed to post at least one entry every day, until yesterday. Since I use RFB to aggregate blog posts to a number of different sites, this means that RFB had a continuous calendar running back to its first day. I was kinda...

So I had my federal and state taxes all worked out this weekend and was just doublechecking the figures and adding a few bits of trivia (my EIN, for example) and getting ready to file electronically tonight. Turns out my copy of TurboTax did not have one current form (8880 -...

This Yahoo entertainment news and gossip article (Saddam Starred in Gay Porn Films!) reads like an Onion article or some disinformation, but who knows? Say, wasn't Salam Pax reported to be a closeted gay man (I think I read that in the New Yorker) from a well connected family?...

---begin forwarded text--- ENLARGE YOUR COALITION! GUARANTEED!! (cont'd) ... (thanks, MZ!)...

The rhetoric gets a little overwrought, but this writer in the Hartford Advocate is starting to miss Richard Nixon....

I was thrilled to hear that seven of our U.S. prisoners of war were rescued near Tikrit. I had been dreading the worst for them.(NY Times login: mediajunkie, password: mediajunkie)...

Well, the stress of gearing up for the conference and then running through the whole thing on not enough sleep and too much drinking has left me with a nasty little cold. Like so many it started out with a sore throat but now this one has gotten kind of especially...

Testing, testing. OK, someone managed to ping my trackback ping metablog, so once again I'm trying to ping it myself. This post may disappear....

Most years we hold the annual Waterside publishing conference in San Diego's Mission Bay, but this year we are holding it near East Shore State Park in Berkeley. Author, consultant, entrepreneur (and author of 'elm') Dave Taylor, attending the conference, took a walk along the waterfront this morning and posted some...

I first saw Olatunji as the opening act at a Grateful Dead new year's eve concert at the end of 1985. (That night was also the first time I saw the Neville Brothers, which started me on a strange odyssey through the Meters to Jazzfest and James Booker, but that's another...

It's been over three weeks since this (Who's leading Who?) appeared in my in-box and it still creeps me out every time I go take a look. I think it's the phallic nose. And, no, I've never thought this conflict was merely about oil, but it still amuses me to imagine...

Spotted this IM status message from the environs of Chaif consulting today: YANKEES MAGIC NUMBER - 156...

Every few years some new technological framework comes along to challenge Microsoft's dominance of the desktop. Since the advent of the Internet, Microsoft has managed to fight off Netscape (IE), Java (.Net), application service providers (Hotmail), remote process calls (SOAP), and U.S. antitrust law (Bush). OK, I'm waving my hands here....

This one keeps showing up on my screen, so I might as well note it. The Dullest Blog in the world is a deadpan satire of inconsequential web journaling. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Yahoo's crack crew of editors can hardly contain their mirth:Web logs have reached critical mass...

I've been trying to sort out the design elements at X-POLLEN. Right now I'm trying to track down a CSS (style sheet) error, and it helps me visualize the various design blocks to give them distinct colors and ugly borders. The problem is in the left two-thirds (links) area of the...

As I recall, "regime change" first entered the vocabulary back in 1998, when it stood for a stronger position against Saddam's regime in Iraq than disarmament, essentially promising that post-Gulf War sanctions against Iraq would never be lifted as long as the Saddam Hussein regime remained in power there. There may...

Measure the buzzosity (suit or geek) of any website....

Via MediaSavvy (a site whose brand combines two of my favorite buzzwords of recent times), I found this article called The Web's Hippie Period is So Over. It's an amusing take on the usual web dev chitchat, despite its ahistorical spin on the recent past. Gerry McGovern, the article's author, is...

Screwed up taping the first half of Daniel Deronda Sunday night. These VHS tapes hold so little at the high-quality speeds. Juggling the incoming TV stream is becoming unmanageable. So far I've managed to avoid cable except when I was rooting for Jerry Brown on the road to the whitehouse in...

The word of the day is \'fesm\'. Hard to explain why. Trust me on this. fesm....

The Guardian looks closely at how bloggers covered the aftermath of the Rachel Corrie story, finding an unsavory pile-on in the echo chamber. Cointelpro Tool takes on this line of reasoning and finds that it echoes the Indymedia line....

I think I followed Scot's link to Justin Hall's environs and ended up at the Beast Blog ("Because East Bay is Pig Latin for Beast"), reading about this Oaklandish logo: A deco tree with big branches and big roots both - "Oaklandish." I first saw it on a sticker in the...

off the top of me head: Jeff Green Dan Brodnitz Nicholas Meriwether Robert Meriwether Jennifer Crumlish Arthur Crumlish (pear and fills) don't get me started on Crumlishes! Jeff Tiedrich Justin D'arms Doris Lessing Louis Menand Christopher Hitchens...

According to this CNN story:Rumsfeld on Sunday dismissed "hyperventilating" critics of the war in Iraq and called reports that he vetoed plans by top officers for a larger invasion force "fiction." Is anyone else finding themselves annoyed by the extreme spin being put out by both sides in the continuing Iraq...

Gary Hart has a blog. Let's see if he can keep it up through a grueling campaign. A presidential blog would be cool but somehow I don't see it....

For an analysis of the growing scandal [Isn't scandal a bit strong for a story that can be spun multiple ways? --ed. {Who the hell are you? Go back to Kaus's blog! --xian}] around the idea of Rumsfeld and other politicos ignoring the best advice of the military brass and needlessly...

Over at Hyperbole, Jim Haefele reminisces about what he refers to as his decade. Well, we can't choose the time and date of our own birth and one's own memories always end up entangled with the cultural detritus of the period, plus he's in Tunisia and I know when you are...

