Hey kids! Don't have a costume yet? Try downloading one of these CEO Halloween Masks from Forbes!
Above, L. Dennis Kozlowski, Former Tyco CEO! Spooooky! Also available: Bernard Ebbers, Ken Lay, Samuel Waksal, and Martha Stewart! And you want to hear something really scary? Bush's new appointee to the SEC's accounting oversight board headed the audit committee of a company accused of fraud! Boo!
Thanks to Ennis for the Forbes link.
| Corporate Accountability | SEC | George W. Bush | Enron | Kenneth Lay | Martha Stewart |
Mike and Colin's posts in praise of Halloween culture got me thinking about how some of my favorite songs ever are actually pretty Halloween-appropriate. Call me a closet goth or something, but I'm a sucker for tales of occult figures, satanic carnage, mayhem and intimations of doom with catchy hooks built in.
This was going to be a canon/compilation project a la Trip's Camaro Rock or our household Winter Solstice comp tape, but these tunes are a small, elite group and they don't really fit together on one mix. Diverse though they may be, I'd recommend them all to anyone who appreciates the bloody-minded irony of, say, the Simpsons Halloween specials, or who's just done the Monster Mash too many times already.
Six(66) Songs for an All Hallow's Reprieve (The Phantom Liner Notes):
1) Daniel Johnston, "Casper the Friendly Ghost"
Now it can be told! Johnston's home-recorded, Casio-accompanied song recasts Casper as a lonely soul who fell down a well and came back to find the love he'd been denied. "Nobody treated him nice when he was alive... but everyone respects the dead." There's a lesson in that somewhere.
2) The Lord Weird Slough Feg, "High Season III"
Metal bombast has never been so loveable as in the moment near the end when the lead singer proclaims, "Now the time has ARRIVED!/For you to meet your DEMISE!/ The emptiness plagued mortal men/Upon which you FEAST and you THRIVE!!!" This is part of a multisong cycle that's sort of an inversion of Paradise Lost, and would make a great Broadway show.
3) Barbara Manning, "Someone Wants You Dead"
Singer/songwriter Manning has the creepiest ballad in this lot, told from the perspective of someone investigating the scene of an unsolveable murder: "She didn't have a Doberman/She didn't have a phone/It was not the kind of place/You'd want to live alone." Sounds like a latter-day sequel to all those crime-story folksongs that Harry Smith used to collect.
4) Goodie Mob, "Cell Therapy"
I'm amazed at how many conspiracy theories the Goodie Mob rappers manage to pack into one cut. Or maybe it's just one, big theory with government surveillance at its center. The chorus goes, "Who's that peekin' in my window/POW!/Nobody, now." Could this be the answer record to Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me"?
5) Slayer, "Raining Blood"
Yeah, you could point out that most metal bands live in Halloween Town, but the classic riff that leads this one off and the over-the-top guitar solo make this the anthem for teens to headbang to in their rooms while their freaked-out parents dial Tipper. As Jay points out, both this and the Slough Feg track feature Satan soliloquizing about what will happen when he rises and takes over the Earth--just like that song in the South Park movie!
6) Jad Fair, "Frankenstein Must Die"
Long and regrettably out of print, this is the best of the many monster songs of Jad Fair and his band Half Japanese (For an introduction, rent the excellent documentary flick The Band that Would Be King.) The climax is when, after a long, hilarious setup, Jad stands up to the monster, intoning, "Oh Mr. Frankenstein you must die!" And he triumphs, after a fashion.
| Lists | Mixes |
You know all those times I complained about the proliferation of login screens in my life? How I can't always keep straight which one's my ATM PIN, which is my Blogger password and which is the combo on my luggage lock? Well forget I said any of it. Passwords are a wonderful solution to all manner of personal and corporate security needs! I adore them! I'll go now and memorize them some more. Just, please, step away from the forearm and keep that syringe where I can see it. Let's not be hasty, OK?
