At last, one of our classic sci fi tropes becomes real. Albeit for mice.
Bring on the personal jetpacks.
April 2005 Archives
More info here.
Thanks to everyone who joined us at Pete's Candy Store last night for their weekly trivia contest -- and to celebrate the birthday of yours truly. Thanks Emily, Chris, David, Liz, Andrea, Jay, Jim, Matt, Lisa, Billy, and of course my darling Debbie, who organized the whole thing as a surprise. Our combined knowledge of hot peppers, 10cc, Texas wildflowers, pirate movies, McCarthyism, lacrosse, history and geography vaulted "Mike's Mauraders" into third place, winning the coveted Pete's Candy Store sandwich. (For the record, if we had only listened to Liz telling us that Turkey bordered an awful lot of countries, we would have tied for second.) Afterward, a subset of us decamped to Plant Thailand for yummy food.
I had a great time. Isn't Debbie the best? She's the best.
Oh, and happy birthday to Liz md H!
"If we were going to devise a formula for wrecking the country, it would be difficult to improve on this one. We might as well call this portion of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 the Osama Bin Laden Support Fund."
Looks like some more fodder for the Curious Bookshelf. What would be on your list?
A bit like the Ishbadiddle / IMDB Author Relevance Index. Shakespeare wins again.
Professional Wrestler "The Ultimate Warrior" (legal name: Warrior) has a new career -- apparently wrestling doesn't quite work out if you keep leaving the federations, are reponsible for "one of the dumbest angles in WWF's history", and are "too crazy" to run your own "Warrior University." He's a conservative pundit! Recently the College Republicans at UConn brought him to speak on matters such as homosexuality ("queering don't make the world work") and Arabs (he told an Iranian girl to "get a towel.") Let's just say the audience didn't take it well, since the campus police had to get involved. An example of Mr. Warrior's delightful rhetoric, from his UConn Retort -Cowardly College Republicans:
As for the College Republicans who brought me in, well, I can only tell you that I have an apology to make. I apologize for having just gotten over a small cold as I came on your campus and that I was not capable of smelling your rudeness and cowardice out so that I could have taken you to task for your hypocrisy, phoniness and disrespect in person - right there - to set an even more incredible example of leadership and principled behavior.
It gets better from there, really. Something Awful linked to him as the "Awful Site of the Day," calling him a "crazy racist." OMG! Someone called him a bad name on the internets!! I guess it's time for the ultimate weapon in the wrestler's hands -- I refer not to the metal folding chair, or the piledriver, but the threat of a lawsuit! Says the Something Awful guy:
I thought I had seen it all. In my nearly eight years of using the Internet, I've been threatened by lawsuits from webmasters, psychotic game developers, heavy metal bands, adult men who wear diapers, and even more psychotic game developers. I had never, in my entire life, thought I would eventually receive a lawsuit from THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR. Well, not exactly the Ultimate Warrior, but his "Director of Communications," whatever that means. I guess that's the guy who picks up the phone when it rings and then turns it around the correct way so Mr. Ultimate Warrior is speaking into the correct end.
You really should read the entire thread, in which the "Director of Communications" swings between name-calling, lawsuit-threatening, and stalking, before finally giving up. The SA guy taunts him better than any pro wrestler would. Ah, it is to laugh for, this internet.
(There's also a Metafilter thread on the subject.)
I especially liked The Amazing Amazon.com.
We must have spent days, all told, playing Mao in college. Many late nights in Durfee's, eating Chris' Flurries and shouting "penalty!" At some point, fortunately, my obsession with the game turned into an obsession with one of the regular players. But despite the game's place in our relationship, Debbie and I haven't played really since then. It's a game with a maddening learning curve, as you aren't allowed to know the rules, which moreover keep mutating. I am sorely tempted to edit this Wikipedia article to include a reference to the "ooh baby baby" rule. However for the sake of Wikimedia I shall refrain.
"The bodies of the toads expanded to three and a half times their normal size."
I've been meaning to implement this for a while, but I've finally created Ishbadiddle's own community calendar, right over There. It lists holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, etc., of interest to our posters and regulars, as well as suggestions for stuff to do, for the next two weeks. So you can use this to promote concerts, shows, parties, etc. to the larger Ishbadiddle-reading public.
