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We "discovered" the Junie B. Jones books earlier this year and have had a lot of fun reading through the entire series with Charlotte as her bedtime stories. We've read almost all of the books that take place in her kindergarten, and have even jumped ahead a few to read several of the first grade adventures. Charlotte gets a lot of enjoyment out of the stories, and I get to have fun coming up with all the voices of the characters.
When we first learned about the series, I believe it was Charlotte's kindergarten teacher who told us about them. Right off the bat she let us know that sometimes Junie B. does not use correct grammar or correct words. Okay, fine. Five-year-olds are not known for their impeccable grammar or grasp of English verb tense exceptions. It's to be expected, particularly in the context of being used in a novel where the main character is the narrator AND a five-year-old to boot. But who knew this was such a heated battle among parents?
Frankly, I don't expect every single thing my child encounters to have to be a formal learning experience. I suspect that a lot of the people who are so upset about Junie B. Jones are also the sort of people who feel their children should wear a helmet at all times and never eat anything that wasn't personally hand-grown by their own private organic farmer. Indeed, isn't one of the ways we improve our command of the language through being exposed to its improper use in a way that helps us understand the errors being made? We're already turning into a society full of illiterate morons, drowning in an ocean of bad grammar, bad taste, and bad judgment; you would think that people could see this as an opportunity to point out the errors and share a little one-on-one parent-child education.
It's not that I don't have a few criticisms of the books myself. It's pretty obvious to me that Barbara Park, the author, is writing for theparents as much if not more than the children who hear these stories. Sometimes too much so. A lot of Junie B.'s speech affectations and word choices are meant to deliberately draw a laugh from the grown-up reader and are somewhat lost on the child. It's okay in small doses, but as the cumulative effect of reading the books builds up, it gets old. If she really wants to write to the adults, then the affectations do not need to be so in-your-face, and some attention should go to developing the adult characters who appear routinely in the books but as little more than flabbergasted foils. Character development of everyone other than Junie B. is pretty much non-existant. But I think those are minor quibbles.
Permalink | Comments (0)Now here's something you don't see every day: it has been ten years since David Shenk's book "Data Smog" first appeared. Today, at Slate, the author himself revisits the book, acknowledges where he was wrong, and considers how much (and how little) the information overload has changed since 1997.
It's refreshing to see someone who wrote a book that was so fixed to its own moment in time and yet made so many assertions about the future willing to sit down for a few mea culpas. Of course, a lot of what he wrote was spot-on back then and only continues to be all the more real for us now, so he doesn't have to backpedal or equivocate at all; he can just admit to the few overblown assertions and/or bad predictions, confident that he did make his point the first time.
Permalink | Comments (0)Sorry to be a bit delayed with today's posts, I found myself caught up in some mid-morning meetings just at the point in my day where I usually post.
Besides which, all anybody can seem to post about today is the Rhode Island Death Cat. I found him here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and, of course, here. And those are just the sites I visit regularly.
That sumbitchin' cat gets around!
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Okay, some of these stories are not new, and I suspect some of them aren't even true, but this page has a pretty good collection of stories about the idiotic things people are capable of. I especially enjoyed the first one.
Strangly, there are no mentions of the TSA anywhere on that page. Maybe whoever put up that page is afraid of being blacklisted.
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A laurel and hardy handshake to my former co-workers at IDEO Boston (which, for the moment, is still technically IDEO Lexington, but is soon to be IDEO Cambridge). They picked up four of this year's IDEA Awards for their work on the new Eclipse 500 Very Light Jet.
It's nothing new for IDEO to win a pant-load of IDEA Awards, but since I know some of the people involved, I just wanted to offer them my personal congratulations.
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Just when you think every possible bit of fanboy appreciation has been milked out of "Star Trek", somebody manages to find ONE MORE ARTICLE. At least this one is entertaining: the folks at Modern Drunkard magazine have put down their drinks long enough to write an article about what a bunch of boozehounds Captain Kirk and Crew were back in the day, and what a load of tea-drinking posers the ST:TNG crew were by comparison (via)
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Yesterday, our dear friend Suzette was complaining about people who say that New Jersey is a Zone 6 climate. She says it's more like Zone 7, similar to the weather found in North Carolina.
Today, Joe at bookofjoe has a post about the northward creep of the hardiness zones from 1990 to 2006, which seems to prove her point. It might be a little hard to see in that picture above, but if you look at a larger version, you can see that much of New Jersey has seen a +1 change of zone.
Eastern Massachusetts has remained a Zone 6 area (the warming effect of the ocean making our climate much milder than the rest of New England), but over the last 16 years the rest of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island have also warmed up to Zone 6, and now even much of New Hampshire and Vermont have warmed up to Zone 5, which is more typical of the Upper Midwest...or what used to be typical 16 years ago, I guess.
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It might be a little difficult for you to make out, but that picture is a screenshot of a video of a seagull stealing a package of Doritos from a beachside convenience store in England.
According to the Daily Mail article (via), the bird always takes the same flavor -- Chili HeatWave -- and does this on a daily basis. His M.O. is always the same: he comes in when the door is ajar, looks to see if the store owner is paying attention, grabs the Doritos, and hightails it. Once back outside, he enlists the aid of the pigeons to open the bag and gives them their cut of the action.
Don't believe it? Watch the video!
I wonder if he's part of a sort of bird mafia, working along with those coin-thieving starlings
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This short American Heritage web article (via) talks about the rise and fall of one of the first major national retailers in the United States: F. W. Woolworth's.
The American Heritage article doesn't go into a lot of detail except to point out that the culprit behind Woolworth's demise was suburbanization. The actual discount retail concept itself hasn't even remotely gone away, it has just reshaped itself into Wal-Mart and has even found a niche in the flourishing "dollar store" retailers. Some local "five and dime" stores remain even to this day, particularly in towns that go out of their way to retain "local character".
Among my own earliest memories is being taken to Woolworth's by my grandmother and riding the escalator. Sometimes we would even eat at the lunch counter. Marcel Proust would be pleased to know that my strongest memory of the place is the smell, which includes the unmistakable aroma of stale buttered popcorn, the mingled perfume of hundreds of old ladies, and a je ne sais quoi that I can only call "department store". I've never been in a Wal-Mart that smelled like a Woolworth's, although I have found the same aroma in other department stores.
Even though Wal-Mart seems invincible, I think the take-away from this article is that all things must pass, and the greatest giants are often humbled even as they seem most powerful. Nice to know that insignificance is an equal-opportunity effect.
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You know who else is rapidly approaching complete insignificance? Newspapers, that's who.
They may put a brave face on it -- they alternatingly talk smack about bloggers and then try to suck up to them, they've tried to recapture younger readers with targeted mini-papers, and so on -- but this WSJ article lays it on the line. The newspaper business is getting measured for its coffin and the undertaker is not the blogs but Craig's List, abetted by eBay and similar online venues for selling your junk.
Why, it's so bad that even REAL newspapers like the Weekly World News are going under.
(graph and WSJ link via Tom McMahon)
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Back in 2004, in the wake of George Bush's narrow (and most likely fraudulent) defeat of John Kerry, author and historian Garry Wills famously wrote in the New York Times about the clouds of a new "Un-Enlightenment" amassing over us.