| Biotech | Scary |
Back in my teenage years, I watched a lot of horror movies. We'd get a bunch of people over, sit around in my family room, and rent something laughably awful like Slumber Party Massacre II. But every once in a while, something like Phantasm would actually freak me out. There's nothing like a good scary flick to keep you up at night. This Halloween, we'll be watching Jacob's Ladder, a really freaky-scary movie. Last year it was The Exorcist and the year before was The Omen, I think. So, herewith, in no particular order, a brief list of some of my all-time favorite scary movies:
Continue reading "Scary Movies" » | Lists |
OK, file this under Disturbing Gender Trends: Lingerie Barbie. (Found on monoki.)
Do parents really buy these for their little girls to play with? Perhaps as disturbing -- Barbie as Bond Girl:
.
Boy, am I glad I don't have to deal with the whole doll issue. Yet.
| Toys | Dolls | Fashion | Lingerie | James Bond |
From Kristof's Op-Ed piece in today's Times, "The Greatest Threat":
I called Kim Myong Chol, a North Korean unofficial spokesman, who said his country would respond to sanctions not just by reviving Yongbyon [nuclear plant], but also by ramping up weapons exports.Gee, thanks North Korea!"North Korea can export missile and nuclear technology to the highest bidder," he noted dryly. "It's a capitalist practice."
"If America tries to knock out Yongbyon," Mr. Kim added, "North Korea will retaliate immediately on New York and Washington, wipe out South Korea, wipe out Japan."
I observed to Mr. Kim that I was speaking from Midtown Manhattan. "Well okay," he said obligingly, "maybe not New York. Washington and Chicago instead."
| New York City | Nuclear Weapons |
So, is Halloween, like, real? Or what? Turns out that it's less authentic, maybe, than you might think. (It's not even really Pagan.) Much like Christmas -- a holiday so broad in scope that my Jewish friends give me Christmas mix tapes -- it turns out that our beloved October 31st traditions were actually cobbled together in the last 100 years or so, from other holidays' leftovers, by greeting card companies and magazine writers. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's still my favorite holiday, along with Elvis' birthday (January 8th this year; don't miss it!).
| Holidays |
I first read about the Little Green Footballs controversy over on MSNBC's Blogspotting blog. LGF, for those of you who don't know, is a blog that focuses on Mideast politics and the worst excesses of Muslim fanaticism. It's a great source of news you won't find elsewhere. It also features some opinions (in the comments section especially) that veer off into right-wing hysteria. Evidently Femia at MSNBC listed LGF in it's "featured blog" list; some folks complained that LGF was a "hate site"; Femia tagged old-school blogger Anil Dash as the leader of the anti-LGF opposition (Dash has made plenty of comments on LGF arguing with its regulars, but says he never emailed MSNBC to ask for its removal.)
We've dealt with flamewars here on Ishbadiddle. It's a shame when political debate devolves into petty name-calling. In an effort to call for civility, I wrote the following at LGF:
I'm going to do something dangerous here -- wander into the middle of a flamewar. I don't read LGF religously, and I've only rarely read Anil's blog. So I'm not going to get into the who's-right-and-who's-wrong-and-who's-a-bigger-crybaby thing. I come neither to praise Anil nor to bury him.I didn't get much of a respone from the LGFers -- one person wrote a comment that had something to do with Salman Rushdie -- but I did get an email from Dash thanking me for my comments. Dash did the right thing -- he offered to continue the debate in person.Look, I'm a liberal New Yorker. I have a blog. I link to LGF and I read it. It's a great blog -- it's got news I won't find anywhere else. It's important for me to read and try and understand what the hell is going on in the world.