If you have suggestions for any recurring holidays, leave them in comments below. I've put the current list of holidays below the fold, so if I've left off your birthday, or have it on and you don't want it there, let me know. I'm missing a bunch, I know! Consider this the first draft.
If you're an Ishbadiddle poster, adding future events to the calendar is simple. Give an entry about the event the category "Our Events" and save it in draft form. After you save a draft, you'll see an "Authored On" box on the bottom of the screen. (If you don't see it, hit the "Customize the display of this page" link below the Save button, select "Custom," and make sure "Editable Authored On Date (Edit Entry screen only)" is checked.) Just change that date to the future date of the event. (The time doesn't matter.) Any information you write about the event in the Entry Body won't show up in the main blog, to save space and reduce clutter, but a » will indicate that there's more to read on the subject. You can tag the event in the Keywords field and give it multiple categories, just like any other entry.
If you're not a poster, but have an event you think would be of interest, you can email me with details at ishbadiddle -at- triptronix.net.
Mad props to Kevin Shays, who not only wrote the DateTags plugin that makes this possible, but also was very patient in helping me figure out the coding for this.
Continue reading Synch This!.
And other "Choose Your Own Adventure Books" That Never Quite Made It. Via retcon via robot filter.
Another neat mapping tool (we're all about maps these days, it seems) is the interactive 2000 Census Map over at Social Explorer, the brainchild of Andrew Beveridge, Professor of Sociology at Queens College. Now sure, you can look at maps of boring things like ancestry, education, immigration, etc., and make your fancy reports and such. But the most interesting thing about the map: it's a National Gaydar System. That's right, you can find out just where the (self-reported) gays and lesbians are. At least the ones who are in couples.
Now, the usual places are on there (San Francisco New York Vermont blah blah lesbian blah blah gay blah), but I'm more interested in the rural areas. You know, Red States, the places that are (in David Brook's World) the antithesis of all things gay.
Now, there are some interesting patterns outside the major cities. (This is based, by the way, on percentage of the population, not absolute numbers.) Lesbians prefer Portland, ME, while Maine gays are attracted to Somerset. You'll find a higher concentration of gays in Forest, PA, but the nearest hotbed of lesbianism is Tompkins, NY. Georgia? Webster: gay. Lanier: lesbian. Nearly everyone in Hampshire, MA seems to be a lesbian, while Massachusetts gays are mostly in Boston. Idaho? Not many pockets of lesbianism, but you'll find gays in, um, Benewah. Gays are in Goshen, WY, and La Paz, AZ. Lesbians are in Keweenaw, MI, Piute, UT, Allendale, SC, McClean, ND, Dewey, SD, and Pushmataha, OK.
The one place I'm really curious about is Hudspeth County, TX. Southern Hudspeth County is lesbian country. Northern Hudspeth County is gay. Who decided that one? Do they meet in the middle and brawl?
(See now if I were David Brooks, I could write an entire uninformed column out of this, and you'd read it in the New York Times.)
You may have read about the new food pyramid recently unveiled by the USDA. It's customized! It emphasizes exercise! (There's a little guy running up the side of it!) There are 12 of them!
The pyramid has come under fire by nutritionists who complain that it doesn't really encourage anyone to eat less of anything. But what bothers me about it is that it's not really a pyramid.
OK, so here's the old pyramid:
The meaning of it is immediately clear: eat more of the stuff at the base, eat less of the stuff at the top. That's how a pyramid graphic should work. Here's the new one:
By turning the sections on their side, there's no longer any relationship to the pyramid shape. Other than the guy running up the side of it. The amount of foods recommended still relate to the area covered, but the reader can't immediately grasp which foods to eat more of and which to eat less of. You could get the same information out of a stacked bar chart:
Bad graphics. Someone get Tufte on the phone. Stat.
There's a big hole in the ground on 35th Street, and it's being filled with a building by non-union labor. I know this because I pass by the large Inflatable Union Rat most every morning. I remember Jack telling me that in New Jersey, strikers had to remain in motion, but I guess the rules are different in New York, because the union guys are mostly standing around.
