Best Product in a Leading Role. Presence of Aflac duck: one more reason not to see a Jim Carrey movie.
| Product Placement |
A Baedeker of myth, ritual, and magic. Once you get past the language about "primitives" and "savages," it's fascinating stuff -- a look into the archetypes of human society. (American Gods and The Wicker Man make much more sense now!) Although Frazer's scholarship is dated, I was still left with a sense that the modern view of the world is both very recent and sadly lacking. (Oh, and it's all online at Bartelby.)
| Mythology | Ritual | Religion | Magic | Anthropology |
William S. Burroughs's head is a very strange place to be. This is a collection of his dreams.
| William S. Burroughs |
I am somehow on the email list for Jeffrey Seglin's Right Thing column. Today's "Sound Off" question was one I had to respond to:
SOUND OFF: RESTRICTED DONATIONSThe outpouring of millions of dollars in contributions from individuals to help victims of the tsunami in southern Asia has reflected incredible generosity. But many people have made donations to relief organizations specifying that the money be used only for tsunami victims, rather than leaving the use of the money up to the agency's discretion.
There's some concern that such restrictions may hurt relief efforts in other crisis areas. After receiving $50 million in contributions, Doctors Without Borders said that it had enough money for its work with tsunami victims and asked that donors contribute to other areas where the relief organization works.
The issue raises the questions: Once you've found a relief group you trust to do good work, is it right to restrict where a donation can be used? Or is it better to leave the use of the money to the discretion of the aid group?
Here's my reply:
The Power of the Unrestricted Gift
As a fundraising professional, I believe that giving free of restrictions is more effective than earmarking gifts. When you invest in a for-profit corporation, you are putting your money behind the company's management and their strategy. Equity investors don't demand that their particular funds be placed into R&D, or advertising, or into a particular product. Nonprofit investors should act the same. You are investing in us, our mission, and our strategy. As a donor, you should of course do your due diligence. Is the strategy sound? Does the organization get results? Is the money being spent wisely? But second-guessing the management of nonprofits can lead to unintended consequences.
For instance, it can lead to the "special projects" trap. Many major donors, both institutional and individual, want to give to special projects. It is of course worthy to help a nonprofit launch a new initiative, and donors are right to be proud that their dollars built a building, or created a program. But if too many donors demand that their funds go to special projects, then managers are left scrambling for funding to pay for core programs -- not to mention the light bill. The capital market of contributions all too often rewards novelty over results.
Finally, Maimonides reminds us that the penultimate level of charity is "one who gives tzedaka to the poor, but does not know to whom he gives, nor does the recipient know his benefactor."
| Charity | Nonprofit Management |
Ish already has a method to automagically create Amazon links, but I figured that when it comes to movies, the most likely thing you'd want to do after reading about it is to put it in your Netflix queue. So, a new shortcut premieres today:
<netflix>00354611:Casablanca</netflix> will now code to Casablanca. The first part should be the Netflix's movie ID number, which is the number right after "movieid=" in the URL. Note that the ID number for older movies is 6 digits rather than 8 (I guess they realized that they might have more than 999,999 titles some day), so you'll have to add "00" to the beginning if you want it to work.
Boring "here's how it's done" stuff below the fold.
Continue reading "Yet Another Shortcut" » | Netflix |
Just re-watched this very under-rated film. It starts off very Boyz N The Hood but halfway through becomes a completely different film. I won't say more. The 12-year old lead more than holds his own with Samuel Jackson and Giancarlo Esposito. I turned off the (self-involved) director's commentary pretty quickly, but I will say that his comparison of this film to The 400 Blows isn't far off. Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.
Found on Eyebeam reBlog.
| Information Mapping | Art |
Remember Free iPods? Well, now the same company is running a Free Mac Minis scheme (though they're calling them Mini Macs). Anyone? Not I, since I can’t stand the thought of volunteering my data to one of these information-accrual marketing companies.
| Apple |
Sex in High School Involves Long Chains of Relations, concludes a recent study. I think the J. Geils Band should be in the footnotes somewhere:
You love her
But she loves him
And he loves somebody else
You just can't win
And so it goes
Till the day you die
This thing they call love
It's gonna make you cry
I've had the blues
The reds and the pinks
One thing for sure
(Love stinks)
Love stinks yeah yeah
Etc.