But sometimes, well, I just can't read it. I'll be honest -- sometimes it's because the news is too hard to read. It makes me too angry, or sad. And yes, sometimes it's because the news and opinions challenge my liberal beliefs. [Still on the honesty tip -- I was hoping the sniper didn't turn out to be a Muslim (just as, from some folks' comments here, it seems that some of you were hoping that he was), not only because it (likely) means that more foreign-sponsored terrorism is on the way, but also because it once again forces me to do that "but-not-all-Muslims-are-evil" thing that we liberals have to do.]
But more often, I stop reading LGF because of the tone. I've had flamewars on my own site, and when things got personal, the people who didn't agree with me (and my fellow posters) just left. They didn't come back. And that's what I fear is going on with LGF -- people who don't agree with your opinions get turned off by the tone and the breakdown of civility, and they don't come back.
The thing is, these are the very people who should be reading your blog. People like me. When I read posts like the one about the mosque that received threatening leaflets, and Charles' comment that "this monstrous leafleteer must be brought to justice before he leaflets again," well, I'm just like, WTF? Sure, one threatening leaflet pales in comparison to the daily acts of anti-Semitism the world over. But I'm sure if the same leaflet (well, with different wording, as we Jews don't eat *that* much curry) were delivered to a synagogue, the reaction would be quite different.
I'm getting off on a tangent here. (Hey, isn't that what blogging is all about?) My point is, there's so much news out there about the evils of Islamic fanaticism, and you research and present it so well, that it speaks for itself. But the commentary and flaming turn people away. The frame gets bigger than the picture.
Look, I'm not saying LGF or its commentors should be censored (they'd have to pry my ACLU card from my cold dead fingers first), and I'm glad you got up on the MSNBC list because LGF shows what good blogging is all about -- a point of view, intelligently expressed -- and because people should read what's going on. I'd just like to point out why I don't read LGF as often as I should.
I don't know. Maybe the time for civility vanished last September. I hope not. I hope we can still sit down over a cup of coffee and hash out what needs to be done next.
Flamewars are as old as the Internet itself. Any medium where folks can write quickly and anonymously on hot-button topics will get personal. (Someone might even compare someone to a Nazi.) But if blogging is going to be a better medium than Usenet, we have to act and write with civility.
| LGF | Anil Dash | Civility |
Realistic Internet Simulator. Makes me glad I've got POW! to kill mine.
| Games |
From the Washington Post:
Eric W. Hickey, a criminal psychology professor at California State University at Fresno, said there have been plenty of minority serial killers. In his 1995 book, "Serial Murderers and Their Victims," Hickey wrote that 22 percent of such killers were black. An additional 17 percent were women.
"It's a stereotype that . . . most serial killers are white," Hickey said. "You ask most experts and they can't name a black serial killer. We have Asians and we have Hispanics that were serial killers. We need to get away from all the myths."
But most serial killers are white. And that is one reason former police officers and profilers of serial killers predicted that the sharpshooter was an angry white male, possibly with military training.
| DC Sniper | Race & Ethnicity | Serial Killers | Profiling |
It's here. Thanks to Fimoculous for the link.
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Patrick sent this in:
[Maker of the rifle that was used in the DC area sniper attacks] Bushmaster's principal owner and chairman, Richard Dyke, was the finance chairman of George W. Bush's campaign for the presidency in Maine in 1999. Mr. Dyke resigned as Mr. Bush's chief fund-raiser in Maine in July 1999 after a Los Angeles police officer sued Bushmaster as the maker of a gun that wounded him in a shootout with bank robbers.
[Which is ironic because Bushmaster, which specializes in making non-assault rifles that look like assault rifles, owes its success to the Clinton era assault rifle ban.
Taken from the Times
| Gun Control | GOP | George W. Bush | Crime | Serial Killers | Guest: Patrick |
Trip found these H.P. Lovecraft Fonts. Call out the Old Ones in Lovecraft's own handwriting! No money back if you're slaughtered by a color out of space.
| H.P. Lovecraft | Occult |
Mea Culpa. Mea Culpa Maxima. I was wrong wrong wrong. They weren't white at all. Profiling may have helped them stay on the loose longer.