Ain't no thesis like a P-Funk thesis.... Is the academic world ready for the awesome power of a fully operational mothership? Scot Hacker reports that an article he wrote on Parliament-Funkadelic for a book by Pagan Kennedy has inspired a master's thesis. Now maybe his seminal writings on Liberace will finally...

As my to-do list grows (book project, consulting projects, conference coming up, taxes to do soon, clients deals to do, and more) I've had one of those two or three day periods of just trying to do the same things over and over. First there was a recalcitrant zip file that...

Oliver Willis objectively supports rounding up Bon Jovi fans....

I know this war can't be about control of oil, and we're supposed to look past Dick Cheney's revolving-door history from first gulf war to Halliburton, where his contacts in the gulf came in somewhat handy, back into the government in time fo rthe next gulf war and hey, look, if...

CNN is maintaining a page listing all available information about U.S. casualties in the ongoing Iraq war.[via Virginia Postrel]...

Another e-mail tip leads to this graffito response to a "United We Stand" decal....

Someone sent me a link to Iraq Body Count, which estimates only 16 civilian deaths so far....

I thought I knew Victoria's secret. I always figured Victoria's secret was that she was a guy. According to What is Victoria's Secret? the answer is bulimia....

After Gil Scott-Heron. Or, as my friend Non likes to call him, Lung Scott-Egret (or the variant B and I like: Lung Pict-Egret). From the UC Berkeley J-School's intellectual property weblog comes Revolution is not an AOL keyword....

So, as I mentioned a while back, Textpattern reports on what happens when you ping Weblogs.com. Ordinarily, you see this message: Article posted Weblogs.com says: Thanks for the ping. We checked and found that the “x-ism” weblog has changed, so it will appear in changes.xml next time it is updated. (The...

Graceful spaz. something something...

Just to annoy weblogs.com. I’m posting again in under five minutes, specifically to generate the error message....

You know you\'re listening to Ween when.... You type “steel cut dwarfs” onto your grocery shopping list....

This was in my inbox this morning: Subject: in Erbil for an hour I'm back to Erbil city since half an hour ago to check out on the house, we are now in a small village in the mountains that is one hour and half far from Erbil.. its a big...

Late last year I had been encouraging Delshad to start a blog, but he has been on the move most of the time since then. Yesterday he wrote from Erbil: Dear Xian, I'm now Erbil and most possibly move to some village or town far from here... I really don't like...

Here's the message I got from Delshad on Tuesday, sent to all his online friends: Dear friends, This is just a very short note to tell you that I'm now leaving back to Erbil where then I will go with the family to some village - seems the war is already...

Long story short, I have a friend in Iraq named Delshad. He is a Kurd and he lives in northern Iraq, in the northern no-fly zone. Last fall he was trying to get out of the country, but only got as far as Syria and then returned. With the war on,...

Mailed a birthday card, bought some champagne, returned a video, snapped some pictures. The plum trees have turned a lurid crimson maroon. The recent rain has polished the lens of the sky to its east-bay finest. You wouldn't believe how many pictures of clouds I've taken over the years....

...then what is your mouth? It's great to have my new camera, though I'll need to get a larger flashcard soon (or stop using the silly movie feature). Treated myself to lunch today at Mama's Royal Café, the site of one of my first date's with B....

Hawks to the left of me, perverts to the right Here I am, stuck in the middle with you...

I realize I'm falling for a deliberate imitative "fallacy" when Nick Denton contrasts the Iraq/antisemitism storyline with one about drunken Irishmen. It reminds me of an EU chart in a late '80s copy of the Economist I was reading for free on one of my first flights from New York to...

top of myfuckinggamethese guysin d---best guys9 yrscomatosediabeticjunkie get some fuckinkid you can pushit aroundpay him more moneyget somebody topush his craparoundI'll go where I can withpeople like me....

First they laughed Fleischer out of the room, then this petty payback against Helen Thomas, and now the stilted, scripted case-for-war, sorta, press conference is under scrutiny, according to this Kuro5hin thread, Ari Fleischer admits Bush called from a prepared list of reporters thread.Insert "bush league" crack here....

My dance card is full now at least through May, and I'd like to spend a week or so in Greece in May or June this year, and with this flood of steady, varied, remunerative work I suddenly find myself more productive in other areas as well. I'm applying what I've...

A Chronicle article from January 24 circulating among my environmentalist brethren and sistren (Taking on 'Rational Man') discusses the politics of academic economics, and the animosity between neoclassical economists and dissidents. While professors in the U.S. are being marginalized in subsidiary theoretical programs, French grad students have taken the lead in...

T. C. Boyle (or as the old New Yorker cartoon had him, T. Whatsisname Boyle) was on Forum today on KQED and I called in to ask him a question. I wanted to mention how much I liked Sorry Fugu, which I think I read originally in a Best American Short...

Been geeking around on a PC again. Borrowed a Dell for an upcoming documentation project and been bidding on Thinkpad's on ebay for another project. (Found out I'm going to be working with my old friend Molly on the project I can't talk about yet, which is cool! Maybe I'll even...

Well, it turns out immersion in coffee is not good for digital camera. Our local camera shop (down on Lake Shore, and it's cool we have one – the old typewriter repair shop on College in Elmwood closed recently), sent it back to Canon for a $20 estimate. Turns out they...

Given the choice of half of Paul Ford's writing talent or half of his database squeegling skills, I'm not sure which I'd choose.... (Go on?)...