So this morning I came up with the perfect nickname for the Inflatable Union Rat: Scabbers. Get it? It's so perfect I'm going to have to suppress laughter every time I see the Rat.
I'm so dang clever!
American Rhetoric is a site run by a UT-Tyler prof. Kind of neat -- it uses movie clips to demonstrate rhetorical devices. For instance, Nicholson does Asyndeton.
Sweat Ship: Team Plans Offshore Assault on L.A. Coders
Of all the dystopian futures imagined for Los Angeles, none have been stranger than the truth. Get a load of this horror:
Three San Diego entrepreneurs plan to start a cut-rate outsourcing plant for software development three miles off the coast of Los Angeles aboard a used cruise ship moored in international waters.
Wired with a fat T3 pipe fed by microwave, SeaCode would employ 600 developers - the bulk of them non-U.S. citizens - who could crank out code around the clock at a lower cost and higher rate of efficiency than their American counterparts.
The beauty part (at least according to the proponents) is that business would be booming, the headquarters could change sail wherever business took it, and RnR would be just a half-hour water-taxi ride away. In your neighborhood.
EXTREME OUTSOURCING! Query: do off-shore oil rig crews have to be legal, or do they come under the same loophole?
"Well turn it up, dude!" David Bowie, the Nazis, and the Golden Dawn. I would totally love to see the video of Bowie and Henry Winkler together on the Dinah Shore show, but apparently it's lost to the ages.
OK, I admit, I had fanboy excitement going in to see Sin City. Frank Miller's comic is amazing hypernoir. As long as he's not doing a sequel, Rodriguez is a fine director. And it promised to look amazing, with a panel-to-screen translation unseen before, capturing the look and feel of Miller's black-and-white-with-splashes-of-color comic. Plus, you know, eye candy.
So, what's the word I'm looking for? Disappointment. Yeah, that's it.
Sin City is this year's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It looks great, it's a terrific homage -- and it's just not very exciting. As a movie. "Sin City" (the comic) has great characters. Their movie versions (with the exception of an unrecognizable Mickey Rourke as Marv) are just sort of bland, style with no attitude. Clive Owen's Dwight is the worst, and the middle story is kind of boring because of it. I think part of the problem is that we only get part of Dwight's story, so his victory doesn't mean much; nor does his relationship with Gail et al. make much sense. Bruce Willis as Hartigan is somewhat better, but please, can we just tell Michael Madsen to stay out of acting for a while? Watching him chew the scenery is not my kind of fun.
The other problem, I think, is the translation. What works on the page doesn't necessarily work on the screen. The violence, for instance, seems much gorier. I was reminded of this interview with Alan Moore, talking about the translation of comics to films:
Personally, I tend to think [The Watchmen is] unfilmable, and it would only lose something. But there, again, I'm very pessimistic about adaptations from one medium to another. I've got a very kind of primitive, Puritan view of it. I tend to think that if something was derived for one medium, then there's no real immediate reason to think that it's necessarily going to be as good or better if adapted into another one. Sometimes the transition can be easier. There have been very good stage plays that have made some very good films. But there are not so many differences between the theater and the cinema as there are between the cinema and, say, reading a book or reading a comic. So I generally tend to be pessimistic, although I could sometimes be wrong. You'll occasionally get a film that is a wonderful adaptation of a book, and maybe does add something to it.
Comics-to-movie adaptations tend to be worse than book-to-movie adaptations, and unfortunately, Sin City fares no better.
Oh, and some funny SC-themed Photoshops from Something Awful, below the fold.
Continue reading Sin City.
You can always count on Wodehouse, just as Bertie can always count on Jeeves. This farce contains the best example of zeugma I've ever come across; one thinks that PGW thought it up first and then wrote the entire book around it. Also recently read
Finally Explained! Now we can rest. Via The Morning News.
So The Guardian asked a number of scientists to rate their favorite doomsday scenarios. Their Eschatonathon ranges from genetic decay to super-volcanos to the earth being swallowed by a black hole.
Afterwards we estimate each threat in two ways: first, the chance of it occurring in our lifetime (the next 70 years); and, second, the danger that it would pose to the human race if it did happen (10 = making humans extinct, to one = barely having an impact on our lives).
