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In this age of media companies and the RIAA suing everyone and their computer illiterate grandmothers, it’s nice to see an musician take a critical look at what it is that they do, if it’s really necessary, and ask if there was a better way to spend their money. And, quite frankly, it doesn’t surprise me in the least that it was Sarah McLachlan. (QT video)
comment posted at 6:27 AM on Sep-27-04
comment posted at 9:03 AM on Sep-27-04
comment posted at 4:25 PM on Sep-27-04

WalMart ends anti-Semitic book sale Bowing to a barrage of complaints from Jewish groups, retail leader Wal-Mart Inc. has stopped selling "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," an infamous anti-Semitic tract long exposed as fake.
comment posted at 6:46 AM on Sep-27-04
comment posted at 8:49 AM on Sep-27-04

"It was surprising how thick the smoke had become. It seems like the world has always needed a scapegoat --someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire. But America wasn't the Roman Empire and someone else would have to step up and volunteer. I really was never any more than what I was -- a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me." -- from Bob Dylan's new autobiography, Chronicles, with a brief interview, via Newsweek
comment posted at 1:03 PM on Sep-26-04

25 years old and I pretty much had made it. The critics’ darling was now a success. So what happened? Why is it that many of you here today aren’t quite sure who the hell I actually am, aside from Rufus Wainwright’s father? Why is finding a CD of mine akin to archeology? Where were the follow up hits to "Dead Skunk," funny animal songs like "I Met Her at the Pet Store" and "Stay Away From My Aardvark?"
My Cool Life by Loudon Wainwright III
comment posted at 11:58 AM on Sep-25-04

Who Was Abused ? There are several ways to view the small white house on Center Street in Bakersfield, Calif. From one perspective it's just another low-slung home in a working-class neighborhood, with a front yard, brown carpeting, a TV in the living room. Now consider it from the standpoint of the Kern County district attorney's office: 20 years ago, this was a crime scene of depraved proportions... [and] this time, through Ed Sampley's eyes. Twenty years ago he was one of the boys molested in the house where sex abuse was part of the weekend fabric. That's what he told Kern County investigators. That's what he told a judge, a jury and a courtroom of lawyers... Now for the first time in 20 years, Sampley is back in the driveway of that small white house. ''It never happened,'' he tells me. He lied about Stoll, an easygoing divorced father who always insisted the neighborhood kids call him John rather than Mr. Stoll and let them run in and out of his house in their bathing suits, eat popcorn on the living-room floor and watch ''fright night'' videos. More Inside
comment posted at 11:51 AM on Sep-25-04

Sebastian Horsley - a man who's slept with more than 1,000 prostitutes - gives a controversial and candid account of his experience of paying for sex
comment posted at 1:39 PM on Sep-24-04
comment posted at 9:26 AM on Sep-25-04

The Art of Cats:
The Kattenkabinet (Cat Cabinet, the Cat Museum) of Amsterdam: a collection of objects d'art wholly centered around the theme of the cat, among which you will find a wonderful gallery including Picasso. Controversial social taboos are not avoided. Malaysia's Cat City of Kuching has a Cat Museum; more info on the Museum of Meows here (Ancient Egyptians shaved their eyebrows in mourning when the family cat died. Malays attached superstitions to cats believing they possessed supernatural powers...) The scullery of Kathleen Mann's Antiques in London's High Street has a "Purrfect Museum" too, with 250 exhibits from all over the world going back to the 1770s, founded by Kathleen and her mother ... Kitty. Not to be outdone, Lithuania and Russia have cat museums as well.
comment posted at 10:17 AM on Sep-23-04

Redemption and the Power of Man. In Christianity, redemption is essentially an act of divine grace, the salvation of a sinful humanity that is incapable of saving itself. In Judaism redemption depends entirely on man, who is responsible for his own fate. To what extent did Judaism influence the development of progressive, pluralistic democracy?
comment posted at 5:11 PM on Sep-22-04
comment posted at 10:51 AM on Sep-23-04

Los Zafiros. A Cuban pop group that could rival the Beatles for song-craft, if not in popularity. Don't take my word for it though. Read Ry Cooder's interview, see the movie, read the movie review, or listen yourself [real|wmp].
comment posted at 10:29 AM on Sep-21-04
comment posted at 12:50 PM on Sep-21-04
comment posted at 4:42 PM on Sep-21-04