Seems like as I workload heats up and my deadlines start compounding, I am blogging less. Sometimes this is not the case. Often there are delicate webs of interdependent procrastinations at work. Then I can accomplish much while still feeling bad about something important I’m not doing. This feels more like...

If there's any blogger out there who deserves a decent-paying column gig, it's Ken Layne. He's got the writing chops, the journalism dues paid, and the blog cred. What more is required?...

Noticed a bunch of visitors coming from an unfamiliar referrer. It turns out to be a message board for players of some online game. Apparently one of the participants is a French-speaking 15-year-old from Canada who goes by the online handle 'xian'. The mother of one of the other teen participants...

Is the academic world ready for the awesome power of a fully operational mothership? Scot Hacker reports that an article he wrote on Parliament-Funkadelic for a book by Pagan Kennedy has inspired a master's thesis on P-Funk and Transcendentalism. Now maybe Scot's seminal writings on Liberace will finally get the attention...

This message is intended exclusively for the individual or entity to which it is addressed. This communication may contain information that is proprietary, privileged, confidential or otherwise legally exempt from disclosure. If you are not the named addressee, you are not authorized to read, print, retain, copy or disseminate this message...

Happy Mardi Gras! The beadcam shows a pretty tame daytime scene at this moment, but it may get more interesting this evening. [via MZ] UPDATE: I fixed the bad link. Thanks, Rayne. The crowds are getting thicker already. (1:05 PM Pacific time)...

Andrew Stafford, who helped us make sense of Duchamp and put Aspen magazine online, tells me he has now produced a version of Richard Brautigan's Please Plant This Book, a collection of poems in the form of a collection of seed packets. Stafford's tasteful minimal animation provides a comfortable interface...

So I'm goofing around thumbing through the always entertaining Craigslist and I notice that they've added (or made more accessible) a system basically allowing people to flag items as inappropriate, misfiled, or especially good. In a way it's like the modding up and down they do at Slashdot. Anyway, I go...

There was a time when I had my in box(es) totally under control. Stuff got filtered. I either deleted messages, replied to them, or saved them if they really needed saving. Then blogging helped, because it provides a way to directly deal with any information that comes into my box and...

At some point Fred Rogers' death from stomach cancer is going to hit me, but so far mostly I think it's kind of passed by me in a glaze. Somehow I'm associating Mr. Rogers with my maternal grandfather, an equally calming presence. An op-ed in the Times today nearly brought a...

Sometimes the only thing more entertaining than Craigslist personals is the CL job listings. Take this one, PCBootyCall.com Model Recruiter Wanted. Apparently, "PCBootyCall.com is a new promotional service for adult models in the USA." They're seeking "professional and responsible" female escorts, dancers, and "adult companions" (high quality only) to advertise presumably...

If Orcinus had a syndicated (RSS) feed, I'd put his headlines write on the main Mediajunkie page. By catching up with him today, I learned that someone actually is now transcribing Rush Limbaugh, got frightened by signs of the demonization of dissent, read about a Karl Rove lie on the record,...

A day in the life. x: style='font-family:Georgia;color:black'> got some quotes of deductible vs. premium tradeoff at progressive. color:black'> x: also getting a quote from gecko. b: i tried to call you earlier...D and I were discussing his coming over for dinner tonight & Buffy watching... b: then he got a call...

Nothing to see here. Test category-based trackback ping functionality between this blog and metaxian, which really sohuld be and eventually probably will be just a category of this blog. Now move along....

Damn! I subscribe to Mike Watt's mailing list and wade through tons of announcements for gigs in the southland and then I miss a rare Banyan appearance in an intimate SF room? What's wrong with me? How frustrating. It's been too long since I heard my favorite bass player. Scot Hacker...

Just now finally got around to upgrading the version of Movable Type driving this X-POLLEN blog. Since I installed version 2.5 there was a 2.51 upgrade and possibly a 2.52, and then the recent more substantial release of 2.6, quickly followed by bugfixes 2.61 and 2.62. So I managed to avoid...

The reverse cowgirl told me about this 5 line site, saying "thought this might vaguely entertain you." The challenge, make a self portrait in 5 lines. Before studying the rules (380 x 380, what constitutes a line) I started doodling in the empty spaces left in a recently filled note book....

The Bush Crime Family meme I've seen bandied about on the Well and elsewhere has spawned a comic at the Village Voice, The Bushopranos.Where are those humorless lefties when you need them? This cartoon fights the Bush restoration/rematch narrative that put their team within striking distance of the prize with a...

First-hand reports from Miguel Octavio of The Devil's Excrement indicate that Hugo Chavez has jailed opposition leaders in Venezuala:Woke up in a Dictatorship todayToday I woke up in a Dictatorship. Up to now Hugo Chavez and his hoodlums had been using the law to "hide" the repressive and intolerant nature of...

Sing along with the vocal stylings of the spongmonkeys as they regale you with their acoustic guitar rave-up We Like the Moon....

My favorite pundit for these extreme times has gotten Get Your War On No. 19 out:...

Let's Hear Your Havel Anecdotes! Everybody's got one. Mine was already written once, by Greg McIlvaine. To loosen up your memory box, here's a fine David Remnick essay in the New Yorker, a Paul Wilson National Post account of Havel's last days, and some Guardian reminiscences from Timothy Garton Ash. –Matt...

Dave Winer says I've always wondered if Mr Straw knows that his name is the title of a Grateful Dead song. This is why weblogs are so revolutionary. Just kidding." [Scripting News] I think he does. His boss, Tony Blair, was the frontman for a Dead cover band called Ugly Rumours...

