Anyone up for the concert? I'm thinking of going ....
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OK, I don't really understand this -- but congrats to Christina on her article on Yahoo Finance! (I guess that should be Yahoo! Finance!)
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Gooooooood Morning, Park Slope!
Air America Radio, the new Liberal Radio Network, has started airing pure knee-jerk gold to me and my tiny enclave of irrelevant wedge-issue panderers. Come on and join the party!
So far it's got all the hallmarks of talk radio that I usually hate: it's unformulated and rambly, a little disjointed, and it doesn't tell me anything I don't know. But it's MY rambly disjointed unformulation, so I love it! Unfortuntely, to support the advertisers in their first ad block, I'd have to get commercial-free radio, join the Navy, eat a Tyson chicken, and -- finally -- give Sharon Stone some money for AIDS research.
So, go ahead, poke holes, but I'm loving the fact that someone (even someone from Harvard) is on the radio talking sh!t from the point of view that maybe the Wadministration and the right-wing media are up to something dodgy. (A minute ago, I think Bebe Neuwirth was doing an Ann Coulter impression. At the moment, they seem to be talking to G. Gordon Liddy... which would be REALLY funny if it's really him. I think they're actually cross-calling on each other's show. Wow.) As Michael Kinsley said when Clinton was elected, "I'm sure it will all end in tears, but...." I'm glad it's happening.
| Air America Radio |
So George W. Bush today reverses course and lets Condoleezza Rice fulfill her wish to testify before the 9/11 intelligence investigation panel. So how is he going to say he didn't cave in to overwhelming public pressure when he obviously did? Not only will he prevaricate, others must join him. A letter from the White House counsel says that, to hear Rice, the panel must deny that an obvious precedent is a precedent.
Perhaps in Bush's church, one can lie so long as the fraudulent words come out of the pen of one's attorney. At least the fraud appears to be harmless*: the paper that Kean signs will have no authority.
*Beyond teaching our country's kids to lie.
Hey folks -- we're moving all discussion about DOTWH over to the discussion forum on www.designsonthewhitehouse.com. Email me if you want to be involved and need to log in.
| Designsonthewhitehouse | John Kerry |
| Fantasy | Evil |
It's "gruesome perdition" versus "merciful salvation" in the climax of the wildly popular Christian thriller series "Left Behind." In "Glorious Appearing," the title card bout, the Messiah is back and he is ready to rumble.
Continue reading "Sunday, Sunday, Sunday" » | Jesus Christ | Entrails | Religion | End Of The World |
An article, "Boo-Boos in Paradise," that, in my humble opinion, goes almost all the way in pegging David Brooks for what he is: a soft, sly wedge-issue panderer. It stops short of detailing how closely Brooks hews to the GOP talking points of the day, but offers a fairly robust shakedown of the "jokes" (as Brooks calls them) in his best-known piece. Worth a read.
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Welcome to our newest Ishbalinker, little fucking ray of sunshine, who links to us because we sent him 12 Little Plastic Ninjas. Welcome, Adam!
The links section on the sidebar was in sore need of updating. It now includes links to rss feeds, for those blogs that have it. (If you haven't jumped on this bandwagon yet, I recommend bloglines as a free RSS reader. You can syndicate Ish via the links under "Syndicate" in the HERE column.)
You may now resume your non-Ish-reading lives.
| Syndication |
Why you should boycott Details now.
| Race & Ethnicity | LGBT |
Open thread: Who should we approach to be judges for the contest? As I see it, there are three basic groups:
1) Political Types (James Carville)
2) Design Gurus (Milton Glaser)
3) Lefty Celebrities (Al Franken)
Fire away.
| Designsonthewhitehouse | John Kerry |
A follow-up from yesterday's proposal to launch a design contest for better Kerry t-shirts. Here's the steps we need to take. If you'd like to help out, leave a comment and tell me which step(s) (other than 6.c., of course) you're willing to co-ordinate or help out.
1. Filing.
a. FEC
b. IRS
c. Open Bank Account
2. Website.
a. Grab www.designsonthewhitehouse.com, .org, .net.
b. Find someone who will donate hosting for us?
c. Web design
e. Database coding, especially if we're going to incorporate public voting.