In the three years since, the whirlwind of willful ignorance and public denial of nearly every facet of reason, science, and empiricism has only gained strength. It's really hard for me to even begin to understand what is driving this wholesale rejection of the amazing discoveries and additions to human knowledge that are perhaps the only positive hallmark of the 20th Century, but there's no denying that the people who push for a world-view based on fear, ignorance, and the rejection of empiricism in favor of blind faith have gained far more support than I (or anyone else, for that matter) could have possibly imagined when I read Wills' op-ed then.
This Guardian article reviews a new book by Natalie Angier called "The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science", and in the process considers a fundamental problem that may go a long way to explaining our culture's breathtaking abandonment of reason: our society relegates almost all of our basic education of science to our earliest years of education, turning away from science, math, and other "hard" topics to "softer" ones when children reach their teen years (literature, art, music). As a result, we are left with a decidedly imperfect understanding of even the most basic tenets of science and math, which, if we do not pursue them ourselves in college, become dim and only vaguely understood at all. Consequently, it's all too easy for the current crop of demagogues, charlatans, and evil-doers to swoop in and convince people with anything that sounds remotely plausible like "intelligent design" or even totally implausible like miracles, faces-in-pizza-slices, hurricanes "punishing" people for "evil", and so on.
Even people who might otherwise know their stuff about their own area of expertise are not immune to this -- see the quiz the Guardian gave to some notable public figures in Britain about basic science facts, and see how poorly they did. In our daily lives, it might not matter if we know why salt dissolves in water or what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is, but our collective ignorance weakens our ability to resist the charismatic lures of the Willful Ignorant.
Check out this web page with a whole list of common misconceptions about basic science -- stuff you thought you knew, but you really don't. Or maybe you did when you were 8 or 9 years old, but have long since forgotten. I have to cop to not knowing the first one on the list myself, and these are all pretty obvious items.
Al Gore's new book "The Assault On Reason", takes on some of the other culprits -- our over-entertained culture, the information overload from corporations and agenda-driven media organizations, and others -- but I find a lot of power in the argument that we simply waste the power of education by misdirecting it. And I think it extends beyond the current battleground of science -- how many Americans never learn a shred of history beyond what is taught to them in elementary school, with the result that the overwhelming majority of Americans do not have a realistic picture of the root causes of the Civil War, the political context of American intervention in World Wars I and II, or the misguided foreign policies of the Cold War that have led us to our current disastrous situation in Iraq.
Collectively, we're getting more and more ignorant with each succeeding generation, and the damage is beginning to show. I'm on hiatus from heavy-duty ranting, so I'll share this blogger's screed with you because he sums it up so well.
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The Three Gorges Dam project is slated for completion in 2009 (the dam itself was finished last year), but this Discovery Channel story says that local climatological and meteorlogical changes caused by the dam are already observable -- noticeable changes in rainfall now are expected to increase in magnitude as the project completes.
If you read that first linked page all the way to the bottom, you'll find some more links to environmental changes that are likely to occur because of the dam: a loss of silt deposits at the mouth of the Yangtze near Shanghai, and the likely disappearance of a major fishing area in the East China Sea are only two of the larger threats being monitored.
Today is the 38th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. I was not quite Charlotte's age in July of 1969, but I remember watching as much of this as my parents would let me, hunkered down in their bedroom in front of the little television they had in there.
Funny, I don't remember it happening like this (YouTube, lots of profanity), but I was pretty little at the time.
Relatedly, this story talks about a recent meeting-of-minds among various engineering and science teams who are contributing to the early phases of designing a manned mission to Mars. It's the first time anyone hs gotten them together to talk about the difficulties in designing the landing system that will be required. Mars presents some challenges that previous space programs haven't had to deal with -- primarily, landing a very heavy orbiter in a very thin atmosphere and getting everybody inside the craft safely on the surface. The fact that 60% of all unmanned missions to Mars have failed to land successfully isn't terribly encouraging, but they've got some interesting ideas.
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My friends at The Big Red House Forum and I have been entertaining ourselves for the last few months playing a variation of the board game "Scrabble" that I devised. They're very good at the game, so I have to keep ratcheting up the difficulty level to keep it challenging. This week we added Triple Word and Triple Letter scoring bonuses, and it has everybody working a little harder to make sure they're getting every possible point.
So, I just had to post this link to this craft blogger who makes rings out of old Scrabble tiles. (via) She also makes these Scrabble tile knitting markers
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Vanity Fair editor Cullen Murphy is only the latest person to consider the obvious comparisons between the United States and the Roman Empire in his new book "Are We Rome", but I liked this interview with him on The Atlantic Monthly's website (prior to joining Vanity Fair, Murphy was the editor of The Atlantic for many years). Compared to the pro-empire voices of people like Niall Ferguson, it's worth having someone remind us that being the "New Rome" isn't entirely a good thing.
Permalink | Comments (0)By now most everybody has had the chance to try the Simpsons avatar generator at the movie's official website. Now, Burger King has a "Simpsonize Me" site where you can upload a photo of yourself and have it automagically generate a Simpsons caricature of yourself. (bonus points to Burger King for the pun on "SuperSize Me", which was the Morgan Spurlock film that bashed fast food)
I guess I am just not meant to be part of some Simpsonian universe, because I tried both of these doodads and could not get an avatar that I thought looked the least bit like me at all.
My wife tells me I look like Hermie The Elf from "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer". Personally, I don't see it.
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2007 is the 75th anniversary of the publication of Aldous Huxley's novel "Brave New World".
Like me, you probably read the book in high school English class, along with the other two Big Novels in social allegory -- Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm". Somehow over time, these books, along with other "Big Idea" books like "Atlas Shrugged" went from being serious literature to hoary standards fit only for naive and idealistic teenagers. And so they are foisted on a generally unappreciative audience, where they are woodenly transformed into lifeless book reports and essays or breathlessly embraced by teenage minds aching for philosophical explanations of the world that they can grasp.
We are reminded almost daily of the continuing relevance of "1984" in the context of our doublespeak public sphere, in the "endless war with Eastasia", and the intrusion of "Big Brother" into our lives. But "Brave New World" is often overlooked, lumped together with science fiction novels, even though the technological elements we all remember are really just decorative trappings for a more serious consideration of what it means to be human.
This essay from the conservative-leaning technology journal "The New Atlantis" revisits the book's themes and considers them in the context of our own times, as they prove to have a great deal of resonance with current social issues.
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So, I just read this post by one of the contributors at Mental Floss, where she did a little quick figuring to address the question of how likely it is that anyone from a given state in the U.S. will be from that state's largest city. In other words, if you're from New York, how likely is it that you're from New York City?
In the case of New York and NYC, it's actually almost a 50-50 proposition that a New Yorker is also a New Yorker, if you follow me. But she looked at a bunch of cities and has posted the results for your interest.
Somehow, she left Boston off the list. Tragic oversight, obviously. So here I am to fill in the gaps for you.
The City of Boston's estimated population as of 2005 is roughly 559,000 people (and you thought Boston was A LOT bigger, didn't you?). The population of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was 6,437,193 in 2006. you can do your own math, but the answer is that only 8.68% of the people who live in Massachusetts are residents of Boston.
Which seems to fly in the face of reason, right? Well, that's because most of us who "live in Boston" actually live in the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area, our grandparents having had the good sense to flee the city decades ago in favor of such charming burbs as Everett, Randolph, and the like.
