December 2002 Archives

Here are a couple of reference sites that you simply cannot live without: Logos of Russian/Soviet tube factories, found on The Noodle Incident, and Famous Cats, Dogs, and "Critters", which Trip found the other day. Vive la web!

Controversial doctor named to FDA panel

WASHINGTON - A physician who has been criticized for his views on birth control was named to a Food and Drug Administration panel on women's health policy. Dr. W. David Hager, a University of Kentucky obstetrician-gynecologist, was among 11 physicians appointed Tuesday to the FDA's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs.

Hager has sought to reverse the panel's 1996 recommendation that led to approval of the abortion pill, RU-486, has condemned the birth-control pill and acknowledges he is anti-abortion. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America on Tuesday called the appointment of Hager and other doctors on the panel a "a frontal assault on reproductive rights that will imperil women's health."

And an article in Time on Hager:

Jesus and the FDA

A quiet battle is raging over the Bush Administration's plan to appoint a scantily credentialed doctor, whose writings include a book titled As Jesus Cared for Women: Restoring Women Then and Now, to head an influential Food and Drug Administration (FDA) panel on women's health policy. Sources tell Time that the agency's choice for the advisory panel is Dr. W. David Hager, an obstetrician-gynecologist who also wrote, with his wife Linda, Stress and the Woman's Body, which puts "an emphasis on the restorative power of Jesus Christ in one's life" and recommends specific Scripture readings and prayers for such ailments as headaches and premenstrual syndrome. Though his resume describes Hager as a University of Kentucky professor, a university official says Hager's appointment is part time and voluntary and involves working with interns at Lexington's Central Baptist Hospital, not the university itself. In his private practice, two sources familiar with it say, Hager refuses to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women. Hager did not return several calls for comment.

You can email Jane Peterson, head of the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs, and let her know what you think.

Apropos of our recent post on the political power of blogs, read this piece on on Bitworking on Stigmergy, Anthills, and the Web.

The Peanuts Arcana Tarot Deck.

Well, don't know how you all fared with the Christmas snowstorm, but out in New Jersey, we spent the day with my in-laws, sharing a Christmas turkey. I noticed our cat, Aziza, was laying low. No doubt she had read this article, about what happens to bad cats who mess with the family feast. In a way, I had a certain sympathy for the hard justice inherent in the tale. Less comprehensible is the notion of combining a zoo and a restaurant under the same roof. I guess when I think of "preserving animals," I don't mean in pectin jelly or small jars. On the other hand, I continue to threaten to serve Turducken for Thanksgiving next year, so I'm not sure my stance on the eat-as-you-watch zoo qualifies me as an Animal Friend.

Oddly enough, we rally around our little friends when the going is toughest. For example, in Israel dogs and cats are being issued gas masks. Inventor Rafi Kishon says he was inspired by his literal take on Saddam Hussein's 1991 pledge to "eliminate Jewish dogs from the world." Frankly, I wasn't aware of the fact that there ARE any Jewish dogs. I've seen dogs eat things that I wouldn't classify as food, so I can't imagine the concept of "Kosher" means much to your average beagle.

Well, it's Christmas Eve (or so), which means it's time to check the headlines for any "Keep This Under Your Hat, Boys" announcements from the Bushes at 1600. Ten years ago, you may recall, Bush the Elder pardoned Caspar Weinberger and 5 others (including new Bush II employee Elliott Abrams) on December 24th -- the darkest hole of news coverage of the entire year -- thus sparing himself and several Republican heavyweights the embarrassment of testifying about their role in the Iran-Contra affair and effectively ending the investigation by Special prosecutor (and Republican) Larry Walsh. The Clinton quote in that first article is pretty ripe; the Clinton-haters will pounce on it, but we can always go a couple rounds on the relative moralities of circumventing Congress versus circumventing Hillary.

For the record, Walsh was considering indicting Bush for withholding his notes from the relevant time period; the Wee Bush has since made it harder to get to his dad's records, via executive order. Check out Bob Dole's unbelievable hatchet job on Walsh at the end of that story and his subsequent high dudgeon at Walsh's outrageous 5.6 million dollar investigation. Kids' stuff, of course, as we would later learn.

Anyway, I'm excited about tomorrow morning, naturally, so I'm up listening for reindeer paws on the roof (paws or hoofs... or hooves? the traditional songs are all over the map on this issue). Thinking back to '92, I decided to check the headlines. And sure enough, there's some exciting news from Team Bush. Not as scandalous or underhanded as dad's little lump of coal (the stakes were pretty high back then and this is just timing spin).

We'll be AFK until next Monday, spending the holidays with Benlet and the relations. Ish wishes you the very best over the holidays. We'll be back soon!

Ishbadiddle's guide to occasional music.

LISTen up! is back! In which, one of our guests selects a music-listening occasion, gives his or her top music list (singles, albums, box sets, EPs, whatever) and suggests a new category.

This week's guest: Mary Everett (my stepmom, in her first Ishbadiddle post!)
Mary writes: On the occasion of Beethoven's birthday (and my father's), I am sending you my music list. More like categories than a true top ten. Some are favorites; some just knock me out. You could choose subcategories of songs for car rides: Ben would enjoy listening and humming to them now, and singing along later.

Moon and Stars

Come Rain or Come Shine | Joe Sample | Invitation
Swingin' on a Star | Stefan Scaggiari Trio | That's Ska-Jar-E
Same Moon | Phil Collins | Dance Into the Light
Luz Dum Estrella | Cesaria Evora | Miss Perfumado
So Many Stars | Jackie Cain | So Many Stars
Somewhere Over the Rainbow | Chuck Brown and Eva Cassidy | The Other Side (not my favorite song, but...)
Yo Lé Lé (Fulani Groove) | Youssou N'Dour | Eyes Open
First Time Ever I Saw Your Face | Roberta Flack | Softly With These Songs

Flowers and Trees

Dos Gardenias | Ibrahim Ferrer | Buena Vista Social Club
Silencio | Ibrahim Ferrer | Buena Vista Social Club Presents Ibrahim Ferrer
Walkin' After Midnight | Madeleine Peyroux | Dreamland
Dindi | Jon Lucien | Sweet Control (as you know, Jobim is a favorite at our house. Jon Lucien's version is great!)
Pines of Rome | Respighi | Pini di Roma / Feste romane

Songs that Grab My Heart and Won't Let Go

River | Joni Mitchell | Blue
My Father | Judy Collins | Colors of the Day
Leila | Eric Clapton | Unplugged
You Take My Breath Away | Tuck and Patti | Tears of Joy

Thanks, Mary! If you'd like to be a guest LISTener, email me or leave a comment.