Tom the Dancing Bug has been having a great old time lampooning the Wall Street Journal's Lucky Duckies trial balloon that complained about the unfair and progressive U.S. federal income tax....

The Guardian deconstructs the "Saddam = Hitler" argument (without invoking Godwin's Law!), and turns the table on the question of who is appeasing whom. We'll leave deconstructing the specious "Bush = Hitler" protest signs as an exercise for the class....

Posing as an interactive game (there's really only one choice, about halfway through, and I suspect it's a Hobson's choice), this Flash animation projects a worst-case scenario for the upcoming (ongoing?) Gulf War. [via Nick Denton]...

Watching late-night TV (Ask Rita), I saw an add for a Homeland security specialist program at NIT schools' San Jose campus. It started with an American flag and a voice over talking about how 9/11 changed everything. Quick cut to a man in a suit introducing himself and calling himself the...

I think I can safely file this under "blogging too much lately." I had one of those long, convoluted dreams last night, much of which I can still remember even as the internal dream logic has started to tatter. Near the end, I was in a motel room with Mark Pilgrim....

The war has already started. The Pentagon was leaking all over the place yesterday that we already have special forces inside Iraq. For example, the Washington Post reported: U.S. Special Operations troops are already operating in various parts of Iraq, hunting for weapons sites, establishing a communications network and seeking potential...

I've already overcommented on the Burningbird: Boys with Toys thread (and related) at BurningBird, but I went back and read the three entries and their tails of comments again and I still feel that the various points of view are largely talking past each other, partly because they (we) are also...

On today's New York Times op-ed pages, Bill Safire applauds the bipartisan shackling of the proposed TIA and gives cover to libertarian-inclined right-wingers waiting for a signal on Patriot II: the wrath of Ascroft. Over on the opposite side of the page Bob Herbert notes the stealthy way the Bushies are...

OK, so wait a minute, is Michael Lerner (of Tikkun) "deeply silly" or not?...

Every warblogger's favorite idiotarian rag, The Guardian, has a little article today on voting-machine paranoia:One is Georgia, where all the votes in 2002 were cast on Diebold screens. The sitting Democratic senator and (to general astonishment) governor were both defeated in the election. Nine of Diebold's 12 directors are listed as...

Bob Weir was outvoted. Joel Selvin covers the changes in Grateful Dead-land today: The decision to change the group's name was not unanimous. "At least a couple of the guys really wanted to do it," said Dead guitarist Bob Weir. "I think it's a bit premature. I was just fine being...

Ken Layne is concerned that airlines may be dropping the ID check at the gate. He calls it "one of the only sane security checks—is the guy with the boarding pass the same guy who cleared the first security gate?" John Gilmore sees it the opposite way. He points out that...

How do they do it? The Morning News is the kind of web publication I've always wanted to produce. They publish new stories every day, their design is succinct and tasty, they drive it all with Movable Type, I don't see any typos, and I don't imagine anyone's getting paid. I...

Looks like I jumped to conclusions. The news appears to be that Kerry will have surgery for prostate cancer, not that he will be dropping out of the race. When TPM posted that this news would "shake up" the race, I mistakenly assumed this meant a reshuffling of the candiates. My...

For years I've been bugging my friends about an untenable, unmarketable, too-expensive-to-produce idea for a dynamic atlas. I've always been a huge fan of historical atlases, those books that show not just where the borders and populations are now but where they used to be and how they've changed. What I...

With the demise of the nonpartisan exit-polling service and the news of uncheckable voting machines owned by Republican politicians, Douglas Rushkoff has concluded that voting rights in the U.S. are in even worse shape than some of the dirty tricks in the last two election cycles may have indicated:My farewell is...

Well, it looks like the remaining members of the Grateful Dead have shucked the played-out "Other Ones" monicker and have decided to call their new band simply "The Dead." In doing so they've managed to split hairs, technically leaving the official name of the Jerry-era band retired but resurrecting a name...

If you didn't find Bush's state of the union message convincing, maybe you need to read between the lines, as in this remixed version of the SOTU speech.[via Hyperbole]...

Last night a creepy wind blew west from the hills, in strange pulsing gusts, dying down to nearly nothing and then growing almost instantly to gale force, whipping shrubs and vines against our drainpipe and windows, stripping new buds from plants fooled by the false spring we've been having around here...

By now, most tapped-in Deadheads have heard that GDP is shutting its doors and outsourcing its merch business, laying off most of their longtime employees. Here's a report supposedly from an insider (while I can't vouch for the veracity, it's interesting enough to pass along): ...awful news from GDP today. All...

I rejoiced a week or so ago when I learned that Peet's was about to reintroduce Aged Sumatra beans after a several-year hiatus. I am drinking it right now. Sumatra is fine as it goes, but the aged stuff is just incredible. Mellow, chocolate-y, rich, flavorful. My endorsement for the day....

Since late last year I've been meeting once a week with a good friend in a bar or café to do some writing. We encourage each other. It's a bit like having an "exercise buddy." If either of us don't feel like doing it, we can use the fact that the...

"The moon landscape depicted in Petr Ginz's drawing attests to his aspiration to reach a place from where the earth, which threatened his life, could be seen from a secure range." (from Holocaust-era Art from Yad Vashem's Collection sent into space with Israeli Astronaut)...

I suppose it was inevitable that the frootbats would crawl out of the woodwork almost immediately with conspiracy theories about the shuttle disaster, in this case claiming that it was a deliberate act of self-sabotage in order to provide distracting news coverage during the ramp-up to war in Iraq. And I...