According to that Wikipedia link, these days the reach of the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area extends to about 30% of the total area of the state and has a population of 4,411,835. That's 68.53% of the total population of Massachusetts, meaning 2 out of every 3 people in Massachusetts are "from Boston" in the larger sense. If you fold in some of the satellite cities that are also considered part of the total statistical area such as Manchester NH, Providence RI and Worcester MA, the overall population is 7,427,336, or 115% of the population of Massachusetts.
That's a lot of Massholes.
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I'm sure you've probably read or heard about the flotilla of thousands of rubber duckies that have been drifting around the ocean for the last 15 years and are set to make landfall on the western coast of Britain this summer.
Maybe they're headed back to the mothership. This massive rubber duck is spending its summer in the Loire River estuary in France, patiently waiting for all those little duckies to swim home.
Permalink | Comments (0)a.k.a My Childhood Treasures!
This blogger has thoughtfully put together a list of toys he called the "most dangerous of all time." Of course, most of them come from the 1960s and 1970s when disfigurement, mutilation and risk of death were all just part of an afternoon's fun. And we LOVED it! Who cared if little Jimmy lost an eye, or if the kid we all knew as "Lefty" had to spend six months in the hospital!
Of the toys this guy has listed, I don't think we actually owned any of them ourselves, but my brothers and I definitely played with some of them. My grandparents owned a set of lawn darts for years, and we used to love to go out into their front yard and throw them as high up into the air as we could and watch them auger into the ground. We must have known someone with the Creepy Crawlers set, too; I can vaguely remember making them or something similar. If you were old enough to play with a toy like that, you were old enough to know not to eat them, but i suppose that didn't stop younger siblings. I also had a chemistry set, even though it did not contain anything radioactive. We sure used to mix up some pretty nasty stuff in the little test tubes, though.
Given that our entire society lives in a total state of panic about anything the slightest bit dangerous, you'd think that toys today would have had all the fun...I mean risk...engineered right out of them. Nevertheless, this list of recent toy recalls from the Consumer Product Safety Commission shows that there are still plenty of ways for kids to jeopardize life and limb. Hooray!
Like a lot of IT guys, I work in a very small office, surrounded by lots of computer hardware, much of which runs 24/7, cranking out a lot of heat. Even with the office HVAC, the ambient temperature in my office hovers just below 80 degrees Fahrenheit almost all the time. My den at home routinely gets up into the mid-80s in the spring and summer unless I keep the door shut and the AC cranked. It's not unbearably hot, just a little warmer than you might like to be unless it's the dead of winter.
Now, thanks to the Miracle of Technology, all that has changed! An ingenious inventor from Japan (of course) has developed a shirt with it's own built-in ventilation system -- a fan powered by one of the USB ports on your computer! (via)
If you're like me, you're already sitting at the damn thing 16 hours a day, so there's no problem at all just plugging your shirt right into one of the ports while you're at your desk to stay cool and comfortable all day long! Then, when it's time to leave the office, you can even plug into the power socket (formerly known as the cigarette lighter) for some ventilation in your sun-baked car. Plus it comes in both short- and long-sleeved styles, so you can dress up for those long, airless meetings or go biz-cazh.
As those animated fellows in the Guinness commercials say, "Brilliant!"
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My child is terrified of bugs. Doesn't matter what kind of bug -- ants, flies, mosquitoes, midges, or those creepy hairy-legged things in the corner of the bathtub -- she freaks out if she so much as THINKS one is in her vicinity. The other day, on the way home from day camp, a fairly large moth got in the car as we were getting in, and I could not get it to fly back out when I opened my window. No matter how many times I told Charlotte that the moth wouldn't hurt her, she shrieked every time it flew into the backseat area as though she were being attacked by Mothra.
After the moth finally got sucked out the window, we had a long talk about the harmlessness of moths and butterflies as compared to bees and mosquitoes, but I don't think it will really change anything. This morning she came screaming to me about a bee in her room, which turned out to be a dead midge blown from the window fan onto her bed. Oh, well.
So I am not ever telling her about this website, which ranks the relative painfulness of insect bites and stings and which puts the very common paper wasps and honeybees right near the top. On the upside, though, I don't see any moth species listed.
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Artist Zeev Zohar has designed this lovely handmade pencil that has a seed embedded at the very top so that when you've used up the pencil, you can stick the remaining nub into the ground and grow something. (via)
No, pencils do not grow ON trees. Pencils ARE trees. Spaghetti grows on trees, silly.
Permalink | Comments (0)For quite a long time, we used to have a cleaning service that came in every other week and cleaned our house. "Clean Day" was as close to a religious experience as I think I will ever have; there was such anticipation and joy at the thought of coming home to a house that seemed to magically clean itself. Even after I started my "sabbatical", we kept the cleaning service as long as we could afford to (which, in retrospect, was probably too long). Eventually though, we had to give it up and shoulder the burden of doing our own scrubbing, dusting and vacuuming. Which is, of course, why The (Real) Big Red House looks like a disaster area these days -- we SUCK at house cleaning. Lately, we've even taken to watching the BBC show "How Clean Is Your House", just so we can feel like SOMEBODY is worse than we are (and, believe me, they are).
Discipline is part of the problem for us -- our intentions are good (aren't they always?), but we're easily discouraged and always ready to procrastinate. I think if we could break things down into more manageable chunks rather than having to face an entire weekend of housecleaning, we might be more likely to do it. Or not. Who knows.
Apart from wanting to have a clean house again, we also have this notion about getting Charlotte to do some household chores. She's old enough now to be able to pick up after herself, put away her clothing, etc. But convincing her that it's worth doing includes getting ourselves back on the straight and narrow. I ran across this website at the very useful Lifehacker site a couple of weeks ago: it promises to help you devise a cleaning schedule, assign jobs to specific indivduals, and let you break down big tasks into individual steps. I don't know that lazy housekeeping can be solved with online software, but you never know.
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Continuing on our Japanese Cuisine theme from yesterday, here is a great food blog post about a visit by the blogger to one of the premiere soba noodle makers in Japan. The post has a lot of large images in it, so it will probably be quite slow to load for you, but be patient because it's worth it.
It's typically not too difficult to find packaged soba noodles in supermarkets these days, but you can also buy them online readily. As the blog post makes clear, making them by hand takes a fair amount of skill and practice compared to, say, Italian ribbon-shaped pastas, which are much more amenable to beginner cooks. The traditional recipe of soba served with a little soy-mirin dipping sauce is a great accompanyment as part of a Japanese menu. I usually stir-fry up some veggies (whatever is on hand) and toss plain, cooked soba with the veggies in a sauce of soy, rice wine, chili garlic sauce and hoisin; I know that's sort of a mish-mash of Japanese and Chinese, but the end result is pretty damn good.
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Do you remember a few years back there was a bit of a panic about a nasty fish called a "snakehead" that had been illegally dumped into some rivers and lakes and was spreading quickly? I definitely recall blogging about it at the time (my archives from that period are all offline, sorry). There were even stories that the fish could survive out of water and "walk" from one body of water to another like lungfish and mudskippers and the like.
Well, proving once again that you cna always take lemons and make lemonade, the Washington Post had this feature article in their Sunday magazine about a couple of enterprising individuals who are trying to find a way to drum up a business out of sport fishing for snakeheads. First, though, they have to figure out how to catch the damn things, but once they've got that down, they're sure they can interest the hard-core sports fishing enthusiasts to have a go at it.