The wonderful folks over at Coudal have posted their 2nd Annual CP Rock & Roll Pop Quiz. It’s a very interesting set of questions, not the run-of-the-mill kind of thing at all; I really appreciated having to dig for the answers. Of ten questions, I could only conceive of the answer to two (#s 7 and 8), and one of them I’m pretty sure I would have nailed.

Pretty sure? Huh? Well, the Coudalese have determined that you don’t get to see the answers except by submitting your contenders and waiting until the tally rolls around in January. Not wanting to embarrass myself publicly (more than I already do), I didn’t turn in my exam. Maybe you can do better, smartie?

(And if you’re that kind of TV-bred Gen-X instant-gratification junkie, you can try your hand at the 2001 CP quiz. NB: The answers are inline, so you might have to do a little screen concealment to avoid seeing them right away.)

(I like their "evildoer" T-shirt.)

Or, the Name Dropping Post

If you live outside of New York, you probably imagine that life here is full of glamour, where we attend fabulous parties, and rub elbows with the stars on a regular basis, and have cabs whisk us from one red-carpet event to another. (Also, that Seinfeldian events happen daily, wacky neighbors drop by often, and that our apartment is gargantuan and only has three walls.) Well, we've been living the glamorous life lately. (Without love, it ain't much.) Thanks to a benefit for the Hospital for Special Surgery, where Deb's dad works, we went to the star-studded opening of Baz Luhrmann's "La Bohème" a couple of weeks ago. (More on the show further down.) The actual red carpet is divided in two -- celebrities to the right, hoi polloi to the left. The celebs walk the gauntlet of reporters and photographers, shouting for their attention, while the rest of us try to ID them without appearing to care. Looking over at the reporters, I noticed Anne Marie Cruz, standing behind a sign that read "People". I hadn't seen Anne for a long while, definitely not since she stopped working for ESPN Magazine and went over to People. I couldn't talk to her then -- she was working, after all, but fortunately she was able to fill me in on who was who: Natalie Portman, Taye Diggs, Connie Nielson (who has her official site hosted on geocities? C'mon, you're a movie star now, you can afford a real server.)

And Wednesday night, we went to the premiere of Chicago at the Ziegfield. (Review below.) Debbie's sister Jen was in charge of post-production for the movie and so got us tickets. (Thanks Jen!) Saw Bob Balaban, Molly Shannon, Jerry Orbach (who is so much of a New York institution it almost doesn't count as a celeb sighting), and the stars of the movie, Christine Baranski, Taye Diggs (again? are you stalking me?) Renée Zellweger. And, as I was going to get popcorn before the movie, I was this close to Catherine Zeta-Jones. (Step about four paces away from your computer. That close.) Someone was asking her, "Are you here with Michael?" and she was saying yes, while being radiant in that movie-star-at-her-own-premiere sort of way. I didn't even for a second think that she was talking about me. Not even for a second.

Of course, the most beautiful woman I saw that evening happened to be sitting next to me. I got her phone number, too. Funny thing, it's the same as mine.

Remember that joke about the guy who's taking all the musical numbers out of My Fair Lady, and turning it back into Pygmalion? (If anyone knows where this comes from, please tell me.) They'll probably say the same thing about Baz Luhrmann's La Bohème. "We'll remake Rent... and set it in Paris... and let's do it in Italian! Plus let's add more musical numbers. Heck, we'll sing the whole thing!" This Bohème gets the Brodway treament: big sets, flashy costumes, etc. According to a friend, The Opera World hates the very idea of this production ("they've cast models, not singers!"). But while the voices aren't as strong as you'll probably find at the Met, they're very good, and the non-going-to-the-Opera-public won't care. (And, if it introduces more folks to opera, can that be so bad? It's not like he threw an Elton John number in there. Or had Elton John rewrite it, fer gosh sakes.) Luhrmann has focused on making the opera more accessible, and so focuses on the acting more than the singing. Other than that, he doesn't really muck around with Puccini, other than to set the opera in 1957 rather than 1830. So they've played with the translation of the libretto for the supertitles, using more 50's beat slang, and some modern references (Mimi is spotted riding in a Rolls instead of a carriage, etc.) (Note to production staff: if you're going to use different fonts throughout the production, can't you assign one font to each character? Sorry, font geek here.)

The last Bohème we saw was a City Opera production at Summer Stage a few years back. It was one of the worst days of one of the worst heat waves. We watched Rodolfo and Marcello pretend to freeze in their garret while it was 100º+. We didn't make it through the first act. So it was nice to see the opera when it was actually cold out.

I was in Bohème as a "Street Urchin", back when I was an alto in the Philadelphia Boys Choir, and got to hand a bundle of wood to Luciano Pavarotti (I just can't stop the name dropping, can I?) on stage. This is probably why Act 2 is my favorite Act, since it's the one the street urchins are in. Musetta's aria always knocks me out. The kids in this production? Not too bad. That kid's got some learning to do about how to hand over a bundle of wood, though.

Wow. Wow wow. Wow wow wow. The best movie musical in decades. (Even better than Moulin Rouge, which looked great but cheated by having no original music.) Chicago is a great musical -- we saw the City Center revival with Bebe Neuwirth and Ann Reinking, which became the current Broadway production. Debbie is a big fan of this musical, so if she loved this movie -- and she did -- you know it must be good. The audience was going wild with applause after every number. The musical is done as a cabaret, and so they've made all the songs take place in Roxie's mind (except "All that Jazz" and "Nowadays", which actually take place on stage). I was afraid this was going to be hokey (like, we've seen this before in Pennies from Heaven and Dancer in the Dark) but the editing is so smooth that it works. (Reportedly they had to cut "Class", because it didn't fit in the songs-in-Roxie's-mind trope, which is a shame because it's a great number.)