Seriously, though, the diagram is pretty Tufte-worthy. Story via URLDJ.
| Dating | High School | Education | Weird Science | Tufte Alert |
This is "no name calling" week. But you probably already knew that didn't you, you little wuss?
| Education |
| Mr. Death | Love and Death | |
|---|---|---|
| Neurotic men in glasses? | Yes | Yes |
| Historical re-enactments | Yes | Yes |
| Holocaust references | Yes | Brief, but yes |
| Russians? | No | Yes |
| Germans? | Yes | No |
| Jews? | Yes | Yes |
| Tesla coils? | Yes | No | Historical tyrant | Hitler | Napoleon |
| References | Triumph of the Will | Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Ingmar Bergman |
| Instruments of Death | Electric chair, lethal injection machines, gallows | Cannons, muskets, pistols |
| Death is... | Neurotic man in glasses | Tall, robe, scythe, etc. |
| Final impression? | Well, that was disturbing | "Wheat." |
| Errol Morris |
David Brooks, Wayne’s Worst Export, in his editorial today declaring (by fiat) the End of Hypocrisy, includes this list of American Idealists:
While many back home have lost faith, our troops fight because their efforts are aligned with the core ideals of this country, articulated by Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Lincoln, F.D.R., Truman, J.F.K., Reagan and now Bush.
Walt Whitman? Was he President? What's he doing in this list, exactly? And what would he and Bush have to say to each other about American ideals?
* Headline for this post supplied by Debbie.
| David Brooks | George W. Bush |
Still trying to get Technorati tags to work. Ignore this post.
Technorati seems to be working...
|
I really want to think that this Tsunami Game was done up before the disaster that left nearly a quarter of a million dead, and that no-one's bothered to pull it from the web yet. And who's responsible? FEMA, of course! Can you say "public relations disaster," kids?
They also have a kids' comic book on tsunamis, which isn't so bad.
Via Gadgetopia.
| Disasters | 2004 Tsunami | Bad Culture | Games |
It is always amazing to me how ignorant people are of foreign lands and the troubles they face. For example, how many people are aware of how disease continues to claim thousands of lives in Lordaeron? Or the irresponsible and reprehensible environmental damage being wrought by corporate interests in Mulgore (not to mention the massive and intentional deforestation happening in the Stonetalon Mountains)? Or the problems of dislocated communities trying to integrate into mainstream culture while preserving their traditions, as is currently happening in both Durotar and Khaz Modan?
I'm proud to say that I've spent a lot of time and energy trying to address these problems, and I think I'm making a difference. Of course, more hands are always welcome, so if you think you are up to it, read on. Particularly if you are a Druid or a Shaman, as I think those would be the most helpful (though we wouldn't spit on a Rogue).
Continue reading "Greetings From Durotar" » | Virtual Reality | MMORPG | Warcraft | Online Culture |
Apparently, what Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein learned in Bush’s first term is that maybe if you softball a nominee's confirmation hearing, she'll go on to do what you want, as recounted in the NY Times. “Past behavior is no guarantee of future results,” runs the financial services disclaimer, and it would seem that the standards-bearers of the Democratic party have taken that to mean that past actions are not to be counted against a nominee for secretary of state. Some cherce extracts from the article:
Mr. Biden, who was first elected to the Senate in 1972, as the United States was extricating itself from Vietnam, said he hoped Ms. Rice would be a voice for greater candor from the administration on the Iraq undertaking, in terms of how many troops will ultimately be needed, and for how long.
And that’s because she’s been in the forefront of acknowledging her mistakes and owning up to them. Not to mention how she’s tried so many times to clarify honestly why no WMDs have been found
Condoleezza Rice pledged today that, as secretary of state, she will work tirelessly to strengthen American alliances around the world while following President Bush’s policy of spreading freedom and democracy.
I think the policy is actually called “forcibly spreading freedom and democracy heedless of the costs at home or abroad”
| WMD | Disingenuousness | Gullibility |
Stratfor responds to Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article on Iran:
Deliberate disinformation would certainly be more comforting these winter nights than imagining a ticked-off intelligence officer spilling his guts to Hersh. It comes down to this: On the broadest level, Hersh's story simply restates what is known or logical. On a deeper level, it reveals details that, if true, could cripple U.S. intelligence collection in Iran. That Hersh would publish this is a given. That he could get hold of information like this from the CIA is a crisis. Or, Hersh could simply have been the victim of U.S. information operations.
What do you all think? Has Hersh committed a Plame-level crime?
| Iran | Seymour Hersh | New Yorker | Disinformation |
Start: Haugesund, Rogaland, Norway
Finish: Trondheim, Sør-Trøndelag, Norway
Distance as the crow flies: 324 miles
Distance if you go via the route suggested by MSN Maps: 1685.9 Miles
| Microsoft | Norway |
The Washington Times recently reported on the importance of faith to the President. It quotes him as saying:
"I think people attack me because they are fearful that I will then say that you're not equally as patriotic if you're not a religious person," Mr. Bush said. "I've never said that. I've never acted like that. I think that's just the way it is.