BTW - have you noticed patterns in terrorists ?
Shoe-bomber & Malvo: Jamaicans
McVeigh and Allen Williams Mohammed: Gulf War Veterans
| DC Sniper | Profiling | Race & Ethnicity |
Found on Anil Dash.
| Tufte Alert |
It’s BlackPeopleLoveUs.com! (And who said the dotcom explosion was over? Someone’s still got time to put this stuff up.) — found at URLDJ
| Race | Comedy |
Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers.com. Another waste of our precious national bandwith resources.
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There’s this guy, see, who’s taking a picture of himself nearly every day, and has since 1998. There are entire months, and even stretches of months, that he skipped, but it’s still kinda interesting. (First seen on Coudal.)
| Time |
Cleaned some stuff up around here -- there was all sorts of old code lying around, not to mention a few broken links. I moved most of the links off of the sidebar, except for my friends' sites, and blogs with reciprocal links. The margin was just getting far too cluttered. It's still too cluttered, but hey. There are now five sections -- Archives, Clicked (the archives of the Recently Clicked bloglet on the sidebar), Movies (with all film-related posts, the still-to-be-fixed Netflix queue, and expanded movie links), WTF? (for "What's That Font?", not that other acronym, with links to the fonts displayed in the title), and Links (which I'll revamp later).
I hope that clears things up somewhat. Design suggestions and complaints can go in the comments box. Or just accost me on the street.
Liz and I went to see Spirited Away, the story of a girl who finds herself in the spirit realm and must rescue her parents. What an amazing film. I'd only seen one of Hayao Miyazaki's movies before, Princess Mononoke. Like Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away is gorgeously drawn, with images that are beautiful and haunting (and, when necessary, terrifying). But while Mononoke was an epic, Hayao Miyazaki's latest is a true fairy tale, and that is high praise.
The story of Spirited Away is similar to The Wizard of Oz: an ordinary girl is transported to a magic realm, and must rely on the brains, heart, and courage that she didn't know she had, in order to get home. Chihiro shares some of Dorothy's spirit, but the rich and strange realm she enters is more like Alice in Wonderland -- a dream world with its own logic that must be obeyed, but which makes perfect sense taken on its own terms. (I was also reminded of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts -- the novel, not the Byrne / Eno album -- although Tutola's spirit world seems much more threatening). Like Dogdson writing his stories to amuse Alice Liddell (and her sisters), Miyazaki has made a movie for his "young friends":
I have five young female friends who are about the same age as Hiiragi-san [Hiiragi Rumi, the 13-year-old voice actress of Chihiro] and I spend every summer with them at my mountain cabin. I wanted to make a movie they could enjoy. That is why I started this film, and that is my true purpose. I felt this country [Japan, I take it] only offered such things as crushes and romance to 10-year-old girls, though, and looking at my young friends, I felt this was not what they held dear in their hearts, not what they wanted. And so I wondered if I could make a movie in which they could be heroines.(Full interview here.)
The wonderful thing about Spirited Away (and it's a film full of wonders) is that Chiriho is an ordinary girl. She doesn't wake up one morning to discover she's got superpowers, or that she's really a wizard, or that she's really the key to the fate of the universe.
Until now, I made "I wish there was such a person" leading characters. This time, however, I created a heroine who is an ordinary girl, someone with whom the audience can sympathize, someone about whom they can say, "Yes, it's like that." It's very important to make it plain and unexaggerated. Starting with that, it's not a story in which the characters grow up, but a story in which they draw on something already inside them.One of the most interesting things about Princess Mononoke was that it refused to have any villains. Characters did good and bad things, but for reasons more complex than their being "good" or "evil". Miyazaki does the same with Spirited Away. Like Chihiro (and Ashitaka in Mononoke), the audience must learn to "see with eyes unclouded by hate," to see both good and bad:
This film is an adventure story, although the characters neither swing weapons around, nor use supernatural powers in battle. It is an adventure story, but its theme is not a confrontation between good and evil. It will be a story of a girl who was thrown into a world where both good and evil exist. She gets trained, learns about friendship and devotion, and survives by using her wisdom. She finds her way out, dodges, and comes back to her old daily life for the time being. However, it is not because evil was destroyed -- just as the world does not disappear, (evil does not disappear). It is because she gained the power to live.(Full interview here.)