And the cast? Zeta-Jones is phenomenal. She sings, she dances, she is Velma. The flash of her eyes as she motions the spotlight over to her at the beginning of "All that Jazz" -- just great. Zellweger as Roxie is really good, better than we both expected, and she really carries the movie. Richard Gere's numbers lack some of the punch that the others deliver (but come on, what can top "He Had It Coming"?) but he does a great tap dance number, and "Razzle Dazzle" is terrif. Queen Latifah as the prison matron "Mama," John C. Reilly as Amos the duped husband ("Mr. Cellophane") are also standouts. The whole ensemble is great. All the cast did their own singing and dancing. The choreography tips its bowler hat to Fosse, but director/choreographer Rob Marshall does his own thing.

One recent comment on IMDB says that "If Chicago doesn't prove to be a box-office hit, the Hollywood musical can be considered dead once and for all, because examples of the genre don't get much better than this." I'd have to agree. While this film will certainly get critical acclaim (already many Golden Globe nominations), I wonder if it will be a success at the box office. Chicago is a musical -- but it's everything that the stereotypical "musical" is not. It's sexy. It's cynical. It's about killer dames in prison. What's not to like? Go get some of that razzle dazzle, and all that jazz.

Ballenger, a North Carolina Republican, said former Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., so provoked him that "I must I admit I had segregationist feelings." "If I had to listen to her, I probably would have developed a little bit of a segregationist feeling," Ballenger told The Charlotte Observer in Friday's editions. "But I think everybody can look at my life and what I've done and say that's not true.

"I mean, she was such a bitch," he said.

[Quote taken from here, linked to from Josh Marshall's Talkingpointsmemo.com]

All Ishers are forthwith invited to 166 Garfield's Ninth Annual New Year's Day Brunch. It's always the biggest, mellowest party of the year, and the foodstuffs are worthy of a J.K. Rowling feast scene. 2 p.m., January 1st. Drop me a line for directions, if you're interested. Please sort yourself into Muffindor, Coffeepuff, Bearclaw or Slitherin. Pickup Quidditch game leaves from the roof at 3.

Click here. He makes LA and the TV business sound kind of benign.

Read the article, then call your senators and congresspeople.

Hundreds of Iranian and other Middle East citizens were in southern California jails on Wednesday after coming forward to comply with a new rule to register with immigration authorities only to wind up handcuffed and behind bars.

Incidentally, the rules to which they refer are the pass laws for people from 20 or so countries. Understand that these people were not accused of any crime (other than national origin), nor does anyone really know how many people were detained. Talk about a bait and switch. This is really, really horrible.
P.S. Read Atrios to find out that at least 14 of the detainees were Iranian Jews fleeing persecution, counter to the Yahoo! headline. I'd link to the LA Times article directly, but I hate their registration dealie. Anyway, he has more here. I'm starting to hope that the Millenialists are right and we're living in end times. That way we won't have to endure this nightmarish crap any longer.

Thanks to Randi for the link!

Courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle. In an article called Gifts for Sexy Anarchists, I came across this site selling prayer panties and this site selling, er, possum fur nipple warmers. Hey, given all the grief the Times has been getting, they should take a page from the Comical.

Hillary Clinton thinks the left can borrow a page from the right. Meanwhile, Grover Norquist gives an insider's view of his big, happy conservative family:

"When I put together 115 people at our Wednesday meeting, we have the gun people and the tax people and the home-schoolers and the various communities of faith, and everyone just wants to be left alone. So we can be friends, because as long as the Christians don't steal anyone's guns, and the property owners don't throw condoms at the Christians' kids, we can all be friends. Our coalition doesn't want anything at anyone's expense.

"The left," Mr. Norquist continued, "is a collection of competing parasites: the labor unions, the trial lawyers, the big-city political machines, the people who are locked into welfare dependency .... They are not friends; they are competitors for divvying up the assets that the state organizes. They'll never be able to work together as cheerfully as we do."

Before too long, we may find the G.O.P.'s Big Trent here, in the robustly moribund Political Graveyard. An old-school "Web page" cross-referenced to beat the band.

The new proposals for reconstruction of the WTC site are up at LowerManhattan.info (as of fairly recently, one of the few sites actually using the dot-info TLD). There’s supposed to be a public comment period of some sort, but I didn’t see it immediately.

You may have missed it, but in the comments to this post on Lott there was a discussion on why this story's been getting so much airtime here. Well, now we have a reason: we helped sink Trent.

According to this article in the Washington Post, the mainstream media was "caught napping" on Lott's remarks:

Even after Lott's comments were reported, though, much of the establishment press ignored them for days. It wasn't until Lott apologized last Monday night that such newspapers as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today took note of the matter. In the meantime, Lott was pummeled by a number of online Weblogs -- particularly by conservatives who agree with him on many issues -- in a way that helped force the story into public view.

Michelangelo Signorile in this week's New York Press also credits bloggers (but of the lefty variety) for pushing The Story that Almost Wasn't:

If there truly were a cabal of liberal ideologues in the media pushing a liberal Democratic agenda they'd have jumped on this without any prodding. The Lott story took off because of online writers, as Paul Krugman noted in the Times last week, who just wouldn't let it go and who kept challenging the mainstream press. Krugman mentioned Joshua Marshall at talkingpointsmemo.com, among "a few other Internet writers." One of those other left-of-center bloggers who was as instrumental as Marshall, was Atrios, aka Eschaton, who has fast become a one-stop shop for progressives who want to know what's going on at any hour of the day or night and want it with a dose of punchy spin. Conservative online writers came a little later to this story (though, to their credit, they did become forceful on it, as did some of their print journalism counterparts, such as Robert George of the New York Post); the usual suspects among them and their promoters are trying to make as if they were at the very front of this blog wave.

But in the end, Marshall, whose invaluable contacts gave him documents and information (and a Larry King/Lott interview minutes before it even aired!), and Atrios, who made all the important connections to this story and focused on Lott's past, gave this controversy its initial momentum. As Krugman noted, if not for them and a few others, Lott's remarks might have gotten lost in the media haze, like so many other things.

Krugman said again in yesterday's NYT said that "the Internet commentator Atrios ... played a key role in bringing Mr. Lott's past to light".

So the mainstream media dropped the ball on the story, while some dedicated bloggers did the research and kept the heat on. There are a few blogs (Andrew Sullivan, for instance) who are noticed by the regular non-blog media -- I don't know the whole chronology here but I imagine that once they took up the Lott story it was suddenly an Issue. If Lott steps down he'll have a handful of bloggers to thank for ending his political career.

