July 8, 2004
Porn is just a means of reaching our goals.
Enviropornoshockrockers!!! Ellingsen claims the couple performed the surprise sex stunt during a set by the controversial band The Cumshots "actually to draw attention to the rain forests, which are in the process of disappearing." (NSFW, maybe, and via The Spoonbender)
Save The Children calls on release of Iraqi children from jails.
Save The Children calls on release of Iraqi children from jails. This apparently in response to recent media reports on the abuse of children in Iraqi prisons. And it's not just Save the Children who is concerned, but UNICEF, Amnesty International, and the Red Cross.
Infact, Congress has called for a special briefing tomorrow from the Pentagon on "confidential reports" from the Red Cross on prison conditions in Iraq. The Pentagon is closing the briefing to the public, however, and apparently thinks that even Congress shouldn't know the details of how we treat prisoners.
"It's something of a stretch of policy and procedures to give them to the Congress," Rumsfeld spokesman Larry Di Rita said.
"It's something of a stretch of policy and procedures to give them to the Congress," Rumsfeld spokesman Larry Di Rita said.
transparent public loo
I-C-U-P. I wonder if you can use it at night?
Korean Psych And Acid Folk
Korean Psych And Acid Folk • An introduction to the late-60s/early-70s experimental music of Korea. Bonus: be among the few Westerners to hear these ultra-rare tracks by the Pearl Sisters with songwriting contributions from a man known as the "godfather of Korean rock and roll", Shin Joong-Hyun, who is credited with influencing Korea's heavier rock scene of the last two decades.
Lysenkoism
Scientific Integrity in Policy Making. The Union of Concerned Scientists have an update to their February report (discussed here) accusing the Bush administration of engaging in Lysenkoism, which Bush's top science adviser denied. [Via The Intersection.]
Ouch, my eyes, my ears!
Short Attention Span Fiction
Anacrusis is a collection of short stories. Very short stories, written under a strict length constraint. It's a perfect way to get your daily dose of weird, funny, thought-provoking fiction.
Museum of Park Slide
Googling for Holocaust survivors
High school students in Israel are harnessing the community-building power of weblogs to locate survivors of the Holocaust.
FCC vs. The fifth amendment
FCC wants radio, TV to keep tapes of shows. Presumably this is to make it easier for the FCC's Enforcement Bureau to levy some of those hefty new fines. Now I know the issue of the FCC fines and the FCC in general has already been discussed here, here, here, and possibly here. But it seems like there's a fifth amendment issue here that's new to this debate. Will forcing broadcasters to keep tapes in effect compel them to give evidence against themselves?
July, 2004 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic:
July, 2004 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic: "The HIV epidemic is worse than ever." "As the AIDS pandemic enters its 24th year, the number of people living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection continues to increase steadily. Two thirds of infected persons are in Africa, where the epidemic exploded during the 1990s, and one fifth are in Asia, where the epidemic has been growing rapidly in recent years." A new report from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS shows that ""in short, the epidemic is outstripping efforts to contain it." "We're talking about more than 8,000 deaths every single day and in the war against AIDS we know the tools that work, we know the sorts of intervention that work, and if an administration is choosing other than these, and is doing less than it ought, then they're absolutely responsible." As prevention fails and more people die, some are "still insisting that only brand-name AIDS drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, most of them manufactured by big U.S. pharmaceutical companies, can be bought by beneficiaries of U.S. aid, despite the fact they are as much as five times more expensive as their generic equivalents manufactured in poor countries."
Who's giving to who?
You can probably guess who people like Janeane Garofalo and Ben Stein have given campaign contributions to. But how about Jennifer Garner? Reese Witherspoon? Siegfried and Roy? Karl Malone? The Newsmeat Hall Of Fame has the answers.
Dinner and A Movie ... Divide by One ... Carry the One
Cost of sex with a girlfriend and wife calculator. The people at NoMarriage.com are have devised some formulas for determining how much you need to shell out to get a little nookie from your significant other.
Clay-riffic
"Untitled Inspirational Memoir" by American [White] Idol '03 Clay Aiken hits #9 on the Amazon bestseller chart. It will be published (presumably with a title) in November. Order yours today. Or, run home and mail off your Great American Novel -- or at least your own dashed-off U.I.M. -- to Random House, publisher to the stars.
How they censor Tintin comic books in Iran
Stalking the Bogeyman
"The entry is dated June 1981, and while I have no memory of writing it, the penmanship is unmistakably my own. There, between accounts of my grandfather dying and a game-winning double I hit in Little League, is an account of my being raped three years before. I concluded the entry by wondering what I would do if I ever met the man who'd raped me on the street once I myself was a grown man." Original article is a few months old but the follow up (here) is fresh. [romenesko]
Paper Wars
Paper Wars. (flash animation)
Orwell would be proud
Eastasia plans attacks on Eurasia "Efforts each of you make to be vigilant – such as reporting suspicious items or activities to authorities – do make a difference. Every citizen using their common sense and eyes and ears can support our national effort to stop the terrorists.
Thank you for your continued resolve in the face of the ongoing threat of terrorism. We must continue to work together – to ensure that the freedom we just celebrated continues as the hallmark of this great nation."
Are you scared yet?
Olga can get him to eat; I can't
Her name was Courage & is written Olga "Olga" (.pdf file in main link) is Olga Rudge, violinist, first promoter of the Vivaldi Renaissance, and longtime companion of the poet Ezra Pound.
Pound maintained a complicated and delicate balance between the two most significant women in his life, Olga and his wife Dorothy Shakespear (who, among other things, was the daughter of Yeats's mistress).
‘‘Paris is where EP and OR met, and everything in my life happened,’’ Olga (listen to her voice here) said later of the chance encounter with Ezra at 20, rue Jacob, in the salon of Natalie Barney. They were together for fifty years, through the dark-night years of Pound's madness (arrested in 1945 for treason, deemed unable to stand trial and sent to an American mental institution, he once suggested to the UPI bureau chief in Rome that the United States trade Guam for some sound films of Japanese Noh plays, asked Truman many times to make him Ambadassor to Japan or Moscow; Guy Davenport reports dining with him one evening and all Ez said was "gnocchi"), until the poet's death in 1972. She lived on for another quarter century, turning up at conferences of Pound scholars --as far afield as Hailey, Idaho, Pound's birthplace, where she gave a lecture in the local movie theater. "Write about Pound", she told publishers who asked her to write her autobiography. (more inside, with Cantos)
Bull. It's all ass to me
Running of the naked bull-equivalents? (warning - NSFW, maybe - pic of naked female buttocks) Wouldn't this PETA protest, over bullfight cruelty, be more directly analogous to the "Running of the Bulls" if the naked runners were to be chased by a herd of meat eaters, on motor scooters, armed with stun guns?
FIRE!
Honk! Squeeak!
Xaphoon! It's a saxophone! No, it's a clarinet! It's dirt cheap and it fits on your pocket! Apparently these have been around for twenty years, but I've never heard of them before. I've ordered myself one of the plastic ones. Has anyone here played one of these things?
Meltdown on CNN
Andrew Dice Clay loses it on CNN/fn. Just lovely. Don't have any details on this but it's worth a look.
Protest warrior
Operation Tiger Claw Whereupon a student exercises his right to free speech in a public school setting...
About Shoah
I haven't yet spent the nine-and-a-half hours it takes to watch "Shoah" but this sad, floating article makes me want to.
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