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Maxim Saves Journalism "The reason the notion of Maxim saving journalism is funny is because everyone buys into this holier-than-thou notion that Maxim, because it dares to package itself in an easily digestible format and obsess over the real concerns of real people instead of operating on a higher theoretical plain, is anti-intellectual, maybe even partly responsible for what’s being called the “dumbing down of America.” That’s the squawking canard I’m going to try to chop the head off of today. I’m going to take you behind the titillating eye candy and show you what Maxim really is, and how it’s part of a growing movement already blowing the cobwebs out of a truly ancient and intransigent industry." (via medianews)
comment posted at 12:50 PM on Jul-26-02

Great feat, but not a great athlete. Let the Cyclist bashing continue.
As a follow up to the pointless Bicycles and cars don't mix column, Ron Borges over at MSNBC wonders if Lance Armstrong is even an athlete.
He says Athletes must do more with their bodies than pump their legs up and down. For his money, being the greatest athlete in the world involves strength, speed, agility, hand-eye coordination, mental toughness and the ability to make your body do things that defy description. Anyone who has ever been in a bike race (Road or MTN) knows it does indeed take all that and more. Anyone who writes about sports, rather than participating, would of course have no clue it takes more than moving your feet up and down.
comment posted at 8:33 AM on Jul-26-02

From NPR (The MetaFilter giveth, the MetaFilter taketh away...) Remembering Tuskegee
600 low-income African-American males, 400 infected with syphilis are monitored for 40 years. Even though a proven cure (penicillin) became available in the 1950s, the study continues until 1972 with participants denied treatment. Perhaps as many as 100 died of syphilis during the study (Allen, 1978). Additional resources.

Thirty years ago is not that long a time.
comment posted at 8:45 AM on Jul-25-02
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comment posted at 11:05 AM on Jul-25-02

The Moon Also Rises. Or how about: Ask Not For Whom the Moon Rises... Both Karl Marx and Mohammed agree, he da' man..err...True Parent! He's serious but I'm laughing. Please God, make him stop!! Falwell and the right wingers actually suck up to this guy!
comment posted at 8:51 AM on Jul-25-02
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comment posted at 12:47 PM on Jul-25-02

When Rock bands leave their irony at home (or potentially never had any). An outrageously hilarious collection of musicians taking incredibly self-concious photographs of themselves. All of my fellow musicians on metafilter, you will find this particularly hilarious (and cringe-worthy, as you wait to see if the next pic will be...you!)
comment posted at 8:18 AM on Jul-25-02

Bikes and cars don't mix. At least, according to the author of this column. As someone who cycles for fun and commuting, I was alternately amused by his anti-bike spewing and terrified that he's a case of road rage waiting to happen. Remind me never to bike in Pittsburgh.
comment posted at 11:09 AM on Jul-24-02
comment posted at 11:36 AM on Jul-24-02

Mormon Heaven, Mormon Hell, Mormon Underwear?
comment posted at 2:00 PM on Jul-24-02

Sol: A Great Big Ball of Burning....Iron? Well that's what a UMRolla professor thinks anyway -- instead of being mostly hydrogen, that the sun is actually mostly iron. He's going against all popular belief, and indeed lots of evidence, but his theory states that our sun formed around the iron core of an old supernova.
comment posted at 7:39 AM on Jul-24-02
comment posted at 7:48 AM on Jul-24-02

HBO's Real Sports aired the tape of Al Sharpton negotiating a drug deal with an undercover FBI agent. I saw the show tonight, Sharpton was obviously unprepared to respond. He left and then came back after he figured out what he was going to say. Why would he refuse to watch it if he didn't know he was going to watch something as baldly incriminating as the tape? Why are black Americans (me included) allowing people like Sharpton to represent them in the media? As if you didn't need a reason before this to kick Sharpton to the curb. (more inside)
comment posted at 6:09 AM on Jul-24-02

It's not the economy stupid: Right wing radio pundit Rush pins Apple's market share woes not on a nonexistant economic downturn (pay no attention to the plummeting chart of the DOW and NASDAQ) but instead on Steve Jobs' refusal to renounce his personal politics.
comment posted at 1:17 PM on Jul-23-02

Non-citizens put on notice to file change in addresses
The Ashcroft Gestapo strikes again!