Well, if these other bloggers were writing on the story, then why continue to write about it here? Isn't that redundant? I'll reference another discussion thread here, this one on the power of linking. Every time we post a new link here, it gets noticed by blog indicies like Blogdex and Daypop. A critical mass of bloggers linking to a specific site will push it onto the top of the index. Lots of people read these indexes to see what's newsworthy in the blogosphere. And, potentially, they'll link to it themselves, pushing the story/meme/link further up the index. This is how we marketed NYCBloggers -- we sent an email to 100 bloggers, and the next day our server was overloaded with hits. Stories can snowball very quickly, although the snowball tends to melt soon after.

So in a small way, by linking to these stories, Ishbadiddle is helping put them on the public agenda. The links contained in this article can help push the "Bloggers Topple Lott" story to people who will never read this blog. And it goes beyond bloggers: Google News selects its lead stories based on "how often and on what sites a story appears elsewhere on the web," so people who've never even heard of blogs are influenced by what the blogosphere is linking to.

In an interview, Cameron Marlow, the creator of Blogdex, said: "I had always dreamed of building a robot that ate the web as food and walked around and said smart stuff. . . . Blogdex is a platform for studying the evolution of information as it spreads through a social network." There's a journalism school paper in here somewhere, about how this information spread through the network, and interacted with newspapers and television, and the democratization of the media. If September 11th was a coming of age for blogging, then the Lott story is the first flexing of its political muscle.

Canada's Trent Lott

Zal Yanovsky dead. Real shame -- both "Do you believe in Magic" and "Summer in the City" were ubiquitous and deeply tied to childhood memories. While I find the former irksome, I still really dig the latter.

At last, something to satisfy all of ish's constituencies. The Onion comes to the rescue with this article: Bill of Rights Pared Down to a Manageable Six.

Where the parking meters tower over the pines...

... and you use a shopping cart to take your Christmas tree home.

Merry Happy!

The 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2002 edition. A box of Altoids, flavor of your choosing, to whoever guesses the #1 person before reading. Hint: it's not Trent Lott. Link from memepool.

I haven’t seen it mentioned, and didn’t even consider the possibility until it was brought up in a news article on the matter, but if Trent Lott were to resign his Senate seat entirely, the Governor of M-i-crookitletter-crookitletter-i-crookitletter-crookitletter-i-humpback-humpback-i would appoint a replacement. Being as how the Gov. of that state (don’t make me write the name again, please) is a Democrat, it’s within reason to speculate that the appointee would be one as well, putting the Senate back to dead even. So the stakes here are perhaps a touch higher than I had realized.

Maybe I just haven’t been reading the news sources I should. All I know is what I read in Ishbadiddle.

Updated the now-discredited-by-Jim political chart to include Andrea and Alex, and to put Trip's Tuftification suggestions into effect.

It's Daily Themes all over again over at one word, where you get 60 seconds to write about, well, one word. Interesting to read what people write when they're forced to improvise.

Speaking of improvisation, we've got a brand-spanking new design over at ImprovEdge, the improvisation-for-business-training company. Greg had done our old design (wow, checkout that handsome auteur pic of him up there) but it was time for a facelift, and Liz did a great job. Yay!

Speaking of websites, you can now get to this page via www.ishbadiddle.net. Hey, our very own domain! Ain't that cool? Thanks to Sun Alberto for the domain. (The triptronix address will still work, as that's where the blog really lives, so no need to update your linkage or anything.) Now we can have that IPO we keep talking about.

What We're Doing When We Blog is an excellent reflection on the medium by megnut

Hey, that lengthy Buffy / Lovecraft post got linked over at Whedonesque. Thanks for the shout out!

Santa Land Diaries, Philly Style over at the always delightful go fish.

Google’s released its second annual Zeitgeist wrap-up, listing the top search terms of the year. They’re categorized by selected countries, and by other categories such as “women”, “men”, and “sports”. I’ll give a pack of Ricola (flavor your choice) to the first person who can name the top Brand without looking.

Just in case you're not following all the action at talkingpointsmemo.com, there's a new entry that points to an interview Ashcroft did with Southern Partisan magazine. Quoth the singing AG:

Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like [Robert E.] Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson and [Jefferson] Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda.

Speaking of racist--er, traditionalist--Republican Senators, there's also an interesting interview on Salon with Richard Barrett of Mississippi's National (as in Socialist?) Movement. Barrett is a supporter of Lott's who exemplifies the dilemma in which the former cheerleader finds himself. (Quick aside: Lott's job was to wave the giant Confederate flag at Ole Miss football games.) The fact is, Lott's base includes hard-core racists like Barrett, and the more Lott does to appear mainstream, the more his core supporters are going to desert. Something tells me he's not likely to pick up enough African-American or non-raicst white votes to offset the loss. From the article:

Barrett has harsh words for President Bush's Thursday rebuke of Lott. "Sen. Lott was right" in his original comments, Barrett says. "Integration is immoral and should also be illegal." Barrett thinks that whatever he's saying now, Lott still believes that in his "heart of hearts." What about Bush? "His heart of hearts has been addled by his drug-abused brain," Barrett says.

Mississippi is still the Deep South, Barrett says, and Lott should have stood up for it, should have stood up for the segregationist spirit that still lives in Dixie. But that's OK, the state will last a lot longer than Lott. After all, "you don't judge France by those who collaborated with the Germans," he says. "You look to the Resistance, not to the appeasers.

"What's that poem?" he asks himself. "'Those who shout appease, appease, are hung by those they sought to please.' That's the tragedy of Trent Lott."

In case you think Ashcroft and Lott are exceptional, you might want to take a gander at this article. And isn't it interesting that Gore's out? Seems like the Dems have an attack dog to get their licks in without seeming negative themselves. At last, a lesson learned from the right...

I Wish You Wish. Happy Birthday, everyone!

Unfortunately, we all have to admit that, as Americans, this is a part of our past and our present. I'm not exactly sure what to do about it, except to stand up for what you believe in. From the Council of Conservative Citizens Web site, in an article talking about their disappointment with Trent Lott and the Republicans who are denouncing his comments:

Flippant feminist columnist Kathleen Parker went into hysterics, asking just what kind of 'problems' Lott meant. Using silly references to Hitler, she wrote, 'Wonder which problems Herr Lott had in mind? That darned black vote? Those integrated public schools? Hip-hop? White flight? Black crime? The blind date that darkens the door of the white family room?' Not bright enough to realize it, she was giving all the correct answers. To think that white parents are not concerned about the racial makeup of their families and passing down inherited traits from generations back is to exhibit a profound ignorance of the importance of race in this country and in the world.