Now what this article lacks is two things: one, a threat matrix, and two, a handy chart. Having a few minutes on my hands, I decided to address this lack:
Print it out, and put it on your fridge!
How it's done stuff, and Top Eschatons To Watch Out For This Century, below the fold.
Continue reading The End Of The World (Now In Handy Chart Form!).
I read on Boing Boing that Bruce Schneier had launched a new symbol: Individual-i:
Today, the rights of individuals are being eroded: by government, by corporations, by society itself. This icon — the Individual-i — represents the rights of the individual.
It represents the right to privacy and anonymity in the information age. It represents the rights to an open government, due process, and equal protection under the law. It represents the right to live surveillance free, and not to be marked as "suspicious" for wanting these other rights.
It recognizes that a free society is a safe society, and that freedom is founded upon individual rights.
The battle for individual rights is just beginning; our side needs a symbol.
We hope to see this symbol displayed proudly wherever individual rights are valued.
Here it is:
Will such symbol-making work? On the plus side, it's an easy symbol to make (only seven pen strokes) and recognize (its anthropomorphic shape helps). On the negative, its meaning is somewhat tied to language. The "I" stands for "Individual" -- but will that meaning translate in non-English speaking (and non-Roman alphabetic) contexts?
Also, I kinda see this, but that's just the Pollyanna in me:
So I figured that any good meme needs its own 80 x 15 blog button so I quickly threw two together, the better of which graces Ishbadiddle even now. And now they're both up on the Individual-i site, how 'bout that, along with some actually professional looking ones.
It wasn't. Numbers are not sentient and thus incapable of feeling fear.
Ennis sent over this link to a superhero seder parody, featuring Magneto, Spock, and ... The Thing? I had no idea he was Jewish, but indeed Benjamin Jacob Grimm is a Member of the Tribe. (Another article at Beliefnet.)
He's a golem, see?
And in case you needed it, a list of all the Jewish Supers. Iceman? Shadowcat? Harley Quinn? Who knew? I guess this two-fisted rabbi has been reading up on his comics.
A favorite blog of mine by an expat in Korea. One of his running themes is his hangover-induced kitchen sink concoctions ("What NOT to cook in Asia...") usually involving whatever's left in the fridge, some kimchi or gochujang, a slice of processed cheese, all topped with mayonnaise and ketchup.
(Note martini olives and bacon in omelet above.)
His latest: Sam Gyup Sandwich.
things magazine is a memestream I Read Solely Syndicatedly. They've been offline for a while, but just burst a core dump of links on us. A few of interest to some of us:
Aaron: Why Architects Give Me the Willies
Colin: OtherPower
Andrea: Location, location, location.
Chris: The internet DJ.
Jay: Really early compression techniques.
Note: you can click on the links even if your name isn't next to it!
The matrix remade as existential comedy. Albert Markovski sounds to me like Andy Wachowski. Is that a coincidence?
"I think so, Brain, but Zero Mostel times anything will still give you Zero Mostel." The Animaniacs were awesome, esp. Pinky and the Brain (until they brought in that stupid girl.) Read through to the Pinky Paradox at the end.
Scott Pakin's automatic complaint-letter generator= is ancient, in Internet years, but new to me. Here's a complaint letter you can send to your local paper about Tom DeLay.
The New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? And what is EPIC?
Found on Josh Rubin.
Speaking of Korematsu, Malkin's enough to make me... April Fool's!
Rox Populi pulls off a slick April Fool's joke with a parody of Michelle Malkin's website. Detailed even down to a scathing memorial to Korematsu.
Fred Korematsu passed away March 30, 2005 at his daughter's home of respiratory illness. He is known for having challenged the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II in the court case Korematsu v. United States (1944), where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the internment was justified due to "military necessity."
Continue reading "He had a quiet courage.".
... Power Slayer? Found on memepool.
I was recently going through Ishbadiddle's server logs, for reasons tangential to everything important. I haven't looked at them for a while (gone are the days when I checked our logs on an obsessive basis!) but was interested to see what Google searches have brought people here. And, hopped up on caffeine as I currently am, I found there was a strange sort of poetry to it.