3. Judges
a. Wishlist -- political figures, design gurus, celebrities
b. Draft letter
c. Recruit judges
4. Shirts
a. Decide -- cafepress, or another vendor?
b. Setup webstore
5. Competition
a. Promote to designers -- listservs, blogs, etc.
b. Figure out rules, categories, etc.
c. Judges (and public?) pick winners
6. Sell shirts! Raise money!
a. Promotion -- media, blogs, etc.
b. Reporting
c. Defeat of Bush and Cheney.
| John Kerry | Designsonthewhitehouse |
Some good analysis from Maria Tartar on the history and meaning of fairy tales, and what the Grimms were actually up to. Contains my favorite chapter title of recent memory, about female villains: "From Nags to Witches."
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Unfutz cites this story from Iran claiming that the US is unloading old missiles to plant WMD evidence near Basra. File under Conspiracy Theories To Watch.
| Iraq | 2004 Election | Conspiracy Theories |
Via Follow Me Here.
| Quiz |
It's all Emily's fault, really, for pointing out the cool stuff you could buy for the Bush-Cheney campaign. Will I go with metrosexual, farm-ranch, "interstate", sports, or just plain patriotic? On the other hand, Kerry's got three designs -- plain jane campaign, Old-Navy-Type Faux Retro Vintage, and "target practice". Ugh.
But we're going to do something about that.
Here's the plan, kids. We sponsor a design contest. We get some folks to judge it. We take the top ten designs and make a store using cafepress. We sell loads of t-shirts. We take the money and donate it to the Kerry campaign. Everybody wins, except Bush and Cheney.
Are you with me?
As it turns out, there are a few steps we'll need to take to pull this off. For one, you can't just raise funds for a candidate willy-nilly. If our efforts raise over $1,000, then we have to register with the FEC as an independent political action committee, obtain an EIN and a 527 from the IRS, and open a separate bank account. (Any good ideas for a PAC name?) I talked with a guy at the FEC yesterday, and the rules are so byzantine that even he was confused about how the reporting would work for something like this. (I'm supposed to talk to him today to clarify the situation.)
Then of course we need to set up and design a website (designs4kerry.com?), put together a panel of judges, and get the word out. Simple enough, right?
Let's get this started! Who's in?
| 2004 Election | Design | Fashion | Designsonthewhitehouse |
Are any of these three the "real" Belle De Jour?
| Literary Analysis | On The Internet Nobody Knows You're A Dog |
Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials Trilogy" is the best fantasy series I've read in a long time. Better than Harry Potter, better than Gormenghast. It's a theological fantasy, as the Narnia books are -- but here, the War In Heaven is replayed, and our heroes are not on the side of the Angels. It's a world of multiple universes, of witches and balloonists and dĉmons and armored bears. While Rowling was writing her latest, it was our read-aloud series. Highly recommended.
So if you've read it, you'll be interested in this conversation between Pullman and the Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Given that the book has been controversial among some religious groups, the conversation is quite interesting, especially as they explore the relationship between religion and storytelling in various media:
RB: The questioner is asking whether perhaps the relationship between Christianity and fiction is that Christianity itself is a story, and is about incarnation.RW: Yes, I think there's a lot of truth in that, that you can't communicate Christianity simply as a set of ideas. At some point you're going to have to sit down and tell a story. And tell a story which, because it's a story, is bound to have some loose ends, some awkwardnesses. As it is we have four versions of the story of Jesus in the New Testament, because of that sense that a story can always be retold. And that introduces a bit of this irony in the narrative, which is very important in reinforcing the sense that this is something mysterious. I think there is something in that fundamental characteristic of Christianity which helps to enable a particular kind of storytelling.
PP: Story is fundamental. We began with Jesus. We might as well end by reminding ourselves that Jesus was one of the greatest storytellers there's ever been. Whether or not he was the Son of God, he was a great storyteller.
RW: [laughing] Eight out of 10!
| Religion | Fantasy | The Curious Bookshelf |
First it was Paul O'Neill, former Treasury Secretary. Now it's Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism chief of the national-security staff. This is potentially much more damaging to the Wadministration, as Clarke alleges that Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, and Bush himself downplayed the Al Qaeda threat before 9/11, focusing instead on "drug trafficking and gun violence" -- and Iraq. Billmon has done some heavy lifting on who Clarke is and why this is a problem for Bush. "Clarke is a national security ultrahawk taking aim at a hawkish president."
| George W. Bush | Richard Clarke | Al Qaeda | Terrorism | John Ashcroft | Paul Wolfowitz | Iraq |
Richard Price. Better even than Clockers. Read Emily's review. Thanks for the loaner, Emily!