Blacks, who are very clever, have discovered a formula which has neutralized every public official in this country. It involves intimidation, threats, retribution, incessant demands, extorting money from corporations, attempting to bankrupt companies in court, and in general making themselves as obnoxious as possible so that no one will say or do anything which might displease a black man or woman.

Politicians, who make the laws, have submitted to the black agenda, and we see an increasingly socialistic government as a result. In other words, give up your liberties quietly or be prepared to suffer ignominy. There is no fight left in the white public sector. That is why we saw immediate disavowals and apologies from Trent Lott.

You can go to the site if you want [http://www.cofcc.org/Views.htm], but I'm not going to link to it.

Kissinger's out. Is Whitman next?

In the past, when I've made this suggestion, some of my friends point out that the President has access to intelligence that I don't. True enough. But when the top US general in charge of defending the nation implies that the Justice Department is over-stating the threat, and that the loss of civil liberties is real (and perhaps disproportionate in the face of the threat) it's time to sit up and take notice.

If this strikes any of you as implausble, remember that the Soviets were a far larger threat, but whenever we abridged civil-liberties, this did nothing to help us in the cold war.

"All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches." Strom Thurmond, 1948.

"I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years." Trent Lott, 2002

There's been lots of indignation here on Ish lately, and I say, let's celebrate it! Assisting me on audio will be this clever ITP project, a sound toy for nattering nabobs like me. You can even add to the onslaught yourself.

Yes, I do care about things other than Trent Lott (sorry, "things"--I know you probably resent the comparison). There was a really interesting article by Jeremy Rifkin in the Nation about how hydrogen fuel cells can actually usher in an era of distributed power production. Fuel cells can go far beyond Bush administration proposals.

In a hydrogen economy the centralized, top-down flow of energy, controlled by global oil companies and utilities, would become obsolete. Instead, millions of end users would connect their fuel cells into local, regional and national hydrogen energy webs (HEWs), using the same design principles and smart technologies that made the World Wide Web possible.

From this article, on Salon.

On Tuesday, on the racist Web site Nationalist.org, past Lott supporter Richard Barrett expressed offense that Lott would retract his remarks and try to portray Thurmond's candidacy as anything other than what it was.

"The reason that you have been elected is because you have been a segregationist, pitted against integrationists in your various elections," Barrett wrote. "Now is not the time to sound a wavering trumpet." Lott owed an apology "to the memory of William L. Colmer, once Dean of the Congress, who placed you in public life, and who was as staunch a segregationist as ever could be," Barrett went on. "I still have the photo of you, me and Congressman Colmer, when we all were together in Pascagoula, here on my wall and would like to say that I have been proud of it."

Barrett schooled Lott, saying, "You owe your loyalty to Mississippi, not the NAACP, to Bill Lord of Carrollton, a segregationist and one of your most-ardent supporters, not Jesse Jackson of Chicago, an integrationist and one of your more-vocal critics." After all, Barrett was the one "shaking your hand at your victory celebration, not Al Gore.

"Your original statement of solidarity with Senator Thurmond and Mississippi was from the heart and honest," Barrett wrote. "Isn't 'honesty the best policy'?"

Talking Points Memo is the single best collection of references to Trent Lott's behavior and Statements over the years:

In fact, it was this website that broke the story about Trent Lott's
amicus brief on behalf of Bob Jones University where Lott compared the
University's ban on inter-racial dating to affirmative action.

To recap:

* Lott has said (at least 2 times) that America would be better of today
if the Dixiecrats had won the 1948 election.

* Lott refused to co-sponsor legislation honoring the 3 slain civil rights
activists in Mississippi.

* Lott had ties to the CCC (the successor organizations to the Citizens
Councils in the South), which he then lied about afterwards. (The CCC
was kicked out of a conservative umbrella group for being racists).

* Lott has repeatedly engaged in the promotion and rehabilitation of
Jefferson Davis (Click here for more info).
Lott's comments on this subject are alarming as well.

* Lott has generally and repeatedly associated himself with the
neo-confederate movement.

Each time Lott has behaved in a questionable matter on race, most
commentators have dismissed protest as being partisan or knee-jerk. But
until this last scandal, I hadn't realized how consistent Lott has been in
raising eyebrows. The question is, what happens next ?

As I'm sloughing away trying to put together a transit strike contingency plan, it's heartening to know that if the MTA does go on strike they'll be in good company, as the nation's only unionized peep show workers are currently on strike:

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Workers at the nation's only unionized peep show walked the picket line, arguing that a contract offer by management at the Lusty Lady is too skimpy. Wearing pink T-shirts that read "Bad girls like good contracts," dancers banged on pots Monday and chanted, "Two, four, six, eight, pay me more to gyrate!"

Thanks to Sandra for the story!

Speaking of media bias, and of Lott's gosh-weren't-the-old-segregation-days-great comments, Signorile outs The Washington Times for its editors' views on race. Here's what it's assistant national editor had to say:

[T]he media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion. The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us.

There's more in there about the WT's editors' longing for the days of the Old South. Last week Signorile took another swipe at the Washington Times, wondering how Andrew Sullivan can work for the Rev. Moon's paper, given that the Rev. says stuff like "If you misuse your love organ, you destroy your life, your nation, your world."

It seems to me that lost in the whole is-the-media-liberal-or-conservative debate, the bias hunters are missing the point. So what? When I pick up the New York Times, or watch Fox News, I pretty much know what I'm getting, bias-wise. The fact that each purports to be objective ("all the news that's fit to print," "we report, you decide," etc.) is about as relevant as the fact that Diet Coke claims that if I drink it I will become sleek and sexy. (Well, sleeker and sexier.) It's a shame that that the NYT watchdog Smarter Times shut down (they went and launched the New York Sun) but a zillion bloggers have sprung up in its stead. I think there's only one truly objective news source out there, and that's Google News, since no human editors are involved. Our efforts would be better spent educating ourselves and the kids on how to read the media critically, rather than searching for objectivity when we're not going to find it.