There was no warning of a problem until the explosion, it seems. Columbia was NASA's oldest shuttle but has been entirely refurbished somewhat recently. This means the cause of the accident is still a mystery. They also seem to be ruling out human error/pilot error. A spokesman for NASA told people...

I felt paranoid wondering if there was any chance of sabotage or other hostile actions, but I realize now that I was far from the only person to have this thought, and I flipped to Peter Jennings saying that this has effectively been ruled out, or at least that the accident...

I hate getting those calls or email that say, "turn on your TV." That's how 9/11 started for me. With all the talk lately about the Challenger disaster it seems cruelly ironic that the Columbia has broken up on reentry. Anything else I was going to post or write about seems...

Republicans trying to have it both ways on race. Joshua Micah Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo is one of the best political blogs around, has a new column in The Hill. His first column takes on Republican tolerance of intolerance:Critics on the left often wrongly claim that the Republican Party is...

Says Kurt Vonnegut, in this short interview from In These Times: "I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers."...

I think I stole at least half of these links from Anil: freegorifero: Always-on weblogs Plasticbag: How has Blogger changed your life? Movable Type: Features planned for version 2.6 Plasticbag: Countering Joe Clarke's screed Fishbowl: I no longer want to know where my files are stored Kottke: RSS readers misusing the...

Robert Reich dissects Rove's Machiavellian chops in "The Rove Machine Rolls On" in The American Prospect, detailing his techniques. Among them:Count on the American public's (and the media's) inability to remember anything from one year to the next. The Rove machine gave Bush tough talking points on corporate fraud when the...

Hello, this is your captain speaking....

Stirring the savage breast. A musician friend told me over lunch at LMNOP in Oakland the other day that PornOrchestra had launched. The project involves composing and improvising new soundtracks for existing porn films. There will be several live performances and the project coordinators welcome contributing musicians, composers, and artists. I...

Killer serial. Dylan Tweney reports that Stanford is re-publishing facsimiles of the original broadsheet serialization of Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations. A new edition comes out every Wednesday. It's retro tech! Read it or subscribe on Stanford's Dickens site....

Which dreamt it?. Before it disappears, go and read Literary Devices by Richard Powers, published in cooperation with Zoetrope. Borges suggested that the reader writes Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes. The software that drives battle scenes in the Lord of Rings trilogy approaches the kind of interactive storytelling landscape presaged in this witty,...

ASPEN MAGAZINE interpreted for the Web. Small world department, my cousin A.P. Crumlish, who runs bend of bay, forwards me this Ubuweb announcement about Andrew Stafford's adaptation of ASPEN MAGAZINE for the Web. Readers of this space will recall that Stafford is also responsible for the brilliant Making Sense of Marcel...

'Coffeehouse' reviewed five years down the road. Wred Fright at Babel Magazine writes a round up of books derived from online e-zine publishing in From A to Zine, but finds most of the content of Coffeehouse unremarkable....

'Nature Lover, or Something' by Richard Brautigan. If a mailing list called "The Richard Brautigan poem of the day" existed, which it doesn't for copyright purposes, today's poem might be this: Nature Lover, or Something I am not particular. I like whatever the sky happens to be doing at the time....

'So Far, So Close' (Call for contributors). e-critures.org sez: CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE PROJECT: "SO FAR, SO CLOSE"Due to the speed of today��s new media, the dematerialization of contents, as well as the monitoring of bodies and places, there is no distance, only proximity.Nudity, transparency, the quest for intimacy, the...

S.F office space available. from Watchword Press: Office space: As some of you may know, over the last year we have shared an office space complex with Bitch magazine, To-Do List, and another community organization. Sad for us, Bitch is moving to Oakland. As a result, two (quite affordable) office spaces...

The usually impeccable attitude on display at The Gawker shows a slight crack today when editor/writer Elizabeth Spiers responds to an illiterate slam from some Tim Goodman groupie. The main response on the Gawker home page is just perfect, but the extended entry tries too hard: I was merely challenging his...

How much proof do you need?. There's no use denying it any longer. Elijah Wood is very, very gay....

The Daily Breeze quotes veteran White House journalist Helen Thomas (whose recently exchange with Ari Fleischer about unelected leaders made the rounds of the blogosphere) on the quality of the current presiding executive:She seemed to have sympathy and affection for everyone but George W. Bush, a man who she said is...

When is a quota not a quota?. Mark Kleiman unpacks the Big Lie in the way the right uses the poll-tested shibboleth word "quota" to oppose any and all affirmative action programs....

The political spectrum here in the U.S. has become increasingly muddled over the years. Conservatives adopted the lingo and some of the verities of liberal progressive thought and more recently the rump of the left has toyed with attempting to coopt the aspects of right-wing thought it finds least unpalatable. We've...

Slip of the tongue?. Soundbite at the top of the Lehrer show today quotes W. warning Iraqi line officers from obeying commands to use biological or chemical weapons again us (just as last time they were warned and they apparently refrained from doing so — whether we poisoned our own troops...

Irish Catholics have long memories. I'm sure an unnamed political advisor from the previous Bush administration is regretting his loose lips many years ago when he confessed to Maureen Dowd that his boss was surprised to find a person with her background covering the White House for the New York Times....

Joshua Marshall has been burning up the wires lately at his Talking Points Memo blog site, holding the administration's feet to the fire on their utterly failed policies toward North Korea. TPM's recent post on the subject goes to the heart of the question of how long the Bush folks have...

