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!
| Design | Soviet Union | Animals | Reference | Cats | Dogs |
Controversial doctor named to FDA panelAnd an article in Time on Hager: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."
Jesus and the FDAYou can email Jane Peterson, head of the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs, and let her know what you think.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.
| Abortion | Religion | Wadministration | Medicine |
Apropos of our recent post on the political power of blogs, read this piece on on Bitworking on Stigmergy, Anthills, and the Web.
| Distributed Culture |
The Peanuts Arcana Tarot Deck.
| Tarot | Occult |
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.
| Dogs | Holidays | Thanksgiving | Food | Turducken | Zoo | Israel |
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).
| George W. Bush | Wadministration |
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.
| Lists | LISTen Up! |
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.)
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(I like their "evildoer" T-shirt.)
| Saddam Hussein | Iraq | War | Energy |
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.
| People Magazine | Musicals | Friends |
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.
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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.
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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.
| Race & Ethnicity |
Click here. He makes LA and the TV business sound kind of benign.
| Alias |
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.
| 9/11 | Civil Liberties |
Thanks to Randi for the link!
| Civil Liberties |
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.
| Fur Nipple Warmers |
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."
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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.
| Politics | History |
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.
| Public Art | Monuments | 9/11 | Ground Zero | WTC |
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.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".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.
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.
| Distributed Culture | Blogdex | Journalism |
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.
| Zal Yanovksy |
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.
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Where the parking meters tower over the pines...
... and you use a shopping cart to take your Christmas tree home.
Merry Happy!
| Trees | Park Slope |
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.
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Updated the now-discredited-by-Jim political chart to include Andrea and Alex, and to put Trip's Tuftification suggestions into effect.
| Tufte Alert | Quiz | Politics | Maps |
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.
| Web Tools | Writing | ImprovEdge |
Hey, that lengthy Buffy / Lovecraft post got linked over at Whedonesque. Thanks for the shout out!
| H.P. Lovecraft |
Santa Land Diaries, Philly Style over at the always delightful go fish.
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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.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...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."