The obvious interpretation of the above statement is that the President believes what he claims to have never said before, that one cannot be fully patriotic without being religious. This would not be surprising, this argument has been around for a long time, and would be consistent with the President's other beliefs.
| Politics | White House | George W. Bush |
Over at Marginal Revolution, Alek says:
More people die from medical mistakes each year than from highway accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS and yet physicians still resist and the public does not demand even simple reforms.The New England Journal of Medicine, for example, has just published another study, as if we needed it, showing that interns who are kept awake for 30 hours straight are a danger to themselves and innocent bystanders as well as to patients:
Researchers found that interns more than doubled their risk of getting into a car accident after being on call, a stint that meant working for 32 consecutive hours with only two or three hours of sleep, on average. Interns were also nearly six times as likely to report nearly having an accident on their way home.....The researchers say those limits don't give doctors enough time to sleep. A study published last fall, also in the New England Journal, found that interns who spent every third night working in the intensive care unit made 36% more medical errors than interns who kept less onerous schedules. They also made serious diagnostic errors 5.6 times as often as their well-rested counterparts, the study found.
Short term solution: make all doctors buy and use the Sleep Alert Master. That way at least they wont kill people when they are driving home so tired that they might as well be drunk. Wont do bupkis for their patients though.
| Medical Training | Sleep Deprivation |
| Mixes |
I was overthrilled to see in Boing Boing that Technorati is now aggregating Flickr and Del.icio.us links with meta-tagged blog posts. Ishbadiddle's subject coding is tailor-made for this application, and so with a brief bit of coding, every subject now has a link to the Technorati tag page. If this is all meaningless to you, then just click where you see this image below and all will be clear as still water, Grasshopper:
UPDATE: Should I just call my subjects "tags"? Would that make their function more transparent / obvious?
| Technorati | Semantic Web | Flickr | Del.icio.us | Distributed Culture |
The Team Leader: Summers.
Team Leader's Old Flame: No longer among the living.
Team Leader's New Flame: Old nemesis, not entirely trusted by The Team.
Writer: Joss Whedon.
Quick, name the title! If you answered "Buffy," you're close. But you're wrong. That's Scott Summers, aka Cyclops. Joss has been brought on to write The Astonishing X-Men. If like me you stopped reading X-Men comics because there were just so damn many titles, I'd highly recommend picking this one up. Great dialog, great story. (This book collects the first 6 issues of the Whedon run; the second batch is out now in individual issues.)
| Joss Whedon | Comics |
The Univ. of CA Press puts 400 books online for free. Free! Amardeep Singh gives us the story.
| Free Stuff | Academics |
Well, actually, Moscow, Idaho. The headline isn't nearly as good that way though. Anyhoo, you can buy a black protest bracelet that says "I Did Not Vote 4 Bush" for a buck. Be the first on your block! Thanks to peksy' for the story.
| Fashion | George W. Bush |
With Flash, of course. Via TMN.
| Flash | How To | Ukulele |
I came across this while looking at Chris Owens' website (he's Major Owens' son, who'll be running for his seat next time). I thought the ishbadiddlers might be interested.
Jessie
fyi, Chris Owens' website is interesting too... (I'm not sure if you're in his district)
| Boycotts | One State Two State Red State Blue State | Brooklyn | Chris Owens |
Audit finds anti-terror funds used to facilitate lawn-mower races in Texas
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - An audit of Texas' spending of nearly $600 million in U.S. government anti-terrorism funds found some of the money was spent improperly, including to buy a trailer that was used to haul lawn mowers to "lawn-mower drag races."
via robotfilter
| War on Terror |
It's a hideous dress. And I love her defense: "The lawsuit says that after the prom, school officials made students wearing Confederate symbols change or remove the items even though the symbols were not creating any disruption in the predominantly white high school in northeast Kentucky." Huh? White people can't be offended by the Confederate flag? Excuse me, that flag made more American widows than the Nazi flag did ... sheesh. YOU ALL TRIED TO LEAVE, YOUR FLAG IS UNAMERICAN.