If a permanent resident doesn't file this change-in-address form, they are talking about penalties up to and including deportion! Note we aren't talking about student visa holders or anything like that .. we are talking about people who have lived in this country for 10 .. 20 .. 30 years or more in many cases.

This country is really turning into a police state the way things are going.
comment posted at 6:02 AM on Jul-23-02

A new director has been announced for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban For this third installment of the franchise, Chris Columbus will be stepping down to producer, and Alfonso Cuarón has been announced to fill the director's chair. Now if they'll just get somebody else to step in for Rowling actually get the next book written....
comment posted at 6:50 AM on Jul-23-02

Like, Omigod! Rhino Records' latest orgy of nostalgia, The '80s Pop Culture Box, arrived in stores this week. The package boasts seven disks, 142 songs, and an impressive array of extras, including liner notes by Jamie Malanowski of Spy magazine, so this may be all that you need to become an instant '80s expert. If the $99.98 sticker price is too steep for you, and you're already an expert, though, you can try their contest for a chance to win a set (and a whole bunch more!) Gag me with a spoon!
comment posted at 11:24 AM on Jul-22-02
comment posted at 12:48 PM on Jul-22-02

The Ballad of "John Walker's Blues" Not long after Lindh pleaded guilty to aiding the former Afghan regime, maverick country-blues musician Steve Earle released a controversial ballad, "John Walker's Blues," that has infuriated the American heartland with lyrics like: We came to fight the jihad, our hearts were pure and strong/We filled the air with our prayers and we prayed for our martyrdom/Allah has some other plans, a secret not revealed/Now they're dragging me back with my head in the sack to the land of the infidel.
comment posted at 10:43 AM on Jul-22-02

Alan Lomax , the legendary collector of folk music who was the first to record towering figures like Leadbelly, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie, died yesterday at a nursing home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 87. Mr. Lomax was a musicologist, author, disc jockey, singer, photographer, talent scout, filmmaker, concert and recording producer and television host. He did whatever was necessary to preserve traditional music and take it to a wider audience. (NY Times- Registraion Required) And... Additionally... And this. Also...
comment posted at 4:42 PM on Jul-21-02

"What are we to make of the fact that the Fearless Leader of the Free World, a man brave enough to challenge terrorists in 80 nations to worldwide war, requires a general anesthetic for a routine colonoscopy?" Spectator magazine columnist David Steinberg raises a stink. (Found on Flutterby!)
comment posted at 3:35 PM on Jul-20-02

Get a job. This fella argues that to be a good writer (and by extension artist of any kind) you have to be out in the world of work and humdrum living. It's a big mistake, he says, to train writers as "writers" in little hothouse workshops. Exposure to the brawny world of work should be part of a writer's education. This, he suggests, is why so much modern fiction bites the weenie. (It does not, however, explain his own inability to compose a more coherent essay.) In any case, to get a job, or not get a job, THAT is the artist's question... (from Arts Journal Daily)
comment posted at 2:24 PM on Jul-20-02

Seating the duly-elected president in office "President-elect Gore would have to be elected to the house of representatives in 2002, along with enough democrats to give them a majority. they then elect him speaker of the house, at that point, all that's left is the simple matter of a double-assassination, and voila! President Al Gore." It's that easy. Yikes.
comment posted at 5:38 AM on Jul-20-02

UHaul "Venture Across America Series" - surprisingly compelling content for a moving company. There are about twenty-five features about various states and provinces.
comment posted at 11:18 AM on Jul-19-02

Every wonder why most Hollywood movies completely stink? It's 'cuz all the decent writers get put through the wringer like this guy, and give up. He hasn't given up yet, and does seem to at least be getting a lot of free Evian at the production companies pitches at.
comment posted at 10:53 AM on Jul-19-02