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Update on the 3-headed frog story posted here recently. There's evidence that it's not a mutant, but instead three frogs gettin' it on. A menage-a-trois-de-grenouille?
| Animals | Sex | Weird Science |
| Science Fiction |
Eh. Doesn't really work as either a romance or a film about Jews in Fascist Italy. Watch The Bicycle Thief instead.
Issue 6 and Issue 7. The plot thickens. Can't wait for the conclusion!
| Neil Gaiman |
Fun for the whole family!
| Iraq | WMD | War |
Now this is lo-tech at its finest: computer programs that were included on 45s by UK bands in the 80s. To play, you'd just record the screech onto cassette tape, and then run it through your Sinclair Spectrum. Oh yeah. The blog's got some other pages about vinyl, scroll down.
| Data Storage | Lo Tech |
| What Irrational Number Are You? | |||
You are π Of all the irrational numbers, you are the most famous. You have many friends and fans. Like many people, non-Euclidean geometry makes you feel uncomfortable. You are involved in so many things that it seems like it would take two of you to make ends meet. You are particularly close to the rational number 22/7. However, you and e have been called "remarkable." Your lucky number is approximately 3.14159265 | |||
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| Quiz |
Of course you don't. But you can see it at the GUIdebook, which documents the icons of yore. Check out the icon matrix. Thanks to LmdH for the link!
| Microsoft |
* "The county that was the site of the Scopes 'Monkey Trial' over the teaching of evolution is asking lawmakers to amend state law so the county can charge homosexuals with crimes against nature."
* Gays and Lesbians in the federal workforce are no longer protected against discrimination on the job. (Thanks to Mark for the tip.)
* And while only breeders are allowed in the Boy Scouts, apparently breeder reactors are frowned upon.
| Law | Discrimination | Boy Scouts | Nuclear Proliferation | Mad Science |
Check out this map of Manhattan, showing where the political donors are. Plus you can see which campaigns your neighbors funded. The National Maps are pretty cool, too.
| 2004 Election | Campaign Finance | New York City | Web Tools |
It's like American Idol. But with politicians. And jokes.
| Democrats | Pranks | Politics |
1. Sunrise
2. Escape Ladder
3. People at Night, Guided by the Phosphorescent Tracks of Snails
4. Women on the Beach
5. Woman With Blond Armpit Combing Her Hair by the Light of the Stars
6. Morning Star
7. Wounded Personage
8. Woman and Birds
9. Woman in the Night
10. Acrobatic Dancers
11. Nightingale's Song at Midnight and Morning Rain
12. On the 13th, the Ladder Brushed the Firmament
13. Nocturne
14. Poetess
15. Awakening in the Early Morning
16. Toward the Rainbow
17. Women Encircled by the Flight of a Bird
18. Women at the Border of a Lake Irradiated by the Passage of a Swan
19. Migratory Bird
20. Ciphers and Constellations in Love With a Woman
21. Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers
22. Rose Dusk Caresses the Sex of Women and of Birds
23. Passage of the Divine Bird
| Miró | Spain | France | History | Lists |
The blog Counterspin Central carries a story about the latest Kerry weak-on-defense-and-terrorism line. Paul Sperry, in the New York Post, quotes a former FAA agent who warned Kerry about Logan's security lapses in August 2001:
"He just did the Pontius Pilate thing and passed the buck" on back through the federal bureaucracy, said Brian Sullivan, a retired FAA special agent from the Boston area who in May 2001 personally warned Kerry that Logan was ripe for a "jihad" suicide operation possibly involving "a coordinated attack."
Evidently Kerry forwarded Sullivan's concerns to the Department of Transportation, where nothing was done about them. (That would be the "Pontius Pilate" thing.) Counterspin points out that the Executive, carry-out-the-laws branch is the one to be held accountable here, not Kerry, and goes on to quote an interview with Sullivan from 9/16/01 in which he said:
"I think Sen. Kerry did get it to the right people and they were about to take action."
Of course, he wasn't Candidate Kerry then.
It's going to be a loooong electoral summer. <Looks out window at snow.> Whenever that gets here....
| 9/11 | John Kerry | Airplanes | Security |
Yup, that holds 4 gigs.
| Data Storage |
We locked you up in jail for 25 years and you were innocent all along? That'll be £80,000, please.
| United Kingdom |
Good government: Rep. Henry Waxman's searchable database of Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, and Rumsfeld's misleading statements on Iraq. Collect all 237!
Bad Government: H.R. 3920, a bill introduced to shred the Constitution enable Congress to overturn Supreme Court decisions. Sponsored by eleven Republican Congressmen.
| Constitution | Supreme Court | Iraq | WMD | War