"Witches are trying to kill me." Standing on his porch dressed in warm-up pants, a T-shirt and a sweat-stained army cap, Jake Jenkins explains Luzerne County is the location of the largest witches coven in the state .... "You have the witches that want to play at it, and then you have the real serious bastards, deadly," he said.
comment posted at 11:39 AM on Sep-21-04

"Black Like me" : the notion of "Race" is know known to be scientifically meaningless, but now roll back the clock to 1959 : "...John Howard Griffin (1920-1980) was a true Renaissance man. Having fought in the French Resistance and been a solo observer on an island in the South Pacific during World War II, he became a critically-acclaimed novelist and essayist, a remarkable photographer and musicologist, and a dynamic lecturer and teacher. On October 28, 1959, after a decade of blindness and a remarkable and inexplicable recovery, John Howard Griffin dyed himself black and began an odyssey of discovery through the segregated American South. The result was Black Like Me, arguably the single most important documentation of 20th century American racism ever written....Because of Black Like Me, Griffin was personally vilified, hanged in effigy in his hometown, and threatened with death for the rest of his life."
comment posted at 12:15 PM on Sep-20-04
comment posted at 8:52 AM on Sep-21-04

What's a pirate's favorite aspect of computational linguistics? PARRRsing sentences.

Happy Talk Like a Pirate day, me hearties!
comment posted at 2:48 PM on Sep-19-04
comment posted at 12:22 PM on Sep-20-04

100 key books “Cyril Connolly chose 100 key books from England, France and America first published between 1880 and 1950 to represent ‘The Modern Movement’.”

This site asks: “How does the list look now, in the first decade of the 21st Century?” “an additional list of key books is needed for 1950 to 2000. What should be included and why? Does Connolly's selection criteria need adjusting [just England (when so many of the books are from Ireland), France and America!] and if so how should this be done, remembering that Connolly was very precise in delineating the list as Key books, not best books?”
comment posted at 1:37 PM on Sep-17-04

70 things you may or may not know about Leonard Cohen (a nice accompaniment to this mefi thread of yore) [via]
comment posted at 8:16 AM on Sep-17-04
comment posted at 11:35 AM on Sep-17-04

Reason's Julian Sanchez thinks he's found the guy who was caught on ABC News kicking a protester at the Republican convention, whose identity has been the subject of much speculation on blogs like TalkLeft. But does this kind of thing have the potential to create the Internet's Richard Jewell?
comment posted at 2:13 PM on Sep-16-04

Why Bush Left Texas Growing evidence suggests that George W. Bush abruptly left his Texas Air National Guard unit in 1972 for substantive reasons pertaining to his inability to continue piloting a fighter jet. A months-long investigation, which includes examination of hundreds of government-released documents, interviews with former Guard members and officials, military experts and Bush associates, points toward the conclusion that Bush's personal behavior was causing alarm among his superior officers and would ultimately lead to his fleeing the state to avoid a physical exam he might have had difficulty passing... If it is demonstrated that profound behavioral problems marred Bush's wartime performance and even cut short his service, it could seriously challenge Bush's essential appeal as a military steward and guardian of societal values. It could also explain the incomplete, contradictory and shifting explanations provided by the Bush camp for the President's striking invisibility from the military during the final two years of his six-year military obligation... There's that elephant in the living room again.
comment posted at 11:18 AM on Sep-15-04

All in the family. An R. Crumb original will cost you an arm and a leg, but S. Crumb will do you one better, for a whole lot less.
comment posted at 9:38 AM on Sep-15-04

Critique Magazine's On Writing III - Each year, Critique Magazine's staff compiles essays by and interviews with writers, teachers, and translators of merit for inclusion in the special anniversary edition "On Writing".

Basically, a shitload of authors provide thoughts on, ahem, writing. {Both sites are worth a look, imo.}
comment posted at 7:10 AM on Sep-15-04
comment posted at 9:53 AM on Sep-15-04

Jimmy Carter's Letter to Zell Miller via Boing Boing via Interesting People
A private correspondence between Jimmy Carter and Zell Miller has surfaced where Jimmy expresses his disappointment with Zell's taking part in the RNC and betraying his constituency.
comment posted at 7:24 AM on Sep-15-04
comment posted at 11:07 AM on Sep-15-04