More on Lott courtesy of talkingpointsmemo.com. Turns out he was against honoring the slain civil rights workers about whom the movie Mississippi Burning was made. Turns out he also filed an amicus brief in support of Bob Jones University's fight to--you guessed it--maintain its ban on interracial dating. Read the article TPM refers to here for some truly nasty comments by Lott's uncle. Here's a taste:

Blacks are a "different kind of people and don't see things the same way, so they can have their own organizations and whites can have theirs," [Lott's Uncle Arnie] Watson says. "They should have been left in their native country." He means Africa.

"This mixing races, the Lord didn't intend for it to be that way."

Messy car helps man survive snow
By Associated Press
Dec. 11, 2002 | Huntington, W.Va. --

For once, Calista Endicott was thankful her brother Robert Ward kept a messy car. Assorted food packets, a peanut butter jar and other items are being credited for Ward's surviving six and a half days trapped in subfreezing weather after he crashed his car last week. A broken hip suffered in the accident prevented him from climbing out of the vehicle.

'Thank God I have a messy brother,' Endicott said Wednesday on ABC's 'Good Morning America.' The 32-year-old from Kermit, east of the Kentucky line, was found Sunday by rescuers who heard his cries for help. 'I ... had some hallucinations. I thought I had been rescued earlier,' he said.

Ward said he wasn't 'worried too much about food at first. I had some Border sauce that you get from Taco Bell. I like that stuff anyway.'

His car landed at the bottom of a 150-foot ravine after he lost control of it Dec. 2 while heading to work as a coal mine security guard. 'It really is a miracle that he survived,' said Dr. William Beam. 'He was starting to go into organ failure.'

Ward also suffered frostbite and a cut. He was in serious condition Wednesday in the intensive care unit of a Huntington hospital.
----

Amish Starbright. Click here for the engine that generated it. With a Bond Girl name like that, it's a good thing I'm a straight man.

I'm including this link as a public service. I know the paper of record took five days to pick up the original story, so you might be interested to know that Lott said the SAME THING about Strom in 1980--that is

You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today.

Now even Daschle is saying something about it. The article has some tidbits about the CCC and includes this new-to-me gem from 1984.

Lott, speaking to the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Biloxi, Miss., said: "The spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican platform."

For more on Lott's history, check out this article on Salon.com.

... but Matt F-B wrote an article about legal blogs as part of a larger blog feature. Go Matt!

Play the Ikea Game and find out!

Those folks at Google Labs just keep coming up with new great stuff!

In today's Voice, Nat Hentoff on the Total Information Awareness surveillance program. Has anyone run the numbers on the sheer quantity of information TIA is planning on gathering? How many terabytes are we talking about here? Or are they just planning on Googling everyone? Maybe they'll set up a distributed computing project for it. My Google toolbar is currently modelling the geometric structure of proteins. Who knows, maybe in a few months it will be crunching the numbers on the Web sites you've surfed, divorce papers you've filed, library books you've checked out, medical records, etc.

Speaking of medical records: In addition to censoring its own columnists, the New York Times is now accused of violating the medical privacy of its own employees:

A former associate medical director of the Times Company says the company fired her because she refused to lie to employees and to hand over their medical records to Times brass without the employees' consent. According to her lawyers, the Times first hired Dr. Sheila Horn in 1995, then named her associate medical director in 1996. Her duties included giving medical treatment and verifying workers' compensation claims. Horn's lawyers have argued in court that the Times' labor relations, human resources, and legal departments frequently demanded that she disclose medical information about employees she had treated, without obtaining their consent. A court decision also states Horn's claim that the Times' VP of human resources told her to "misinform" Times employees about the nature of their injuries, so as to reduce the number of workers' comp claims.

No word on this story in the Times' pages as of yet.

TIA, again: Admiral Poindexter removed his bio from the Information Awareness Office website but you can see the cached bio here. In the SF Weekly, Matt Smith calls on us to do unto Poindexter what he would do unto the nation by turning up as much personal information on him as we can. Call it Total Poindexter Awareness. He even provides their home address and phone number so you can start your very own background check.

Ah, it's winter, when the lampposts are decorated with nondenominational snowflakes -- and of course, doll heads:

At every intersection on 7th Avenue from Garfield down to 9th Street, they're hanging from the lampposts, next to the more traditional shoes:

Nothing quite says Happy Holidays like creepy doll heads swinging in the breeze!

Pictures taken with my handy Aiptek PenCam, the digital Instamatic.

I posted about the Political Compass some time ago -- an interesting quiz that charts your political beliefs. As Trip put it in his initial post on the survey,

underpinning the Compass's questions is the proposition that the standard terms of Right and Left just don't quite cut the mustard. Not that this is news; most of us use those as convenient buttonholes into which we place our politicians, friends, and family members in order to avoid having to give any real consideration to the nuances of their views.

A few stalwart Ishbadiddlers had posted their results, and I'd been meaning to chart them at some point. Well, here's that point. Leave your results in the comments and I'll update the graphic with your very own political dot.

Updated with new data, and now slightly Tufte-friendlier.

"I don't use the voice of Bart when I'm making love to my husband, but Marge's voice turns him on a little."
- Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson.

Hey, he's not the Minority Leader anymore. But it turns out that Lott's racist past goes deep, making it harder to believe Robert Novak's sad but predictable claim that Lott was only kidding. Lott's links to the racist CCC (is that a simple C=K code?) is documented by the ADL here. It's kind of stomach-churning but quite important.

Meanwhile, Atrios reminds us of this part of the Dixiecrat platform:

The negro is a native of tropical climate where fruits and nuts are plentiful and where clothing is not required for protection against the weather ... The essentials of society in the jungle are few and do not include the production, transportation and marketing of goods. [Thus] his racial constitution has been fashioned to exclude any idea of voluntary cooperation on his part.

Given the fact that reality is so dire, I had a hard time figuring out if this article about Ann Coulter was fake or not.

And, lastly, speaking of satires, alternet has this article about the makers of www.blackpeopleloveus.com. Turns out it's the guy who did that Nike sweatshop thing...

Back to studying for the GMAT. It's depressing, but I don't want to go to law school because I don't believe in the judicial system anymore. I know that the way to prove my patriotism is to buy consumer crap, but I always thought that the most American thing you could do was read the Constitution--especially the Bill of Rights--and demand nothing less from your government. That's what Paine, Washington, Franklin, et. al laid it on the line for, not CostCo. But now I think the only way to get one's POV represented and to effect change is to generate the resources to pay for it. Hence, biz school.