Once again I am into the thick of a new project, coauthoring a technical book. As is often the case, I can't discuss the title or topic in public just yet, but of course I will do so as soon as I can. In the meantime, I expect my blogging to...

Scot Hacker has posted a series of photos from Saturday's antiwar protest in S.F. Great images. A fine contrast to the sourmouthing coming from the pro-war crowd. I didn't attend. B wanted to bring a sign saying "No Bush War on the Environment" but we didn't have it together. Let...

Today's motto. "One thing at a fuckin' time."......

You gotta hate those tag errors. It wasn't the first time I failed to close a tag correctly (in this case the STRONG tags surrounding the song same in the template for iTunes listings), and it won't be the last time, but I've fixed it now, so here's another example: Wicked...

I did something very bad to Internet Explorer 2.2 for the Mac and now it crashes whenever it tries to start up. I downloaded a replacement and installed it but the problem remains. Something in the configuration or preferences must be triggering the problem, I suppose.A side effect of this is...

More iTunes format tests. before: Birdcage from the album "Shmo's Sampler" by Stew and the Negro Problem after: Stealin' (Instrumental), Grateful Dead (Birth Of The Dead - The Studio Sides) Pungee, The Meters (Look-Ka Py Py) Midtown (Instrumental), Tom Waits (Rain Dogs) Exquisite Dead Guy, They Might Be Giants (Factory Showroom)...

Testing iTunes reporting format (administrivia). When I feel like referring to or quoting from the music I'm listening to at the moment, I want the reference to be succinct and to link to a search for the song title, album name, and band or artist name (as opposed to just a...

I'm sure the Gettysburg Powerpoint is already a well circulated meme, but it's new to me, and such a perfect send up of the reductive power of slideshows as communication tools that I could not resist linking to it here. [via X-POLLEN]...

To the people I referrred to in Outrage over Pete Townsend, who are busily debating the story over in the discussion area of my Pete Townsend reviews Kurt Cobain's diaries entry, I feel that I should pass along this report from the Smoking Gun, which lends at least some credence to...

For readers of my X-POLLEN blog via (an RSS) news feed, which includes LiveJournal friends reading the xpollen user Mark Pasc setup for me, I apologize for the way the feed just resent something like seventeen recent posts. I just made a minor administrivial change to this blog's archiving nomenclature. Posts...

It now appears that the one-time Camper Van Beethoven reunion shows last fall were some kind of dry run for a more substantial reunion. Look at all the tour dates listed at the Cracker site. The show I saw was a great nostalgia trip for me and it seemed to be...

Here's something odd. Back in November I posted a link to Pete Townsend's review of Kurt Cobain's diaries. Now that the pedophile (or paedophile, for British readers) arrest story has broken, it seems that people must be Googling his name and somehow finding their way to my old post. Even though...

Scot Hacker has posed a provocative thought-experiment to his readers who defend video games that depict killing. In his post entitled Just Pretending he asks which is worse, rape or murder. Then he asks whether it would be OK for children to play rape games. This has spawned an active discussion,...

One day I'll need to come up with a big list of sites that track memes, especially those that do so automatically or semiautomatically (as opposed to sites like Metafilter and half the weblogs in the universe that track memes all the time by virtue of their infectious passing of memes...

I always wondered how to pronounce Tufte. (Thanks to plasticbag.org for the pointer.)...

Just asking....

I'm about to brave bridge traffic to head into the city for the blogger's dinner at Barney's in Noe Valley tonight (at 6 pm). Warning: I'm bringing my digital camera....

Dick Cheney may be hiding out in an undisclosed location unavailable to answer questions from the public (just as his boss ended the practice of holding press conferences back in February of 2001), but you can ask a simulation of Dick Cheney anything you like. My question: Will Halliburton benefit from...

stop breathing. Stop Breathing from the album "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain" by Pavement write it on a postcard "dad they broke me"......

The condensed parody version of the Two Towers is densely witty. Here's a snippet:TREEBEARD: We have opted, hoom, not to do a damn thing. PIPPIN: I didn't expect that. PEOPLE WHO HAVE READ THE BOOK: Neither did I... I still kinda like the Humphrey Bogart version (also at iFilm)....

Republicans hauled out "class warfare" talking point this week as they do every time one of their "tax relief" plans is challenged as extremely tilted toward the superrich. It must poll well for them. If you're tired of hearing this feint or disappointed with the timid rigidity of the Democrats' response,...

New current favorite blog of note: shrevie hoister's LiveJournal. Jump in anywhere. Looks like shrevie's been backfilling to 1995. Random shards of a mind (and fingers, and probably toes) at work, good linkage.Brain says: yummy....

A recent forwarded newspaper article singing the ills of birdfeeders had us going for a while. If we had read more closely or paid more attention to the source (the Wall Street Journal), we may have more easily seen it in the light presented by Laura Erickson's Wall Street Journal Bird...

Reading a Buffy spoiler fan website today, I encountered an unfamiliar term: shipper. I know what slash fiction is (having stumbled on a book about k/s fanfic in the Princeton library a good 20 years ago), and I gather a shipper is someone who either likes to write slash fiction or...

This is it?. This is your big plan?......

Hey, why are we letting out-of-staters choose our California Quarter Design?Some of these are hilarious. Apparently Davis will pick one from the top 5 vote getters....

(Just realized I drafted this on 12/15 but never posted it till today.) Dylan Tweney reports that Stanford is re-publishing facsimiles of the original broadsheet serialization of Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations. A new edition comes out every Wednesday. It's retro tech! Read it or subscribe on Stanford's Dickens site....