Terrist messages in digital photographs questioned (salon.com). Last week, USA Today raised a stir by claiming that terrorists were trading hidden messages in images on ebay by the "hundreds" using an uncited source. Salon contacting other sources willing to go on the record found that finding hundreds of hidden messages requires sampling more files than were posted to ebay in the past year. In addition steganography analysis turns up a high rate of false-positivies. Is this a case of seeing what we want to see like the Bacon-Shakespeare ciphers?
comment posted at 9:23 AM on Jul-18-02

The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke (FFM) (in the Tate collection) Richard Dadd, a Victorian gentleman, a convicted murderer and patient at the famous Bedlam asylum, spent nine years carefully crafting his masterpiece. He wrote a guidebook for it and insisted that each of the hundred characters in the painting is assigned a special task. What does he mean? Well, Neil Gaiman, among others, was inspired by this painting (it influenced the Sandman) and considers it a life-long obsession. He also wrote the introduction to a new book being published about the painting as a gateway to the supernatural world.

A bit of background: Dadd was a painter of Victorian Fairy Art. The obsession with fairies was like a fever that overtook the Victorian Mind. Another painter of note was Richard Doyle, the uncle of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes). A.C. Doyle himself was involved in a fascinating controversy that raged at the time. the Cottingley fairies, in which two young girls circulated photos of themselves with fairies. Doyle proclaimed that the photos "represent either the most elaborate and ingenious hoax ever played upon the public or else they constitute an event in human history which may in the future appear to have been epoch-making in its character" Unfortunately for Doyle, it was the former though the hoax was hardly ingenious, relying on cardboard cutouts and the will to believe.
comment posted at 9:20 AM on Jul-18-02

The National Trust I just cant stop listening to this. I first heard it this morning on a mix disc my friend made me and now it's just on repeat all day at work. I'm buying the album after payday. What albums have you recently heard that stick in your head and your CD/MD/MP3 player? Do you get as obsessed with new bands like I do? Does hearing good new music become as addictive as any drug?
comment posted at 1:40 PM on Jul-12-02

News Sites Hustle for Profitability
In a recent survey of 429 newspaper Web sites worldwide by media consulting group Innovation, only 5.5 percent of North American sites currently charge a subscriber fee. But many are re-considering that model. Steve Barth, general manager of L.A. Times Interactive feels the need to condition us.
"If we took a leadership position and did our part in helping condition the reader that not everything is free forever, hopefully other substantial news organizations would follow," says he.
comment posted at 7:38 AM on Jul-12-02

Knock Down That Wall! The wall that keeps the church and state separated, not the one in Berlin. "Two bills currently being debated in the U. S. Congress would allow churches to spend their funds on political campaigns and to endorse political candidates. H.R. 2357, sponsored by Representative Walter Jones (R-N.C.), would remove a longstanding rule that banned churches from using tax-exempt revenue to fund political campaigns."
comment posted at 1:36 PM on Jul-11-02

Who the heck is Shooby Taylor? By all accounts, he is (or rather, was...it appears he's dead) a musical outsider, but one blessed with a truly bizarre style. Just take one listen to his...unique version of "Lift Every Voice and Sing"(warning: MP3 file, hilarious)... it's pure gold. And there's plenty more where that came from...
comment posted at 9:34 AM on Jul-11-02

American Magus

Without Harry Smith I wouldn’t have existed!

Bob Dylan

… I put Harry Smith with the three most dear to me GRAND INTELLIGENCE!! Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Harry Smith…These were sharp motherfuckers… and heavy… talk about heavy!!

Gregory Corso

Harry Smith, a central figure in the mid-20th-century avant-garde, was a complex artistic figure who made major contributions to the fields of sound recording, independent filmmaking, the visual arts, and ethnographic collecting. Along with Kenneth Anger, Jordan Belson, and Oskar Fischinger, Smith is considered one of America’s leading experimental filmmakers. He would often hand-paint directly on film creating unique, complex compositions that have been interpreted as investigations of conscious and unconscious mental processes. Smith began as a teenager to record Native American songs and rituals. He is best known for his Anthology of American Folk Music, a music collection widely credited with launching the urban folk revival.