I've been interested, in an on and off kind of a way, in "found poetry." In high school I mucked about with programming computer-generated poetry. I never did submit it to Facets, but that would have made for an interesting literary Turing test. (Considering the poetry they did print...) I have a poem "object" made up of clips from one day's New York Times I did in college. So here's another experiment in found poetry, this one entirely made from Google search requests for Ishbadiddle on 4/7/05. Only punctuation changes have been made. Poem is below the fold, so lovers of actual poetry can avoid reading it.
Continue reading Speaking At A Funeral.
"...300 Japanese women in identical blonde wigs take part in an event to counter the supposedly stereotypical western concept of beauty." [via tokyotimes]
Abandonia -- classic DOS games. Mostly free.
Via Gadgetopia, a one-page synopsis of Edward Tufte's Principles, without the whole workshop fee. Also, if you're looking for what not to do, there's Sites That Suck..
Scramble To Destroy Deadly Flu
Scientists around the world were scrambling to prevent the possibility of a pandemic after a nearly 50-year-old killer influenza virus was sent to thousands of labs....The germ, the 1957 H2N2 "Asian flu" strain, killed between 1 million and 4 million people, 70,000 in the U.S. alone. It has not been included in flu vaccines since 1968, and anyone born after that date has little or no immunity to it.....Nearly 5,000 labs in 18 countries, received the virus from a U.S. company that supplies kits used for quality control tests.....The WHO said Tuesday that there have been no reports of infections in laboratory workers associated with the distribution of the samples and that "the risk for the general population is also considered low." Still, the decision to send out the strain was described by Stohr as "unwise" and "unfortunate."
"Unwise and unfortunate." Well, there's your understatement for the day. Since when did "unfortunate" become the word for "colossal foulup that no one will be held accounatable for?" I see it used all the time in this context. That and "we regret the error."
Quickly, now because I'm off to dinner. Found on A&LD, this essay by Michael Walzer on the left and American politics. Yes, it's another essay dissecting what happened in the 2004 election, but I think Walzer's got something here.
Liberals and leftists are engaged on many fronts, but we are not coherently engaged. No one on the left has succeeded in telling a story that brings together the different values to which we are committed and connects them to some general picture of what the modern world is like and what our country should be like. The right, by contrast, has a general picture. I don't think that its parts actually fit together in a coherent way, but they appear to do so. And in politics, despite the common view that all politicians pander to their constituencies, saying one thing here and its opposite there, the appearance of coherence is the name of the game.Scattershot doesn't work, not in arguments and not in campaigns; you need a coordinated barrage. And somehow, right-wing intellectuals and activists have managed to convince themselves and a lot of other people that the free market, individual self-reliance, the crusade for democracy, the war against terrorism, heterosexual marriage, conventional sex and gender roles, religious faith, and patriotic sentimentality all hang together. They are a coherent set, and together they constitute the American Way. And then the defense of "values," even if it's narrowly and weirdly focused-say, on sexual license in Hollywood movies-calls to mind everything else. Well, I guess it's not entirely weird; there is a recognizable picture of America here, even if it's a nostalgic picture, and even if a lot of Americans (maybe, today, most Americans) are left out of it.
Much more to it, of course, and I'm just beginning to think about it. But go read.
I've been staring at maps all day today. Specifically, I've been mapping schools in one of Computers for Youth's potential new cities. The software I'm using is MapInfo. I've spent much of the day trying to figure out how to map addresses to the city streets. When I did this for NYC, it was (relatively) easy. There are street files available for each borough. Load them up and geocoding is pretty straightforward. But no such files exist (at least that I could find through extensive Googling) for this other city. Sure, I could get the grid of city streets (the "Tiger" file, free download). Sure, that grid table includes data on the name of every street and where the address numbers are. But seemingly the only way to actually get a spreadsheet of addresses to show up on the map was -- to buy MapInfo's street data! For hundreds of dollars!
Thankfully, Google saved my butt again. On an obscure part of their site, MapInfo explains the 10 step process for actually making the Tiger file into useful data! For free! Of course, they want to make this fact as hidden as possible, so you think you have to plunk down for their street data product as well. Neh.
Speaking of maps, Kerim has a pointer to Buzztracker, another newsmap like the one we were talking about a few days ago.