I don't know enough about Japanese culture to say that it's generally opposed to our Manichean, good-versus-evil worldview. But at a time when our leaders clearly have this way of looking at the world, its refreshing to see a story that shows things can be more complicated than that, and that wisdom is more important than righteousness. If you have the chance, go see this extraordinary film.
| Animation |
I mean here only to give you a glimpse of our nation's high courts in action. But take the following as a penis joke if you must: case 01-1615 of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, decided September 24, 2002, genuinely pitted Schwing v. Putzmeister in a dispute over "pumping equipment that is capable of moving large volumes of heavy, viscous material."
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Thanks to Patrick for sending it in!
| Comics |
Every Labor Day we head up to Chatham, New York, where Debbie's aunt and uncle have a house. The Lane Clan gathers, and we all go to the Columbia County Fair to look at the sheep and the 4-H exhbits, watch the demolition derby and the pig races, and drive bumper cars.
Some years ago, we were driving toward the fairgrounds, across rolling hills of farmland when Debbie spotted an "Oreo Cow." It was black on both ends and white in the middle. Since I was driving, I missed seeing this unusal cow. I therefore refused to believe in its existence, despite a subsequent sighting by Debbie's Aunt Ila. Ever since, the mysterious Oreo Cow has become a running joke between us.
Well, now I have been proven wrong. I stand corrected. The cow exists. Debbie found it on the Internet. It's called a Dutch Belted cow (or Lakenvelder):
It was first imported to the U.S. by P.T. Barnum. Not that that fact should make you skeptical or anything.
| Animals | P.T. Barnum |
ishbadiddle: hmm, ebay bought paypal
ashidomenyc: nice
ishbadiddle: i wonder if paypal sold itself on ebay, and then ebay paid for paypal using paypal?
ashidomenyc: laughs
ashidomenyc: blog that
ashidomenyc: that is funny
| eBay | PayPal |
David B. sent this in:
Mike,
I was thinking some more on your blognote on democracy. When I taught social studies up in Vermont, I realized that Civics was designed to be the most tedious and disempowering curriculum possible: 435 members in the House, 100 in the Senate, 3 from DC, equals number of electoral votes, (yawn) and a bill becomes law by first going through committee hearings (snore) yada yada yada.
So I did something different.
I would talk to 7th and 8th graders and ask, "Who makes up the rules that you have to live by?" I would educe from them that their parents or guardians do, along with the school, and of course the Municipal, State and Federal governments. Some add their religion.
Then I would ask, "What are some of the rules you don't like,and would like to change?" Their eyes get big at this question. After all, they are pubescents. Hands would shoot up in the air, and talk about anything from bedtimes to voting ages to drinking ages to lots of
individual pet peeves.
Often, 8th graders would say that they want the voting age to go down to 14, but the 7th graders in the same room would say, "No, 13!" to my next questions:
"How would you go about changing these rules? What would you have to do to change the voting age? And how would people decide whether to make it 13 or 14?" And then we would get into the Constitution; what it is, why it's the foundation of our entire legal structure, how hard it is to amend, and why it's important to keep it hard to amend. From there we would talk about other rules easier to change, and methods of change, from petitions, demonstrations, lobbying, all the way to civil disobedience.
Then the bell would ring.