Warren Ellis announces SLEEPLESS PLANET in his die puny humans blog, calling it "a one-year-long nonprofit webmagazine about creativity and activism on the web and any other bloody thing I feel like. It pays no money. It provides only the opportunity to show what you do to a wider audience and,...

I got to wondering why the voices raised in opposition to Paul Krugman's series of columns about the Bush presidency always seem to go for the ad hom argument, at times resorting to coordinated smearing and so rarely seem to engage with the substance of his (coherent, by way of contrast)...

This August, 2000 Austin Chronicle article (The Candidate From Brown and Root) connects the dots on Brown and Root, LBJ, Halliburton, and Dick Cheney. [Bite Media via the Well]...

You'll hate this test but it gets more accurate with each submission. It was 86% sure I'm a man, close to my own level of certainty. A somewhat girly man perhaps (fairly near the middle on the linear scale — must be that preference for a blue bedroom over white), but...

I'm so out of it. After returning from a week and a half in New York I'm still reading The Gawker but without that same sense of immediacy (not that it matters where you are when you read about New York, and not that that prevents me from reading the Times,...

Too lazy to pad out to my front drive and pick up the Sunday Chronicle, I've been reading New York Times op eds and now skimming Slate. There's a tight little William Saletan article from Thursday, Wise Counsel - Edwards copies Clinton's message—in invisible ink, that makes the point that John...

In his op ed today, A War for Oil?, Tom Friedman mentions the president's recent soundbite:Mr. Bush's recent attempt to hype the Iraqi threat by saying that an Iraqi attack on America — which is most unlikely — "would cripple our economy" was embarrassing. It made the president look as if...

It looks like Slate launched a feature called Meme Watch back in November and refers, semifacetiously, to a MemeTracker™ device. Hey, as long as they pay us royalties! No, honestly, the more of us tracking memes the better. Timothy Noah's latest column observes the ups and downs of the "Lucky Duckies"...

Another incorrectly dated post (actually from 12/24): Drowning Mona. About 5 minutes before the end of this movie, Danny DeVito's character says, "Know this...." A good example of lame Hollywood writing, a crutch-phrase I've never heard anyone use in real life.......

whoops! my calendar keeps getting messed up for some reason. this was posted on 12/24/2002 actually, and I'm reposting it to that date now... (no way to change the datestamp on posts in Radio)....

Leading up to Christmas this year I was several times sent chain mail claiming that the lyrics to the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas" encoded forbidden Catholic catechistic information under Anglican repression. Something smelled fishy about this, not least because it was presented without any evidence, and the correspondence seemed...

I stood out back in the shed listening to the wind pick up and drive the light rain against the walls and fences and trellises. Rose bushes lash the windows even now. The cat and I agreed to go back inside.Working on a longish blog entry about losing my wallet in...

GWB HOTLINE 202-456-1111 1 PHONE CALL EQUALS 10-20 PEOPLE WHO DIDN'T CALL, PLEASE PASS ON TO FRIENDS {source this?}...

While I didn't manage to stay long enough to see all three bands (I missed Zmrzlina and Sonny Smith) at Watchword's Dec 8 event at Café du Nord, I did catch Sam Tsitrin's new combo, Ebb and Flow, who presented a fluid velvet beefheart groove style, and I heard all three...

New reading series in San Francisco. Wednesday, December 4th at 7:30 pm 2390 Mission Street Suite #10, at 20th and Mission $2 New Series New Writing///a creative// new series of readings by some of the BayArea's most talented writers plus a free chapbook at every readingtonight's fabulous readers:Chaim Bertman, Sasha Cagen, Stephanie Young, Liz...

Christmas on Park Avenue....

Christmas Blogging (the complete collection) As of 3:05 PM EST December 25, the following piece includes every single writer who has posted today. This is such a treat. I�ve always wanted to write a piece that includes everybody. It�s like the times when I�ll pop into the neighborhood pub and...

Tip of the iceberg. I've been wondering when the Lott flap would lead to a more comprehensive investigation of how the old Dixiecrat movement became the Goldwater/Nixon "southern strategy." To quote Lyndon Johnson when he signed the 1964 Voting Rights Act, "I think we've just delivered the south to the Republicans...

If you want to know what the wired globe cared about or thought about, or more exactly, searched for using Google in the past year, then check out Google's 2002 Year-End Zeitgeist wrap-up.Naturally they filter out pr0n searches which would swamp everything else. ("You've got the most popular non-porn website on...

Nothing like a sinus headache. Got my copy of Jaguar today, installed it no problem, so now I can use the latest version of Kung-Log for posting to MT (and it now picks up what tune your playing in iTunes, like the iJournal client for LiveJournal does, thanks to a request...

Well, sure. In Lott to hold news conference - Dec. 13, 2002, CNN.com reports, "Lott said Wednesday night that he hoped he could be judged in the full context of his career, which he said has included support of historically black colleges and universities....

Salon.com Politics | Lott's amnesiaOn Tuesday, on the racist Web site Nationalist.org, past Lott supporter Richard Barrett expressed offense that Lott would retract his remarks and try to portray Thurmond's candidacy as anything other than what it was."The reason that you have been elected is because you have been a segregationist,...

Robyn Hitchcock daydreams as this week's celebrity guest diary at Slate.Link courtesy of She's Actual Side, Nationwide, Believe. Given that she has now outed herself as a Robyn fan, and her blog name gives away her TMBG allegiance, I am going to go out on a limb and guess that she...