(Oh, and the snakeheads can't really walk out of the water. But they have spread all up and down the Potomac. I suspect they came from Washington D.C. in the first place)
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I really like wasabi. To me, one of the signs of a superior sushi place is the sinus-clearing, head-rushing quality of the little dollop of wasabi paste they give you with your order. If I have to trowel on a big layer of wasabi paste on my nigiri sushi just to taste it, then I probably won't be buying sushi from that particular place again.
You may or may not know that most of the wasabi powder used to make the paste in sushi restaurants in this country has very little, if any, real wasabi in it at all. Usually, the powder is just extra-strong white horseradish with some green coloring added. Other times, there will be a miniscule amount of real wasabi included as well.
Apparently, the wasabi rhizome is difficult to grow, difficult to harvest, and extremely perishable, which explains why we don't get a lot of real wasabi. But this company grows "sawa" wasabi in places like Oregon and Washington and Tennessee (!), and sells whole fresh rhizomes online as well as wasabi powder and a few wasabi-based food products. (via)
Since the rhizomes sell for $45 a pound and you have to buy at least one pound, I don't suppose it's terribly likely that anyone other than a high-end sushi restaurant buys much fresh. A pound of fresh wasabi probably makes enough processed wasabi to last a lifetime. Luckily, the powdered variety comes in a more manageable and affordable amount.
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If, like the Snickers ad says, you're not going anywhere for a while, maybe you might like to try some of these guaranteed time wasters that you can do by yourself, with a friend, or with whatever you might happen to have on your person.
Or not.
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Today is the 50th anniversary of the day when two teenage boys from Liverpool -- John Lennon and Paul McCartney -- first met. The rest, as they say, is history. If you happen to be in Liverpool, there are celebratory events all weekend.
(via)
Permalink | Comments (0)About a year ago, I posted about a broadcasting industry news story that said Clear Channel was going to roll out a sort of "micro-commercial" on its radio stations.
Flash forward to yesterday: the Boston Globe reports that the four Clear Channel radio stations in Boston -- WKZS AM and FM, WJMN, and WKOX (no, really) have been using the two-second and five-second ads for some time.
Of course, they don't call them "blipverts". The two-second spots are called "blinks" and the five-second spots are called "adlets". This media blog says that they know why the 2-second spots are called "blinks": because the advertiser's money is gone in a blink, with nothing to show for it.
As this October 2006 WSJ article (reprinted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) notes, radio ad revenue has been flat for several years even as stations have added more and more time for commercials into their programming. So the underlying idea behind these extra-short ads is to let the stations cut back on time given over to ad spots, but still cram in as many spots as possible, and hope that they don't lose any more money in the process. Of course, in the interim since announcing the "blinks" and "adlets", Clear Channel has decided to get out of the radio business entirely in the wake of being bought out by Bain Capital, so who knows what will happen to these formats.
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Last week it was a story about a white whale in Australia. This week it's a pink dolphin in Louisiana!
Permalink | Comments (0)This article at MSN.com (via) has a list of ten things you may or may not already know about your supermarket, but which they'd really rather you didn't.
Some of them are kind of nasty: I really didn't need the image of my broccoli sharing territory with some toddler's poopy butt. Lately I notice that some supermarkets are putting big dispensers of anti-bacterial wipes right at the entrance to the store so you can wipe down your hands and the shopping cart before you put anything in it. By the same token, though, collectively we are WAAAAAAAAY too obsessed with the idea of germs these days, and all these anti-bacterial products are beginning to have a backlash.
Some of the others were definitely old news to me. Is there really anybody who doesn't know that end-cap displays are there to try to get you to make an impulse purchase? Is it news to anyone who ever takes their child into a supermarket that the candy and cereal aisles are stocked to put everything at kid's-eye level?
They missed out on a few other obvious things, too. For example, the rotisserie chicken ploy: you're supposed to be driven nearly mad for those overcooked birds by their enticing smell as you walk past them. Ditto for the "fresh-baked" bread. And how could they overlook the little old ladies passing out samples?
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Just over a decade ago, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts found itself with a couple of newly arrived transplants: me and purple loosestrife.
As far as I know, the state hasn't developed an eradication program for me yet, but they would really like to get rid of the loosestrife. It's a particularly aggressive invasive species and can completely take over any wetland or open field it happens to find itself in, choking out every other plant that lives there. And it spreads quickly -- it has moved north into New Hampshire and Maine faster than a weekend's worth of tourists.
Via Adam at Universal Hub, here's a link to a blog by a post-doc student named Jennifer Forman Orth who is working on one of the projects the state hopes will curtail any further spread of loosestrife. In the post, she describes releasing 7500 European Galerucella beetles, who dine almost exclusively on purple loosestrife. The Galerucella beetles have been used in loosestrife eradication projects all over the United States since 1995, with a high degree of success.
I realize that loosestrife is a pest plant, but I actually think the big fields full of the tall stalks covered in purple blossoms are very pretty when they're in bloom. When I worked in Lexington a few years ago, there were several large marshy fields right near the on/off-ramps to Rt. 128 that had been completely dominated by the loosestrife, and I used to look forward to the middle part of the summer when they would explode with color.
If my house is suddenly overrun with little beetles, though, it can only mean one of two things: either the state needs to develop a follow-up eradication plan to get rid of all the beetles...or they're out to eradicate ME.
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Try to say that five times fast, I dare ya!
Crotchy is a warm and cozy....er, crotch-thing with long skinny legs, a puffy crotch panel and...ahem...a pink button anus! Plus, check out that awesome tattoo!
I'm not exactly sure what you're supposed to do with Crotchy, but I'm sure you'll figure out something...
Permalink | Comments (1)I have to apologize for not picking up on this Wall Street Journal article about baby names while we were railing on about them last week.
This article is talking about the rarefied social strata of super-rich New Yorkers, not the trailer-park trash crowd. While the lower class kids are getting the crap names like "Nevaeh" (that's "Heaven" spell backwards, thank you, and Number 43 in the popularity list), these yuppie puppies are getting only the most fabulous and prestigious names possible thanks to a variety of baby name consultants.
Baby name consultants!! Kee-ripes! I am missing out on a perfect business opportunity here. I can offer a near 100% guarantee that if you let ME choose the name of your Precious Little Thing, they will have nothing but the BEST. NAME. EVAR. No Caden/Jayden/Hayden/Zaden nonsense, no sirree! No Madison/McKenzie/Hartford/New Haven place name for your daughter, I promise.
Plus, there's the whole unexplored sideline of being a pet naming consultant. All those commitment-phobic 20-somethings who can't bring themselves to reproduce but treat their pets like surrogate children would be all over a pet naming consulting business!
I'm going to be rich, RICH I tell you!
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Powells.com, the online version of the famed Powell's Books in Portland, OR reprints this Atlantic Monthly book review by Caitlin Flanagan of the recently published Generation MySpace.
The review really only glances at the book and also the recent book To Catch A Predator (based on that unbearable "Dateline NBC" feature of the same name) and instead the reviewer talks about her own experiments in social networking websites. She posed as a "tween" girl on a social networking site called Club Penguin to see if she would be singled out by potential pedophiles, but her results were inconclusive. She also played the role of stalker by singling out a young girl on MySpace.com and seeing how easy or difficult it would be to target her in "real life". It turned out to be extremely easy, but, as she writes, teens seem to be very aware of what they are doing by engaging in the strange public exposure of social networking websites. The review is well worth reading. The book might be, as well.