Just in case you missed it, Trent Lott is proud of the way Mississippi voted for pro-segregationist Strom Thurmond during his presidential bid. Lott said, "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

Of course, this is what spineless Tom Daschle had to say. "There are a lot of times when he and I go to the mike and would like to say things we meant to say differently, and I'm sure this is one of those cases for him as well," Daschle said.

Maybe that's what happened to Thurmond during his campaign, when he said "All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches."

Given how much crap Daschle has taken from Rush Limbaugh, I'm surprised he rolled over. It's only a matter of time before Hank Buchanan, Pat's brother, goes after him...

Ish got a nice write-up in The Weblog Review (for which I have written a few reviews myself). Obz says we're "like the 60 Minutes of blogging." Does that make me Mike Wallace? Or (ugh) Andy Rooney?

Hard to tell from the article exactly how the legalities of this played out, but a Portland, Oregon man was convicted of "threatening to harm the President" in South Dakota. Apparently he mouthed off in a bar, and that was enough to set in motion a chain reaction that could land him in jail for more than three years. He's appealing. I'd think you'd have to actually be threatening the President to be convicted of this, wouldn't you? (And also, I thought your bartender was supposed to keep your secrets. I guess he gets his TIPS* somewhere else now.)

*Bonus points: Does this page look familiar to anyone?

Exit Paul O'Neill, the man who brought us such penetrating insights as, "If you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear is really very good."

Walking through Brooklyn in the morning, snow falling and quieting the city, and listening to Astrud Gilberto sing "The Girl From Ipanema". Did I mention that Grado SR60 headphones make excellent earmuffs?

Link found on How to be a bricklayer.

If you haven't been reading Chris' blog, you should. It's like reading a really good issue of Nadine, but without the rampant copyright violation. Also of note: Trip writes about AIDS for World AIDS Day; Emily on affirmative action; and Colin on Solaris and Punch Drunk Love and Emily Watson. Now go read.

Feds Label Wi-Fi a Terrorist Tool

CIA's License to Kill Americans

Oh, and in case you missed it, last month the Pentagon, "despite a shortage of qualified Arabic linguists in the intelligence and defense fields... fired a significant number of trained language specialists from the military's Defense Language Institute (DLI) because they are gay." Prompting this response from Get Your War On:

Yeah, like right now, given the choice between having a gay person in the DoD, or having more Arabic interpreters, which should we choose? Well, being gay is still illegal in 13 states. I'm sure this Supreme Court will overturn those sodomy laws. Don't you?

And, on the perversions in the military front, The Washington Post outed a UN military inspector for his involvement in various BDSM organizations, prompting his resignation (which was rejected). This blog has more links on the guy (no pun intended). While the former case prompted liberal outrage, the latter prompted mostly sniggering. If he'd been outed as gay in a national newspaper and then offered to resign, I'm sure reactions would have been different. Anyway, as it turns out it's not his sex life that's the problem -- it's the fact that he had to resign from the Secret Service after one of his land mines ended up in an assassin's hands. Um, didn't we have months to do background checks while sabres were being rattled?

Spammer can't take what he dishes out. Via boingboing.

I am not the person to write this. I am neither a Buffy scholar or a student of the occult. I've just noticed a couple of interesting correspondences between the Buffy mythos and the lost book known as The Necronomicon.

According to H.P. Lovecraft, The Necronomicon was

composed by Abdul Al-Hazred, a mad poet of Sanaa, in Yemen, who is said to have flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa 700 A.D. He visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent ten years alone in the great southern desert of Arabia - the Roba al Khaliyeh, or "Empty Space" of the ancients and "Dahma" or "Crimson" desert of the modern Arabs, which is held to be inhabited by protective evil spirits and monsters of death. Of this desert many strange and unbelievable marvels are told by those who pretend to have penetrated it. In his last years, Al-Hazred dwelt in Damascus, where the Necronomicon (Al Azif) was written, and of his final death or disappearance (738 A.D.) many terrible and conflicting things are told.

So how did Lovecraft know about this book? According to Colin Low, the book influenced the Norse eschatological myths. It has connections with Kabbalist creation texts. The medieval English magician John Dee translated it. in the 1920s Aleister Crowley found it among Dee's papers at Oxford and tried to pass much of it off as his own. While in America Crowley became involved with Sonia Greene of Brooklyn, who later married H.P. Lovecraft. The Necronomicon thus became a central part of the Lovecraft mythology, the core curriculum of Miskatonic University.

Well, not really. Lovecraft made the whole thing up. Lovecraft said it was a "synthetic concotion of my own." This has not prevented plenty of people from publishing fakes, and a lot of people apparently really really want to believe that the Necronomicon exists. Because, you know, it could be real. (Low has a pretty interesting postmodern take on the book's "existence".) Real or not (a flamewar I'm not going to wade into), the Necronomicon has taken its place in popular culture. (Astute readers will recognize the Necronomicon as the source of all the trouble in the Evil Dead movies.)

Interesting, but what does all this have to do with Buffy the Vampire Slayer? (A question I ask myself several times a day.) First, there's a connection to the Buffy creation myth. We've started watching the first season on DVD and in the second episode Major Exposition Giles explains:

"This world is older than any of you know, and contrary to popular mythology, it did not begin as a paradise. For untold eons, demons walked the Earth, made it their home, their Hell. In time, they lost their purchase on this reality, and the way was made for mortal animals. For Man. What remains of the Old Ones are vestiges: certain magicks, certain creatures..."

"The books tell that the last demon to leave this reality fed off a human, mixed their blood. He was a human form possessed--infected--by the demon's soul. He bit another and another...and so they walked the Earth, feeding. Killing some, mixing their blood with others to make more of their kind. Waiting for the animals to die out and the Old Ones to return."

This is basically Lovecraft crossed with Bram Stoker (or maybe Anne Rice). Low again:

According to Alhazred, the Old Ones were beings from "beyond the spheres", presumably the spheres of the planets, and in the cosmography of that period this would imply the region of the fixed stars or beyond. They were superhuman and extrahuman. They mated with humans and begat monstrous offspring. They passed forbidden knowledge to humankind. They were forever seeking a channel into our plane of existence.