Two Years Before the Mast. "In the following pages I design to give an accurate and authentic narrative of a little more than two years spent as a common sailor,before the mast, in the American merchant service. It is written out from a journal which I kept at the time, and from notes which I made of most of the events as they happened." At the beginning of his third year of Harvard a severe attack of measles interrupted Henry Dana's studies, and so affected his eyes as to preclude, for a time at least, all idea of study. The state of the family finances was not such as to permit of foreign travel in search of health. Accordingly, prompted by necessity and by a youthful love of adventure, he shipped as a common sailor in the brig, bound for the California coast.
comment posted at 12:38 PM on Sep-14-04

Hurricane Risk for New Orleans: "if that Category Five Hurricane comes to New Orleans, 50,000 people could lose their lives. Now that is significantly larger than any estimates that we would have of individuals who might lose their lives from a terrorist attack. When you start to do that kind of calculus - and it's horrendous that you have to do that kind of calculus - it appears to those of us in emergency management, that the risk is much more real and much more significant, when you talk about hurricanes. I don't know that anybody, though, psychologically, has come to grip with that: that the French Quarter of New Orleans could be gone." (Nb. this excerpt from a fascinating 2002 American RadioWorks documentary does not refer specifically to Ivan.)
comment posted at 10:16 AM on Sep-14-04

Victor Jara in English. Tribute page to the Chilean folk singer.
comment posted at 10:36 AM on Sep-13-04

Enviromental absorbant products manufacturer, Dyn-O-Mat claims to have removed a cloud from Doppler radar and intends to test their product on a hurricane. They have a patent and everything. The federal government spent two decades on Project Stormfury, an attempt to halt storms by 'seeding' the eyewall of a hurricane. This guy says we are already doing it with the militaries High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. Even if we're not doing it now, we'll definately by own the weather by 2025. That is, unless we're intentionally causing storms.
comment posted at 5:41 PM on Sep-12-04

You can get at the Oxford English Dictionary for free. Yay. Unfortunately you have to use this backdoor thing. Don't tell anyone.
comment posted at 5:45 PM on Sep-12-04

You know you've had one hell of a year when you get promoted from Jesus to Superman.
comment posted at 2:33 PM on Sep-12-04

A LEVER TO MOVE THE MIND The project is fascinating, even though it is still in the rudimentary graphics stage. As someone who works with people with mental illness this interested me, how about the rest of you? What am I talking about? A way to model what schizophrenia is like.
comment posted at 2:40 PM on Sep-12-04

There appear to be many similarities between the lives of Krishna and Jesus Christ. Exploring the linkage between the two does make one wonder whether the similarities are coincidences or for a very good reason.
comment posted at 1:41 PM on Sep-10-04

Why truth matters.
comment posted at 11:12 AM on Sep-8-04

Comparison of life in Piscataway, New Jersey; Kochi, Japan; and Zhuzhou, Hunan Province, China by Ernie French.
comment posted at 6:57 AM on Sep-8-04

Global Artists. If influential historical figures were reincarnated as artists, what works of art would they produce today? [Via Aeiou.]
comment posted at 10:56 AM on Sep-7-04

The bias of balance : new study of how media "evenhandness" distorts truth "Two researchers argue, in a paper published this month in the journal Global Environmental Change, that following the norms of American journalism, U.S. media have promulgated a bias in the coverage of climate change essentially by giving too much credence to climate skeptics at the expense of the scientific consensus." - "Reporters and editors at four of the nation's top newspapers [ New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal ] adhered to the journalistic norm of balance at the expense of accurately reporting scientific understanding of the human contributions to global warming" (an earlier work in this vein).
comment posted at 11:14 AM on Sep-7-04
comment posted at 12:53 PM on Sep-7-04
comment posted at 1:28 PM on Sep-7-04

Are these really the 10 most hated men in rock?
comment posted at 9:27 AM on Sep-7-04
comment posted at 11:21 AM on Sep-7-04
comment posted at 11:20 AM on Sep-8-04

Twenty Years Ago, The BBC produced a topical drama called Threads - little did they know the furore it would go on to create. [more inside]
comment posted at 6:31 AM on Sep-6-04

The Republican propaganda mill, a brief history It's bigger than Bush vs. Kerry. It's about billionaire funded thinktanks (AEI, Heritage) paying columnists to sit around and make stuff up or legitimize crackpot theories (blacks are genetically stupid, japanese internment was okay). Furthermore its about radio, internet, blogs, tv news and publishing houses working in concert to pummel memes onto the American public. When this stuff infects your culture and is no longer the domain of the loons but now as mainstream as apple pie and Wal-Mart, what do you do?
comment posted at 4:42 PM on Sep-6-04