Meanwhile, via The Good Reverend, who got the story from Bruce Schneier, comes this very interesting first-hand account about how Disney tried to implement a variety of restrictions on their Toontown Online MMORPG website, only to have ingenious kids figure out several ways to defeat the restrictions in order to have open chat.
Ladies and gentlemen, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Because we are the lucky ones who get to live with the Internet as a first-generation, we're all going to be the ones who get exposed to the pluses and minuses of reinventing social communication. The 20-somethings and their younger siblings are doing the reinventing, and so they have a much better ability to negotiate the pitfalls, but some of them are nonetheless going to end up victimized by it. That's the way the world has always worked, technology notwithstanding.
Consider this recent infographic from the New York Times about how the Internet is used by different age and psychographic groups. Those of us beyond the magic age of 40 are mostly viewers and consumers, not creators or interactors. We can't help it, we were raised during the Age of Television and were completely acculturated into being passive consumers of media. The smaller subset of "older" people who ARE less passive would have been the fringy element of people who published zines, made their own home video productions, organized theater groups, etc. (you know...people like ME) Among the "younger" groups, that sort of active engagement is now the norm, not the exception.
By the time my own child hits her teenage years, a lot of the initial bumps and bruises of social networking should be gone, as the 20-somethings find themselves "grown up" and able to exert better methods of control over the interactions compared to our present dysfunctional ones. Not that everything about it will be sunshine, lollipops and roses -- every social adaptation brings with it genuine dangers and unintended consequences -- people will just be less agog about it.
Permalink | Comments (2)So I ran across this wire story the other day touting a recent opinion poll by British pollster YouGov. The story claims that the poll identified "the least popular buzzwords" of Internet culture, such as the odious "blogosphere".
Well, I am always good for a post about hideous neologisms, so I was raring to go. But when I went to YouGov's website, I couldn't find any links to the poll. So I decided to sit on the post until I could find the original source material.
Just as well, it turns out, because on Monday, A-list blogger Anil Dash had a post about it on his own blog, wherein he revealed that the entire thing was a hoax to see how many news organizations would pick up the bullshit story and run it without doing any fact-checking or real reporting.
Well, here's the answer to THAT question. Pretty much all of them, it seems.
And yet journalists are constantly belittling bloggers for not using "proper" journalistic methods in their work. Hmph.
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Looking for a little summertime weight-loss, ladies? The new diet drug Alli would love to help. It apparently works by giving you uncontrollable diarrhea; so much so that the makers recommend carrying a spare change of dark-colored clothing around wherever you go.
Not to worry, though, becuase now there's Clincal Strength Secret deodorant to help you avoid the inevitable stink.
Eeeuw.
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Of note at several news/comment blogs today is the observation that recently the Bush Administration and other spokespeople for the military in Iraq have made a shift in their rhetoric: they've taken to describing ALL anti-coalition forces in Iraq as "Al Quaeda", where previously they distinguished between Sunni, Shi'a and other factions individually.
Given their past performance, I would expect to see this trend continue, expanding to replace the names of other groups opposed to the Bush Administration such as "liberals", "the Democratic Party", "Massachusetts", and so on.
Well, I suppose Dubya was right after all when he said he was a uniter, not a divider.
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"And this part is called the thagomizer, after the late Thag Simmons" -- Gary Larson, 1982
And who says paloentologists don't have a sense of humor? Discover Magazine reminds us that the spiked tail-end of a stegosaurus REALLY IS called a "Thagomizer", in honor of this classic Far Side cartoon.
In fact, here's a message board post that dates back to 1995 citing the use of "thagomizer" in the legitimate academic literature, and you can find it mentioned in other glossaries of paleontology terms
Are you ready for a little cognitive dissonance?
The latest MSNBC/Newsweek poll tracking how well Americans know the facts about current news events is out, and the results confirm that we're getting stupider faster than ever!:
The number of people who think Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 has RISEN since the last time this poll asked the same question. 41% of Americans continue to believe that it was Saddam's evil-doing, up from 36% in October 2004.
A whopping 89% of respondents could not identify John Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. EIGHTY-NINE percent, boys and girls!! The only upside to this is that 81% could not correctly identify who won this year's "American Idol", so at least there's that.
Meanwhile...this article in The Nation by Rick Perlstein uses some findings from a 20-year meta-analysis of opinion polls from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (which many of you will know from their frequent appearances on NPR) to make the assertion that Americans are getting more and more progressive, not less (as the media tend to report).
While Perlstein is making a pitch for the resurgence of the Democratic Party, it's worth stripping away the partisan element of the piece and thinking about the poll data a little. 69% of Americans agree with the statement that "government should help those in need" (even 58% of Republicans agree with this). The same percentage, 69%, believe that the government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep.
More tidbits: 54 percent, think "government should help the needy even if it means greater debt", up from 41% 13 years ago. 75 percent of the population SUPPORT Roe v. Wade. 62 percent support amnesty and eventual legal status for illegal immigrants.
So what can we conclude from this, my friends? As a group, Americans are generally very liberal -- the "liberal" tag has simply come to mean "anything I don't like" because we've allowed the political right and the media to frame it that way. And that's part of the problem -- we're collectively, and dangerous, apathetic and uninformed to the point that a very small, very vocal, and very right-wing minority has been able to dictate the terms of public discourse. The disconnect between the core beliefs of the majority of the American people and the current political powers-that-be is significant to the point that people like Vice President Dick Cheney have been able to all-but-overthrow our representative government and replace it with a plutocratic authoritarian dictat.
Permalink | Comments (0)If you're a regular reader, you know that among my petty annoyances are stupid baby names.
This Guardian story from April talks about a recent University of Florida study which concluded that people do form pre-conceived notions about other people based on their names -- in particular, people will presume levels of competence based on the assumed masculinity or femininity of a name. Moreover, that can actually translate into real performance.
The article goes on to talk about "chav" names ("chav" is a British slang term for lower-class people, somewhat akin to the American term "trailer-park trash" or "wigger"). In a study of 55,000 children, those with "lower-status" names (i.e. made-up names, non-standard spellings of traditional names, etc...you know, the names that drive me batshit) scored 3-5% lower on standardized educational tests.
In other words...if your daughter has a name that's perceived as very feminine, she might find herself trained into thinking she is less able at math or science than if she has a more androgynous name. AND, if your kid is named Mykayla or Kaitlynn or Lemonjello or something like that, she has another knock against her.
My daughter has a name that definitely falls into the "feminine" category, I think, even though it's not listed in that Guardian piece. But one of the common nicknames for girls named "Charlotte" is "Charlie", which is unquestionably more masculine (she is, in fact, named after my father-in-law). So I'll be interested to see if this particular form of gender bias comes her way as she begins her school career in earnest.
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This fellow from Maine has built himself a canoe-sized replica of the German battleship Graf Spee. He can even sit inside the boat himself and pilot the craft around the lake where he lives.
Let that serve as a warning to all you Massholes on vacation with your jet skis.
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Remember the guy who posted the DIY on making your own Green Lantern rings?