The Old Ones are identified with the Nephilim of the Jewish apocrypha, fallen angels who lusted after human women and gave birth to a race of giants:

This is virtually identical to the Jewish tradition of the Nephilim (the giants of Genesis 6.2 - 6.5). The word literally means "the Fallen Ones" and is derived from the Hebrew verb root naphal, to fall. The story in Genesis is only a fragment of a larger tradition, another piece of which can be found in the apocryphal Book of Enoch. According to this source, a group of angels sent to watch over the Earth saw the daughters of men and lusted after them. Unwilling to act individually, they swore an oath and bound themselves together, and two hundred of these "Watchers" descended to earth and took themselves wives. Their wives bore giant offspring. The giants turned against nature and began to "sin against birds and beasts and reptiles and fish, and to devour one another's flesh, and drink the blood".

Not exactly the same as vamps, but you still have supernatural beings using humans to spawn monsters. Plus the whole blood drinking thing. (The naming of the Old Ones as "Watchers", compared with the "Council of Watchers" on BtVS -- well that's just weird.)

What's more interesting is the connection from the Necronomicon to this season's From-Beneath-It-Devours, First-Evil, Mighty-Morphing-Big-Bad. Buffy et al. have been tormented by a demon who appears in the guise of people they know and tries to tempt them into doing Very Bad Things. Debbie figured that the MMBB was the same as the Serpent in the Garden -- he doesn't actually do anything bad, he just tempts others to do so. As such this First Evil isn't corporeal and may be resistant to your average high-heeled-boot-kicking, stake-through-the-heart-type slayage.

And guess what? The MMBB shows up in the Necronomicon. Or rather, through it.

In 1909, Alisteir Crowley and the poet Victor Neuberg went to the desert in Algiers (the same one where Al-Hazred purportedly spent ten years receiving/writing the Necronomicon). Whilst there, he attempted to call forth the aforementioned Old Ones, using a magical system (the "Enochian calls") put together by the aforementioned John Dee, the medieval translator of the Necronomicon. During the 10th Call, he manages to bring forth the demon Choronzon, who says:

Choronzon hath no form, because he is the maker of all form; and so rapidly he changeth from one to the other as he may best think fit to seduce those whom he hateth, the servants of the Most High. Thus taketh he the form of a beautiful woman, or of a wise and holy man, or of a serpent that writheth upon the earth ready to sting.

Low (who says he's not joking this time), in his essay on John Dee and the Necronomicon, says:

At this point Neuburg literally saw these many forms of Choronzon, even the form of a woman he loved. Sometimes Choronzon spoke with Crowley's own voice.

Sound like someone we've seen on TV recently? It gets better. Low demon-strates that Chronozon, far from being that sort-of-pink-guy who battles Morpheus in Gaiman's Sandman books, is "identical with the Serpent of Genesis, and with the rebellious angel Samael in Jewish midrashic and kabbalistic legend." Hence, the First Evil.

OK, want to get really obscure? There's a third John Dee-Necronomicon-Buffy connection, which I found tucked in a footnote to Bruce McClelland's By Whose Authority? The Magical Tradition, Violence and the Legitimation of the Vampire Slayer. (Somebody, please stop this Internet thing before it sucks all my time from me. Away, Google, away!) Buffy's first watcher of course wasn't Giles, it was Donald Sutherland Merrick Jamison-Smythe, in the movie/prequel. McClelland thinks that name is

a cryptic reference to Meric Casaubon. . . . Meric Casaubon in 1659 edited and published a transcription of a mystical work that involved automatic writing between Dr. John Dee, mathematician and alchemist to Elizabeth Regina, and Edward Kelley, an alchemist-magician whose reputation did not stand up quite so well. The manuscript purported to have been dictated by the Angels in a language called Enochian, which had its own mystical (quasi-Hebrew-quasi-alchemical) alphabet.

Which same ms. was used by Crowley in the desert in 1909 (and which I've actuallly seen at the library at Oxford). Coincidence? I think not!

I don't know where Whedon gets his material. Could it be that he's got a grimoire locked in his closet?

The intrepid papertrailers at The Smoking Gun have found a report from Britain's RAF about a UFO sighting in the Rendlesham Forest by several United States Air Force officers. A detailed description of "the object" and the lights seen two nights later make the official explanation -- a lighthouse? -- a bit sketchy. No doubt the Visitors were just looking for a pint and a game of darts.

As I was getting off the 2 train at 50th Street, someone said "Mike? From NYCBloggers?" It was Brian, the 646 Guy! I'd met him at a couple of Blogger Bash events. We didn't have time to chat, since he was getting on the train I was getting off, so I said "I'll blog this!" Which, now, I have.

This makes my second hey-aren't-you-that-blogger-guy meeting -- a couple of months ago I was walking up 7th Ave in Brooklyn wearing a NYCB T-Shirt and someone stopped me and said, "Are you a friend of Liz?" Turns out Stacey is a fellow knitter who has a store right in my nabe.

And who says the Internet is a faceless medium!

David Block writes:

Like a bad nickel, as the archaic saying goes, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" keeps finding itself back in circulation. While I'm using cliches, I'll add that if something hangs around long enough, it tends to periodically find itself back in style.

There is a 41 episode TV adaptation of "Protocols" that was produced in Egypt and that is now being shown all around the world. The book, of course, was a hoax, but that never stopped it from becoming Hitler's favorite book. Find out why it was written, and read the 1921 expose of this plagiaristic hoax, and most importantly -- why we should and need to care about it today -- here.

Penguin Dreams is one of Ben's favorite books. It's a fairly surreal rendering of Chongo the penguin's dream about flying, and zoos, and vampire bats, and space, and.... yeah. The illustrator, J. Otto Seibold, has a cool website filled with Flash goodness. Check out the "Bubblesoap" section. Kewl!

Thanks to Absolutely Vile for the link, which I found whilst approving blogs for NYCBloggers.

Colin likes the RuminateThis blog; could it be because they use the same template?

Very scary article about the use of identity theft and credit card fraud to fund terror operations. I have no fears about buying over the internet, I always knew the greater danger was from the employees who handled the credit cards in any case. I still shred any credit card receipt with my card number on it though, and all the excess sheets of my statements, to stop any enterprising dupster diver.