David
| Democracy | Education |
This November, many of us will have to decide whether politicians' past mistakes should keep them out of office in the future. But consider the quandary for Montana third-party voters: they can pick the Green guy or the blue guy. Ask all you want about his views on the regulation of health products; just don't call him a Meanie. (Thanks to Jay for the link.)
| Elections | Side Effects |
Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, is my new hero. In prose that is clear, passionate, and entertaining, he is documenting the disastrous policies and disingenuous (at best) tactics of the Bush administration. He speaks the truths that the Democratic leadership are afraid to. And, instead of Republican-lite, he articulates rational and progressive economic and foreign policies. How do we draft him for 2004?
In today's column:
When Ronald Reagan cut taxes on rich people, he didn't deny that that was what he was doing. You could agree or disagree with the supply-side economic theory he used to justify his actions, but he didn't pretend that he was increasing the progressivity of the tax system.
The strategy used to sell the Bush tax cut was simply to deny the facts - and to lash out at anyone who tried to point them out. And it's a strategy that, having worked there, is now being applied across the board.
| George W. Bush | Paul Krugman |
| Intellectual Property |
Sadly, Arts & Letters Daily has gone Chapter 11. It's still worth looking through their archives, but we'll miss their daily dose of culture. Another good site gone.
Over at Greg's Asian American Film site there's a monthly haiku contest. Last month's contest subject: Speed Racer. Not to be outdone by Trip's masterful CSS haiku, I tried my own hand at the form. Despite my traditional invocation of nature in the first (and better) poem, alas I was not successful in winning a DVD of Kung Fu Cult Master. Judge for yourself, o reader:
The dry autumn leaf
Spinning in the empty air:
The Mach 5 has passed.
Wanting to tell you
The mystery of your life:
"He's your brother, Speed."
Next time, I'll go for funny.
| Poetry |
Why AOL sucks. Cited in Trip's post on the evils of Netscape / AOL and their bad grammar.
| Language |
I've been thinking about this latest terrorist in the DC area. We don't call him that of course, even though he is committing murder in order to terrify others, since that might mean that terrorism is more complex than just the post 9/11 manichean dichotomy. I'm not trying to imply any sort of moral equivalence with Bin Laden here, but simply to point out a similarity in type.
So, my guess is that this guy is white otherwise we would have heard about his race by now. In these neighborhoods, a brown man would definitely have been noticed, as would a black man. It's possible that he's East Asian, but I think it's more likely that he's white, which is why he's "invisible". So where are all the advocates of racial profiling now ? What about all the people who protested at being stopped for crimes that they claim they couldn't possibly be suspected of. I figure the black men of DC deserve to drive freely without being stopped -- c'mon, why not just stop the white guys driving the white vans ? He can change his van much more easily than his race.
Also, now that there has been an attack in Indonesia, are we going to start seeing profiling of east asians as well ? Somehow I think not, and it's not because people don't have enough racial suspicions about east asians (witness the recent spy scandal). No, I think we wont see profiling of yellow men and women because that would dilute our mental image of the enemy. And what the right wants now is clarity. Our image of the "dangerous" islamic world is one of swarthy arabs, while the real islamic world is far more diverse than that.
| DC Sniper | Vorks | Race & Ethnicity | Profiling |
Oh, and that “Neighbors from Hell” over in “Recently Clicked” (though it might not be there when you, gentle reader, are seeing this post) is, I believe, a certifiable meme now. How I know this is that I was first told about it when in Florida at my grandmother’s funeral (what, we were supposed to weep and wail and rend our garments for three days?); my cousins and aunt and uncle, all resident in the South (some in the New, some in the Old) were hysterical about it, as was my sister a few days later when looked at it. She even mentioned in an email that she was sitting at her work computer crying from laughing at it. Though I didn’t find it quite that funny, I hereby stamp it MEME.
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That’s all very nice, Mr. Ish, but did you know that there’s a new Wallace & Gromit short (2 mins.) out? Yes, provided you have QuickTime, you can watch the whole gadget-riffic thing. (To boot, it’s only the first of ten new shorts.)
| Aardman |