He's kicked it up a notch with instructions for making your very own GLOWING Green Lantern ring using molded resin and a green LED. (via)
The poster in question is a professional jewelry maker, so suffice it to say that he has skills, knowledge and tools that 99.999% of us don't. Consequently, I doubt very few people are going to rush right out and do this at home. And he's also put the kibosh on people requesting that he make rings for them because he doesn't want to incur the wrath of DC Comics. If I were him, though, I'd be trying to negotiate licensing with DC so he could sell them. I know I would want to buy one if I could.
Permalink | Comments (1)Not quite six weeks ago, I posted about Electronic Arts hinting that the release of the highly-anticipated Wil Wright game "Spore" was going to be pushed back to late 2008.
Now comes the news that EA has pushed it all the way back to "sometime in 2009". The game industry mags are speculating that the delay is so that the game developers can do console versions, since the market for games that only play on the PC platform continues to shrivel. Given the complexity of the game as it has been demoed to date, that's no small challenge, I'm sure.
There's also the outside possibility that this game will simply never materialize, a la the infamous "Duke Nuke'm Forever" which has been "in development" for 10 years running with no release in sight. Seems to me I have been reading about "Spore" since 2003, and a push-back to 2009 makes for an awfully long development process, even for a game that everyone has already chalked up as "great" before even playing it.
*LE SIGH*
I guess I'll just have to spend more time with my new Nintendo DS Lite (Fathers' Day gift, dontchaknow). I hear Sid Meier's going to make a DS version of Civilization IV!
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Is this REALLY how low political journalists can go? Crooks & Liars posts about MSNBC "pundit" Chris Matthews pratically fawning over Republican Fred Thompson based on how good he smells:
"Can you smell the English leather on this guy, the Aqua Velva, the sort of mature man's shaving cream, or whatever, you know, after he shaved? Do you smell that sort of -- a little bit of cigar smoke?"
Jesus Tittyfucking Christ! It sounds like Matthews is more interested in getting poked by Thompson's cigar (if you know what I mean) than whether or not the man has the slightest qualification to occupy the Oval Office (not that a lack of qualifications stopped the present occupant).
Just when you think the lapdogs of the press can sink no lower in their complete and utter servility to the Republican Party, they find even new ways to drag it down to an even lower level of absurdity. Should we really be basing our voting behavior on choice of aftershave or perfume?
Meanwhile, dear old blog-buddy Suzette (who seems to have rejoined the blogging world after a prolonged absence) reports that she stumbled into a Hillary Clinton campaign event while at a local Chinese restaurant. Among her observations of HRC: her ass is not as big as Suzette expected, but her feet are huge, and she does not stink. Given that Suzette is herself a rabid anti-Hillary Republican, that amounts to high praise as far as I can tell.
If we're down to worrying about how all these people SMELL, it's going to be a looooooooong campaign.
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Tony Blair's permanent summer vacation starts next week, and the British press are indulging in the obligatory "legacy" and "last days" stories.
The overwhelming consensus is that Blair's decision to support George Bush so closely on Iraq has nearly overwhelmed anything and everything else he accomplished as PM. Blair had already been PM for several years when the Bushies stole the 2000 election, and his initial splash on the world stage was very different than the lockstep lickspittle position he found himself in after 2001. "New Labour" and the "Third Way", which had hallmarked his relationship with Bill Clinton, took distant backseats. Still, the overall popular sentiment in Britain is that Blair did a good job on most things EXCEPT Iraq, and he leaves office with much higher public approval ratings than Dubya will.
Here's a piece from 3QuarksDaily contributor Matthias Matthijs that considers the successes and failures of Tony Blair as well as the prospects for his "heir apparent" Gordon Brown (link goes to an interview with Brown in this week's Time Magazine). Matthijs says don't expect much different from Brown.
This brief story from the BBC frames the legacy question in Blair's appearance before the House of Commons liaison committee last week, during which Blair himself was given the opportunity to present his spin on how his administration went and why he did the things he did. Blair said that he always did what he believed was the right thing. It's that very notion of falling back on his own inner sense of "right vs wrong", which, not surprisingly is shaped by his devout Christian faith, that failed him so badly.
This piece in The Guardian by author Martin Amis (one of my favorite writers, BTW), is a much closer look at Tony Blair. Amis was allowed to tag along with Blair recently and get substantial 1-on-1 time with him. Amis writes about the visible ebbing of power from Blair in these final days, and about the strange and rarified world the PM lives in (and, in one of my favorite parts of the article, how incredibly different that world is from the world of the President of the United States). In this article, Blair's own whip-smart mind and his self-awareness come through -- the comparisons to Bush's lack of curiosity and his need to be surrounded by fawning sycophants who keep up the illusion of his imperial throne are powerful.
If you read all three pieces, I think you'll be left with a very good and well-nuanced sense of Blair and his mostly unwanted legacy. Blair is still a young man in terms of political careers, much like Bill Clinton, so it's unlikely that he'll disappear entirely from the world stage. Blair has always had to endure comparisons to Clinton, but most of the time those comparisons are apt. Bill Clinton has done some very interesting tap dancing since 2000, but his circumstances are quite different than Blair's (I don't think anyone expects Cherie Blair to turn up as the next Labour PM), so Blair has the chance to chart a different post-power course. For his sake, I hope he puts as much distance between himself and George Bush as possible and recovers some of his promise.
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This Daily Mail article got a lot of blog coverage last week, but I wanted to write about it myself. The basic premise of the story is that children today are not allowed to wander very far from home and the watchful eye of a parent. The allowable perimeter has been shrinking for nearly a century as the map above indicates (Here is a link to the full-size image at the Daily Mail site in case you want to see much more detail). The reporter also brings up evidence that lack of interaction with the outdoors may be a factor in developing depression and anxiety, as well as the more obvious issues with lack of exercise.
The basic findings of the study cited are a bit self-evident, but the graphic really brings home the drastic reduction in allowable roaming space, I think. What stuck out for me was how much smaller the perimeter had become for the boy born in 1950 compared to his own father's. Usually when this issue comes up, people of my generation (say, anyone between 35 and 55) tend to think that we had a lot more leeway to go wherever we wanted, yet even we were a good deal more circumscribed.
This issue almost always gets played as a contemporary societal issue, but it seems to me that this article and the study it discusses belie that. Clearly, it's a trend that has been going on for a century. The urbanization of the places where most of us hail from is a contributing factor, certainly, but probably not enough to explain the entire reduction. Similarly, this leads me to think that our current fear-driven culture is not entirely to blame; I think it does probably explain the really drastic limitation modern children, but it's just exacerbating an existing trend.
Implied in the article is that because kids don't go out to play, they stay at home and veg out, and I'm not sure I buy that. Unstructured outdoor play has been supplanted with heavily-structured activity schedules, as I can now speak to from first-hand experience. Some of those activities are outdoor, some are not, so it's probably fair to say that contemporary children do spend less time in outdoor play to some degree, but not to the total exclusion of it.
I find myself a bit torn about how to process this information, frankly. It's a little too facile to adopt the "when I was a kid" argument here, for the reason I cited above, but also because it's unreasonable to expect that the world will never change from the way it was when you were a kid (a lesson A LOT of conservatives need to learn). On the other hand, the present-day obsession with unlikely threats coupled with the "nanny-state" response from people who make policy is equally unreasonable. I will say that seeing the graphic has made me start thinking about how we'll apply perimeter restrictions to Charlotte and how other parents' restrictions are likely to have an effect on her.