| Kentucky | Fashion |
North Korea is pushing back against the west! What is it doing - increasing press freedom? Food production? Nope - they're running TV programs against that notorious corruptor of socialist vigor - LONG HAIR. They're running two programs. One, called "Hairdressing and Our Living", highlights approved haircuts, the other, called "Let Us Trim Our Hair in Accordance With Socialist Lifestyle" catches men with too long hair on the street and harasses them! Even worse, it harasses their wives and employers for having let somebody grow such long hair. This is great - I can't wait for it to air on BRAVO ... I think all they need to do is dub it, and it's a drinking game waiting to happen! [The scary thing is, I'm not sure of the Queer Eye guys would disagree with some of the recommendations]
Snippets from the Beeb article below:
North Korea has launched an intensive media assault on its latest arch enemy - the wrong haircut. A campaign exhorting men to get a proper short-back-and-sides has been aired by state-run Pyongyang television. Pyongyang television started the campaign last autumn with a five-part series in its regular TV Common Sense programme. Stressing hygiene and health, it showed various state-approved short hairstyles including the "flat-top crew cut," "middle hairstyle," "low hairstyle," and "high hairstyle" - variations from one to five centimetres in lengthIt stressed the "negative effects" of long hair on "human intelligence development", noting that long hair "consumes a great deal of nutrition" and could thus rob the brain of energy. Men should get a haircut every 15 days, it recommended.
A second, and unprecedented, TV series this winter showed hidden-camera style video of "long-haired" men in various locations throughout Pyongyang. In a break with North Korean TV's usual approach, the programme gave their names and addresses, and challenged the fashion victims directly over their appearance.
Tidy attire "is important in repelling the enemies' manoeuvres to infiltrate corrupt capitalist ideas and lifestyle and establishing the socialist lifestyle of the military-first era," the radio says. Newspapers too highlight the civic advantages of short hair and smart shoes.
Also check out the popup series of photos attached to the article. Hey Jay, are you listening? We need to get our hair cut every 2 weeks otherwise we're "robbing our brains of energy" !
| Hairstyles and Attitudes |
Looks like someone is actually going to try Ishbadiddle's subject coding scheme!
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Don't get me wrong -- I'm not a purist about keeping corporations out of the schools. If we are unwilling to pay enough to guarantee a proper education for tomorrow's employees, then we're shooting ourselves in the foot. If we can make the Clown pay for it, so much the better. But you have to consider the costs involved. Here's what happened with Facing Inward:
I am on the warpath and I am pissed off. I just found out that today my son was invited to an all school assembly given by McDonalds. McDonalds is so interested in getting kids to read (what their menus?) that Ronald McDonald in all his finery is going to schools and doing what amounts to a magic show and promising the children if they read 10 books and get them marked off by their teacher then (big surprise here) they get a coupon for a free hamburger. Now, let's just forget about the fact that the second ingredient in a McDonalds hamburger BUN is high fructose corn syrup and look at what this really is about.What this really is about is buying the loyalty of unsuspecting children into the McDonalds brand, using Ronald McDonald instead of the big arches (because that would simply be too in your face). If McDonalds can nab my 6 year old then they've got a customer for life and, if, as a pro-McDonalds reading program article puts it ("McDonald's intent is to associate its mascot, the clown Ronald McDonald, with preschoolers' emotions toward learning to read, and to raise awareness of Ronald as a brand icon among kids."), they can nab the positive emotions related to reading of my 6 year olds psyche then, by Goddess, they've got a McDonalds customer who will always associate Happy Meals with being happy. What upsets me most about this, however, is not that the school allowed it, not that they fell victim, willingly, to McDonalds propaganda but that I was not notified as a parent that this was going to happen, that after the fact I was told about it by my child and that I had no option to opt my child out of it. Big corporate politics at work in your local public school my friends. It sucks.
Here's an easy way to make sure parents have the right to opt out -- have the Clown come in and teach evolution. Then you'll be given a choice.
| McDonald's | Education |
Microsoft's Gates endures PC crash during keynote speech at U.S. tech show
| Bill Gates | Poetic Justice |
| Park Slope | Comics | Zippy the Pinhead |
After either recognizing the huge PR gaffe they made or recognizing that they should do the right thing after all, House of Representatives Republicans voted to undo the rules change they made in November helping out Tom DeLay. Other actions of note by the House Ethics Committee yesterday include not removing language from House ethics rules requiring a representative to “conduct himself at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House” and requiring a majority of the Ethics Committee to request a formal investigation of a rep before such investigation is undertaken.
While I’m glad that they reversed course on the first issue, the second two don't seem particularly worthy of congratulation. Not killing language that requires state representatives to Congress to be upstanding people gets applause like asking a schoolteacher to be a good role model does.
And requiring a majority of the Ethics Committee to request a formal investigation means that a formal investigation will happen essentially at the whim of the dominant party in Congress (if Congressional majorities map onto committee majorities as I would expect). True, not requiring a majority means that a minority party can force formal investigations for political reasons, but IMHO ethics rules are partly about being vigilant — even if overly so — rather than permissive.
This item previously mentioned in Ishbadiddle on 18 Nov 2004 and 19 Nov 2004.
| Tom DeLay |
I've been emailing around; so far everyone I know who'