A Brief Break from all the Heavy News Stuff. The latest "thing" here at the Salon blogs seems to be interesting Google searches that led to your site. My favourite for today? "pay scales for CIA". It does make me wondering - in most industries, you can look at how employees...

One Pet Peeve Coming Right Up. "Even if you don't believe in capital punishment, the legislature has said capital punishment is available for certain crimes," Mr. Horan said, adding, "If this doesn't qualify for the death penalty, what does?" - Quoted in the New York Times This is something I just...

Minding the sun. I just read Rich's latest post to True Dirt, on the subject of welcoming the rain that we're supposed to get here in the Bay Area in the winter, when we aren't in a drought. He mentions the strange looks he gets at work when the prospect of...

Now it can be told: In some ways the most frustrating thing about the deal I signed in August to write a guide to blogging for professionals was that I wasn't permitted to discuss the project here in my blog-about-blogging.This was probably a good business decision for my publisher, as they...

Mark Pilgrim's best writing comes when he is remembering the bad old days: And the bath—oh, the bath, it was like a time warp to old times. Not good old times, just old times. A pull-down chain on the john, an old sink that leaked, and small blades—like you could buy...

Mark Hoback doesn't want to monopolize this salonika Salon Blogs collaborative category, but not to worry, a few more people have notified me of their feeds and I'll be adding them. Also, I expect to reorganize this page soon so that it links back more directly to other Salon blogs and...

As the year winds down, I find I have a surfeit of interesting things to think, write, and talk about but an overwhelming desire to sit and stare at a fireplace warmed only by a string of chili lights. I'll be in New York for about a week before Christmas, returning...

Lott shows his true colors. [Bite Media]...

Between the sets of last night's The Other Ones show at the Kaiser Auditorium in Oakland (details to follow), Robert Hunter played for about 40 minutes, just his voice and his tricked-out electric guitar. A lyric stuck with me....I hear the cries of childrenAnd the other songs of warIt's like...

Your Salon Blog Tour of Quality Let�s start right out with the new. Zoe�s Human launched today. I don�t know what a Zoe is, but I do know that the author is named Tamar, and that she follows the Israeli media to some degree. Her subhead forcefully states �I am...

Check out The Unknown Hinson Jukebox for samples of such instant classics as "I Make Faces (When I Make Love)" and "In the Trunk of My Cadillac Car."And who can forget these immortal stylings from "Put Out or Get Out":I was in prison for 30 years, babyYou learn a lot when...

New reading series starts tonight in San Francisco. Wednesday, December 4th at 7:30 pm2390 Mission Street Suite #10, at 20th and Mission$2New Series New Writing///a creative// new series of readings by some of the BayArea's most talented writers plus a free chapbook at every readingtonight's fabulous readers:Chaim Bertman, Sasha Cagen, Stephanie Young, Liz WorthyFor...

Catch Michael Jackson's kids.... MadBlast - Catch Michael Jackson's Kids!......

B sends me this link to Maximum Participation Billboard Liberation. [A Meme List]...

All my life, I've turned down the page at the corner of the book I'm reading whenever a passage of writing strikes me in some particular way: as writing itself, or because it confirms or disputes some ongoing argument I'm having with myself. The gesture is vestigial, the first step in...

What do you call a garden blog written by two people, discussing their plans, decision, thoughts, reflections, illustrated with digital images of the two gardens or the plants in them, with links to other gardening resources and the few (very few) other easily-findable examples of literate garden writing online? Briggs and...

0d my first music CD ever. With many technological advances I am the consummate late adopter. I like to let other people beta test the new techne at premium rates and jump in when the thing has proven itself and become consumer-easy. I waited till I bought a computer that could...

Sometimes satire gets at a deeper truth than "objective journalism" ever manages:WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 — President Bush today named Osama Bin Laden, a polarizing figure who is viewed with suspicion by some in the West but enjoys great cred in the Arab street, to lead an independent investigation into the Sept....

Before it disappears, go and read Literary Devices by Richard Powers, published in cooperation with Zoetrope.Borges suggested that the reader writes Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes. The software that drives battle scenes in the Lord of Rings trilogy approaches the kind of interactive storytelling landscape presaged in this witty, utterly engrossing tale.An excerpt...

Here's one of my pet peeves about television writing. It seems that a writer wants to show a character getting serious and reinforcing some sombre truth, she has that character say to another "know this: I will never leave you alone" or "know this: I'll be watching you" or something like...

Grateful. For an often-morose moper, I have lots to be grateful for. I'm healthy, young(-ish), privileged, and free. I work at home. I live in a beautiful mediterranean climate. I have maintained a love affair for over a decade. I am still learning to know myself better, to listen to my......

Last night I saw the Flaming Lips open for Beck and then back him for the second half of his set. Good show, interesting alchemy. I have all of Beck's records except his most recent one. And I only have the most recent Lips record, but I've listened to it a...

Top 100 albums of the '80s. I haven't found much to argue with in Pitchfork's Top 100 Albums of the 1980s, but then I'm also a huge Pixies fan. Let me put it this way: if not for Doolittle, there would be no Pitchfork. In other words, the influence of this...

Pete Townsend reviews Kurt Cobain's diaries. "Hope I die before I become Pete Townsend," wrote Cobain in his diary. Pete doesn't seem offended so much as saddened in his review of the just-published journals of the suicidal muse of the '90s. It is desperately sad for me to sit here, 57...

Purported Bin Laden "Letter to America". Full text: bin Laden's 'letter to America'...