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NEWS FLASH! President John F. Kennedy is STILL dead some 44 years and 6 months after his assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
Wired has an interview with lawyer-researcher-writer Vincent Bugliosi to promote his new and apparently very exhaustive book about the Kennedy assassination, Reclaiming History.
Bugliosi once again reaffirms the finding of the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing John Kennedy. No matter how many conspiracy theories are launched, no matter how many ways people have tried to slice and dice and spin the evidence, Bugliosi says, the answer is always the same. And the net result -- the death of the President -- remains unchanged for all time.
While I note that Bugliosi isn't adverse to cashing in one more time on this, the time really has come to stop with the obsession. Think of it this way -- it'll give people all that much more time to obsess about the 9/11 conspiracy with Rosie O'Donnell.
Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. North America and all the ships at sea...
NEWS FLASH! Paleontologists in China have uncovered the remains of a huge raptor that helps sceintists bridge the evolutionary gap from dinosaurs to modern birds. Gigantoraptor erlianensis was 10-12 feet in height and weighed over 3000 pounds, and sported feathers and a beak.
NEWS FLASH! British researchers have discovered that plants have the ability to detect other plants of the same species in their area through "recognition" of chemical patterns in the surrounding soil. Furthermore, individual plants will respond to this information and change their absorption of nutrients in the soil to benefit the overall survival of their "siblings".
NEWS FLASH! An independent consortium of research agencies studiyng the human genome has released a study which finds that so-called "junk DNA" is actually far more crucial to determining genetic traits than previously believed and may, in fact, be more important to the overall function of the genome than individual genes. These findings challenge much current thinking about human genetics, but at the same time also promise to yield a much better understanding of the biochemical process of life.
NEWS FLASH! A whopping 68 percent of registered Republican voters DO NOT BELIEVE any of the above. This recent Gallup/USA Today poll produced some truly disturbing results that show that in the overall population, 44% of Americans do not believe in evolution. When analyzed for religious affiliation, fundamentalist Protestants and so-called "moderate" Protestants reject modern science in favor of mythology and make-believe by a wide margin, with Catholics only slightly more likely to believe in science. Seculars and Jews were the most likely to believe in science and evolution.
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On his blog "Marginal Revolution", economist Tyler Cowen links to this 2006 speech given by former Soviet Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar about the political and economic collapse of the Soviet Union.
Gaidar says it can all be summed up in three words: oil and grain. The grain problem dated all the way back to the 1950s as the Soviets struggled to increase grain production in the face of a population boom. They failed and went from becoming the largest exporter of grain to one of the largest importers of grain. Meanwhile, over time the Soviet government had come to rely heavily on revenue from selling oil, and even though Soviet oil production had diminished substantially over the years, the high market price of oil in the 1970s kept the overall revenue picture satisfactory.
Gaidar is direct in his analysis:
The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.
The collapse of the oil market was directly responsible for the bankruptcy of the Soviet economy -- without oil revenue, the Soviets could not pay for grain imports, could not continue to funnel cash into the war in Afghanistan, and could not bludgeon international lenders into bailing them out. By 1989, Gorbachev had no choice but to start bargaining away political concessions to the West in hopes of attracting money. By 1991, the political state of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was extinct.
Um, I don't see much mention of The Gipper in that analysis. You remember The Gipper, right? The guy who "won" the Cold War? Yes, the same guy who turned down the ultimate political concession -- total nuclear disarmament -- when Gorby offered it, hat in hand, in Reykjavik.
Good links -- the Gaidar speech is illustrated with some useful graphs and is very accessible even to those of us who aren't economists.
Permalink | Comments (0)Wired game column editor Chris Kohler had this interesting op-ed on Monday. He was writing in response to an interview in USA Today with another videogame industry journalist, wherein the journalist said he thought that the huge success of the Nintendo Wii was a "bubble" that could "burst any day".
Kohler disagrees (as do most analysts), and offers up some thoughts on the four core segments of the videogame market -- who they are, how they influence the game manufacturers, and how likely they are to be affected by a "bubble burst". I thought it was very insightful. The editorial format more or less forces him to skip on fleshing out the ideas, but that's why so many journalists write books based on their articles, isn't it? I'd be very interested to see him expand on the typology of gamers and their relationships to the products themselves.
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No, this isn't about Jack Kevorkian. We'll get to him another time (hint: I agree with him).
Instead, the title refers to a beverage that anyone who's ever spent any time working in a fast-food restaurant is certainly familiar with -- the one where you mix up a little bit of everything in the soda fountain into one strange amalgam of sugary syrup and fizz. Recently at Ask MetaFilter, there was a great thread about this drink where the commenters shared their favorite combinations, and the majority consensus was that the drink itself is called a "Suicide".
You can't really buy a Suicide per se at your favorite QSR, but since so many places now have self-service soda fountains, it's pretty easy to mix up just about anything you have the imagination to devise. (Just don't complain when the drink you came up with tastes awful.)
Now, Bloomberg Media reports that Coca-Cola is gearing up for the launch of a new soda fountain that will feature up to 50 different syrup flavors that customers can mix and match. It's an attempt to revitalize the fountain drink category, which has lost ground to a growing preference for bottled drinks. Fountain drinks are insanely profitable for the restaurants as well as the soda companes themselves; a typical fountain drink might only amount to a few cents in cost to the restaurant, but is routinely priced above $1.00. Bottled drinks, while still very profitable for the bottlers, don't represent the same ginormous profit margin for the restaurants.
The Coke people expect to have the first round of units in behind-the-counter locations by fall of this year, with self-service machines to come in 2008.
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Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame."Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"-- "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus, as inscribed on the Statue of Liberty
Lest you think that the current political brouhaha about immigration is a new-found issue with the right-wing, it's worth remembering that immigration policy has been an ongoing political issue since the mid-19th century. Whenever the United States has faced an onslaught of immgrants, whether they were the Potato Famine Irish, the Gold Rush Chinese, or the huge waves of Italian and Eastern European immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there's always been a political backlash resulting in misguided and flat-out discriminatory immigration policy. When you approach the issue with a little context, it makes it clear that the current bunch of right-wing loonies are part of a very long tradition of conservative bigotry, hate-mongering, jingoism, and politics-of-fear.
The Statue of Liberty, erected in the 1890s at the height of anti-immigrant sentiment in this country, was intended as a direct challenge to those who would shut the door on immigration. Emma Lazarus' famous poem, inscribed on the pedestal of the monument, makes clear the difference between the notion of a country open to all comers, rather than closed to "outsiders".
Our sordid history with regard to immigration has other ways to haunt us as well. A new book that looks at Mexican immigration to the United States in the early 20th century unveils how the federal government processed immigrants in holding camps that Adolf Hitler would later use as models for designing his concentration camps (via Fogonazos, which has a wealth of photographs of these American camps). The U.S. would have another go at concentration camps when they interned the Japanese, but these particular camps were the ones Hitler liked. These camps even made use of the now-notorious "Zyklon B" chemical that the Nazis used to kill millions of Jews -- in the American camps the chemical was used as a fumigant.
Presently, the righties are very enamored of concentration camps and other brutalities. Mitt Romney says he would double the size of Guantanamo. 51% of Americans want to build a giant fence between the U.S. and Mexico. And we are all too well aware of the tolerance for torture.
The one thing you can say about conservatives, they've always got someone to get their hate on for. Maybe we need a new Statue of Liberty along the Rio Grande to remind a few people how we all got here in the first place.