The Anthology is the focus here, but Harry Smith, the artist, avant garde film maker, polymath, musicologist and quintessential hipster must be mentioned, too. Details Within
comment posted at 7:34 AM on Jul-11-02
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comment posted at 4:41 AM on Jul-12-02

New Beck song here.

New Weezer video (with the Muppets) here (it's a RealMedia file).

New Coldplay single here in WindowsMedia and here in RealAudio.

Feel free to argue the artistic merits of these three performers as well as whether this post is worthy of a front page post in the thread (like you people wouldn't do that anyay).
comment posted at 1:08 PM on Jul-10-02
comment posted at 1:38 PM on Jul-10-02

Scalia gives divinity school students a peek at what his activism is really about. I can't say it any better than he does so I'll quote: "The reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it, but the resolution to combat it as effectively as possible." Of course we knew Scalia detested democracy on 12/12/2000 with his decision that infamous day but now he admits favoritism to theocracy.
comment posted at 1:30 PM on Jul-10-02

Big foundations pull funding from city school district. According to my inside source at the Board of Education here, the foundations and the BoE consider the school board's shenanigans to be "marginal." That is, unusual compared to most school boards for districts this size. I would think there are many bad school boards like ours, right?
comment posted at 9:38 AM on Jul-10-02

The King of the Jukebox who disturbed the status quo They called rock music jump blues during the World War II era, and this amazingly talented clown was its master, with over fifty Top 10 R&B hits -- eighteen reached #1 -- between 1942 and 1951. Chuck Berry identified with him "more than any other artist." James Brown said, "He was everything" and considered him one of the earliest rappers. A pioneer of music video, the first black artist to cross over from the "race" market to a white audience and a central link between big bands and rock, he was a primary influence on Bill Haley, Ray Charles and B.B. King, who once said, "I wanted to be like him." Rest in peace, Louis Jordan. [Dozens of one-minute song clips here]
comment posted at 7:41 AM on Jul-10-02

"When he can't get along with the real world, Wallace goes back to the only thing he has left: his computer. Each morning, he wakes before dawn and watches conversations stream by on his screen. Thousands of people flock to his Web site every day from all over the world to talk to his creation, a robot called Alice. It is the best artificial-intelligence program on the planet, a program so eerily human that some mistake it for a real person. Richard Wallace has created an artificial life form that gets along with people better than he does." A fascinating article (NYT), how a beautiful and original mind survives in our corporate society with the help of "a daily cocktail of psychoactive drugs, including Topamax, an anti-epileptic that acts as a mood stabilizer, and Prozac. Marijuana, too -- most afternoons, he'll roll about four or five joints the size of his index finger."
comment posted at 10:13 AM on Jul-9-02

The Democratic Fascist Somebody please tell me that this is some kind of really awful joke: "Quite simply, the Democratic Fascist Movement is a well-organized, rapidly growing group of people, inspired by the work of our Visionary Mr. Sean Hannity, who affirm the necessity for Moral Unity in our Nation today. While we do not reject the Democratic Process, we also recognize the need for bringing conclusion to the mob rule which has characterized our Government of late. It is our belief that, through more stringent voting regulations, power must be placed back into the hands of the Moral Elite if this Great Nation can endure." More inside...
comment posted at 10:41 AM on Jul-9-02
comment posted at 7:59 AM on Jul-10-02

"We think of an orange as a constant, but in reality it's not." Canadian study finds that fruits and vegetables have lost much of their nutritional value in the last decades--potatoes, for example, have lost 100% of their Vitamin A. The reason, it appears, is mass production and a market that values appearance over substance. Is this symptomatic of deeper problems within a system where produce travels so far before reaching the consumer? Here in B.C., for example, the stores are full of California produce, despite the fact that we grow much the same fruits and vegetables locally.
comment posted at 10:29 AM on Jul-6-02
comment posted at 12:24 PM on Jul-6-02

It's the clothes. A fashion columnist in The Washington Post blames corporate scandals on business-casual clothes, which lead to casual ethics.
comment posted at 8:31 AM on Jul-5-02