I like Buzztracker because it not only shows hotspots, but also related places. And the newsreader is easier to navigate, as are the archives. However it departs from the "moving average" idea of Eo-Geo, which I think is a strength of the latter site for reasons I went into before and am too bleary from looking at maps to go into again. Plus it's only news in English. Not that I'm reading news in Urdu, but you have to figure that English-only news skews the data somewhat. Finally, it focuses on places and cities rather than nations. Another panel for my giant heads-up display in the Ishbadiddle War Room, coming soon to an underground bunker deep beneath your feet.
sproutliner is a collaborative web-based outlining tool. I'm sure this is useful for something, but there's so much paper on my desk I couldn't tell you what right now.
HOUSE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION NO. 29 - Napoleon Dynamite. Ahh, government.
A blog of postcards of anonymous secrets. Sort of a combination of mail art and the now-defunct Apology Line (featured on This American Life.) The cards range from the amusing to the disturbing.
Note: Thanks to Google, this page has become a small Internet confessional. You're welcome to post your own secrets here. But (and I speak from personal experience) nothing can replace the help of professionals. They will also listen to your secrets, and keep them, and help you deal with your feelings about them. This site will help you find a psychologist. There are also some resources on our friend / superhero's site breakup girl. Don't go it alone. You don't have to.
Just a couple of questions for those of you who read Ishbadiddle via syndication. What feed reader are you using (Bloglines? LiveJournal? Other?) And what's the URL you're feeding from? Please answer in comments, thanks!
The taxation of trade routes to the outlying star systems is in dispute! OMG WE NEED JEDIS! Found on PCJM.
Over on the "Here" sidebar, under the recent comments, you'll see "On This Day In Ish," which lists posts with today's date from prior years, if there are any. Relive the blog's past! Why? Why not! Uses Brad Choate's MTOnThisDay plugin, which does exactly this.
And, of course, the vital reference list of the Amish in Science Fiction. Thank goodness someone's collecting this all.
A collection of guttural moans from comics. These look like panels we would've used in Nadine. Via Eyebeam reBlog.
Funny! Found on Drawn, where I also found Coconino World.
The penultimate issue of Greg's Phoenix comic is now in fine comic books stores near you. (If you've missed them, my guess is that the whole miniseries will be reissued in paperback.) There's some great stuff in here. I especially like the spreads where 3 rows track synchronous action in 3 locations, like strips of film taken at the same time in different places, laid across the page. It's the sort of thing that makes
Oh, and for those Neil Gaiman fans out there, the news is out: Greg will be writing a sequel to 1602. Yay! Gotta wait until July for that one, though.
The Gallery of Shaken Faces. Via robotfilter.
Von Trier's best since
In neat flow chart form! Found on TPM
I had some thoughts regarding Colin's post on shame and intelligence as weapons in the battle against the Crusaders. I hope you don't mind, Colin, if I start a new post on the subject, and hope that I've got the gist of your argument right.
In high school I did a theater workshop at the Kennedy Center. In the drama class, we did an exercise with the characters we were portraying in our monologues. Make a list of character traits for your character and for yourself. Find what you have in common and where the greatest differences are. But what if you don't have anything in common with your character? asked one of my classmates. What if she's just -- mean? Well, our teacher replied, no one really things of themselves as wicked. Except in melodrama, of course.
We justify our behaviors to ourselves. We avoid cognitive dissonance.
That's why I think it's difficult to impose shame on another. Your mom can shame you. Your group (friends, church, bowling league) can shame you. But an "outsider" can't. Our defenses are too high; we'll reject the effort of the outsider to shame us, even if they point out our hypocrisies, lies, and deceits.
So when Joseph Welch asked McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" (decency, not "shame" as is usually quoted), McCarthy could quite simply ignore him. Just so much background noise. (Although, he probably did not have a sense of decency, or shame.)
This tendency, I believe, is all the more powerful when the accuser is our (perceived) foe -- and when we buy into a story of persecution, victimhood, and zealotry (of the religious or non-religious varities.) I'll again recommend
I suggest that modelling security will be difficult as long as there's money and votes and power to be gained by peddling insecurity. Or mongering fear.