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I've had the same happy little betta fish for just about four years now. His name is Phil E. O'Fish (just Phil for short), and I originally bought him to have as an office buddy at my last job. There was a bit of fad where a bunch of people went out and bought bettas for their desks, and I wanted to be one of the in-crowd. These days Phil is in semi-retirement, sitting on the printer stand in my den. Life for Phil is pretty quiet, although occasionally I have to shoo away the cats -- Harry wouldn't mind having him for a snack, and Maynard just wants to drink all the water out of the bowl. (Yes, Maynard IS a weirdo)
Somebody on Metafilter had a link to this spiffy "fish condo" the other day. I don't know if Phil really needs three rooms, but maybe he'd like the opportunity to move around a bit more, you know, travel, see the sights, that sort of thing.
Permalink | Comments (2)Most social networking sites leave me cold. They get off to a hot start, and everybody and his brother joins up, then nothing else ever comes of it. Meanwhile, the people launching these sites are greedily swallowing all that sweet sweet personal data to mine and/or resell to spammers, junk marketers, and so on.
Nevertheless, I have signed up for a few...usually in the same breathless rush to try the Brand New Thing as all my other online amigos. Inspired by John's post at Ascent Stage, I thought I would let you know which ones I am a member of in the off-chance that you were interested in linking to me.
Here's my list (the links go right to my user home page where possible):
cork'd
del.icio.us
flickr
linkedin
stumbleupon
vox
You'll discover that I don't use these nearly as much as I could. I've recently started uploading more pictures to flickr, but that's about it. If some of you are a bit more active with these networks, maybe adding me to your groups of might help me jump start a little bit.
I'm sure you're aware that Google has recently launched street-level views as part of their Google Maps service.
It didn't take very long for people to start noticing that the roaming vehicles that have been taking the pictures had managed to catch people in some activities they might not have wanted photographed: breaking into stores, urinating on the sidewalk, fighting with their S.O., and so on. One woman was surprised to see her cat sitting in the window of her apartment in one picture and began to wonder just how far Google was going to peek.
For the moment, the street-level views are only available for a few select cities, but Google is pouring it on to photograph quite a few more, including the Boston metro area. Adam at Universal Hub points us to this local blogger who says he's seen a car with a roof-mounted multi-lens camera driving around Cambridge, and, since he just happened to have a camera with him, starting taking pictures of it...which apparently freaked out the driver a bit.
Didn't anyone ever tell them that it's not polite to look into people's windows?
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Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,--
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm."...
Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse's side,
Now he gazed at the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns.-- excerpts of "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
As you know, we take all things Paul Revere pretty seriously at The (Real) Big Red House.
This morning, Adam at Universal Hub had a link to this local blogger and Revolutionary War scholar weighing in on whether or not the now-famous Old North Church in Boston's North End is really the church where the lanterns were hung alerting Revere to begin his ride through the towns west of Boston to alert the "Minutemen" to prepare for the British troops on their way to Concord.
Well, I knew the fellow was on the right track as soon as I started reading his post, because it turns out he had been discussing this subject with a good friend of mine -- a woman named Donna LaRue who gives in-character guided tours of many of Boston's historical sites (among her many, many activities). Donna had tugged my ear with this particular story for a couple of years, so I knew immediately what the blogger was going to reveal: that the Old North Church is actually the successor to an earlier church in the North End that was also called Christ Church, but which had a taller steeple and sat higher up on the hill.
The illustration above gives credence to this. It is dated 1768 and was drawn by Paul Revere himself. The larger of the two buildings is identified as Christ Church, but is located on Salem Street, a few blocks from where the present-day Old North Church stands. The present-day building is on the site of an earlier Congregationalist meeting-house that the British Army demolished at the time of the Revolution and is the smaller, lower steeple in that drawing.
Donna tells me that this is really not uncommon knowledge among local Revolutionary War experts, it's just hushed up by the tourism people who have a lot invested in keeping people coming to the current building and spending money. If you've ever taken a stroll through the North End on a summer Saturday and witnessed the non-stop line of touristas from Paul Revere's House over to the Old North Chuch, you'll understand why she says that.
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I already have my request in for my Father's Day present, but there's always the traditional necktie for you wives and children whose husbands and fathers aren't as forthcoming with the unreasonable demands.
Or maybe this is the year for non-traditional. The giant squids are massing by the thousands just off the coast of San Diego preparing to stage their preemptive strike on the rogue-nation U.S., ridding us of our weapons of mass destruction before we use them to terrorize someone, and bringing democracy and freedom to a people crushed under the heel of a despotic tyrant.
I, for one, well....you know. Having one of these spiffy squid brain neckties might go a long way toward appeasing them once they're firmly in control.
Permalink | Comments (0)Now that the Bush Administration doesn't have Tom Ridge to trot out, waving his arms and screaming "Orange Alert! Orange Alert!" like the robot from "Lost In Space", they've upped their game a little bit by periodically trying to spook everyone with some half-assed terrorist plot they've "foiled in the nick of time".
A few weeks ago it was the guys who were going to shoot their way into Fort Dix, and this week it was the crazed Jamaican Muslims who were going to blow up JFK Airport.
These stories play big for a day or two, and all the networks trot out their "anti-terrorism experts", and the right-wing bloggers get to thump their chests and fling some more poo, and we're all supposed to stay cowering in our bunkers. This time around, in fact, the chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party went on record saying he thought a few terror attacks would prove what a great job Bush is doing keeping America safe.
The spin cycle on this shit doesn't last as long as it used to, but it's still pretty depressing to see that anyone puts the slightest bit of credence into it. I almost punched out my TV when NBC's "anti-terrorism consultant", answering a softball lobbed at him by Ann Curry on the "Today" show, actually said he thought the reason these plots happen is because Muslims hate our American freedoms.
For starters, in each one of these plots that shows up, the ham-handed actions of the FBI turn up over and over and over and over. Some informant bankrolled by the FBI infiltrates the group and practically bludgeons them over the head "urging" them to buy guns and explosives, make plans, and so on. J. Edgar "Madge" Hoover would be so proud of the agents following in his footsteps.
Next, even while the Serious Law Enforcement Officials inevitably say that these foiled plots would cause "massive destruction on an unimaginable scale", once somebody who actually knows what the fuck they're talking about weighs in, the actual assault being planned turns out to be technically impossible, logistically unfeasible, or downright foolish.
Keith Olbermann had a good piece about this the other night (link goes to the always-informative Crooks & Liars, who usually have these video clips first). Even the current mayor of New York City publicly said people should "get over it" (Bloomberg is being touted as a possible 3rd party/independent candidate for President, BTW, and it would be very interesting to see him up against Rudy "I'm The Hero Of 9/11" Giuliani).
On the positive side, though, they didn't really achieve their objective of keeping Scooter Libby's jail sentence out of the media. I also notice that with each new Republican debate, the already-announced candidates look more and more desperate trying to keep on message with this stuff. So maybe even the die-hards are beginning to see that their jig is almost up.
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...and don't pet the sweaty things. -- George Carlin
Keep that in mind if you happen to visit the Andalusia Center of Contemporary Art in Seville, Spain. Because one of the exhibits you'll find there is this globby bit of rubber sculpture that gets sweaty when you touch it. (via)
Eeeuww. Just eeuww.
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Via FARK comes a link to an article in The Sun about a family in England that has b