BandToBand.com enables you to figure out how bands are linked by common musicians -- sort of like the Oracle of Bacon for music. It only takes 12 steps to get from Black Sabbath to Sixpence None The Richer!
The countdown for the extinction of CDs is about to begin. Maybe, but I think that rumors of the CD's demise are greatly exagerrated. How else will someone flip through your collection to tell what kind of person you are?
I admit, when I first heard of the Minuteman Project, a group of volunteers/vigilantes (depending on what media you're reading) who are patrolling the border in Arizona looking for illegal immigrants to turn in to the Border Patrol, my first thought was of It Can't Happen Here. In Sinclair Lewis' novel about the coming of fascism to American, the "marching club"/militia/brown shirts are called... The Minutemen.
The whole thing's a political publicity stunt, really -- fewer than a 100 volunteers actually showed up, and the one border-crosser they caught got fed Fig Newtons. Blogger La Shawn Barber has an interview with one Minuteman, who gets points from me just for choosing the alias "John Smallberries." There's an interesting discussion of the Minutemen over at Crooked Timber.
It shouldn't be surprising -- after all, as David Brooks (Wayne's Worst Export) has seen fit to remind us, conservatives actually disagree with each other some of the time! -- but there's a lot of anti-Bush sentiment at these anti-immigration rallies.
That's all I've got. Need more coffee.
Update: A couple of other immigration-related articles that caught my eye. LAPD complains that they can't extradite criminals who are illegals". And illegals contribute about $7b to Social Security every year. That's all. Discuss.
Neat, but I can't figure out how they're picking their blogs. Or avoiding a lawsuit.
A take-off of the modern design catalog Design Within Reach, Deisgn Without Reach shows how to recreate famous pieces with ordinary household objects. My favorite is the Satellite Bowl made with chopsticks and a rubber band:
"Trying to control music sharing - by shutting down P2P sites or MP3 blogs or BitTorrent or whatever other technology comes along - is like trying to control an affair of the heart. Nothing will stop it."
Patrick writes:
Remember the Simputer? I think I was alone in thinking it wasn't such a great idea; and now it's out and not selling very well. Now an even cheaper computer is being proposed: the 100 dollar laptop. This too, I think, will fail. Giving poor people in poor countries hi-tech equipment is putting the cart in front of the horse. I am currently reading
Added to that in this case, there will undoubtedly be a backlash against any government or NFP who is undermining the very engines of technology: Microsoft, the computer manufactures, et al. Not nice, but true.
New York City ranks second, behind Hong Kong, in this skyline ranking of the world's cities. Found on The Morning News.
Man, Pixar just keeps turning out better and better movies. I'm not surprised that Brad Bird also did
As is now the norm for Shyamalan's movies, the movie is much more interesting than the "twist." Worth watching for Bryce Howard's performance.
BBC asks long-dead Bob Marley for interview. Apparently not an April Fool's joke.
If I told you that the leaders of the Muslims, the Jews, and the Christians in Jerusalem were finally coming together in agreement, you'd probably say, "Bah, an April Fool's joke, right?" And if I showed you a picture of them all together in unity, you'd say, "Bah, just Photoshopped, right?"
No, it's not an April Fool's joke! No, it's not Photoshopped! The leaders of all three religions are finally united . . . in their hatred of gays.
Clerics Fighting a Gay Festival for Jerusalem
International gay leaders are planning a 10-day WorldPride festival and parade in Jerusalem in August, saying they want to make a statement about tolerance and diversity in the Holy City, home to three great religious traditions.
Now major leaders of the three faiths - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - are making a rare show of unity to try to stop the festival. They say the event would desecrate the city and convey the erroneous impression that homosexuality is acceptable.
"They are creating a deep and terrible sorrow that is unbearable," Shlomo Amar, Israel's Sephardic chief rabbi, said yesterday at a news conference in Jerusalem attended by Israel's two chief rabbis, the patriarchs of the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian churches, and three senior Muslim prayer leaders. "It hurts all of the religions. We are all against it."
Abdel Aziz Bukhari, a Sufi sheik, added: "We can't permit anybody to come and make the Holy City dirty. This is very ugly and very nasty to have these people come to Jerusalem."
Sigh. Just when I thought there was a glimmer of, I don't know, hope or something.
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