Baby Born With 3 Arms. The picture will disturb you for the rest of the day, be warned.
May 2006 Archives
HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph. I've written a little app that visualizes such a graph.
Here's Ishbadiddle as a graph. Click for the full version.
Am I the only one who, when reading a blog headline about "O'Reilly," is not sure whether they mean Bill or Tim? Just today I thought, "why is Bill O'Reilly trying to own the phrase Web 2.0?" It must be the combination of politics and tech feeds I'm reading...
Recently in Big Ink! An unscheduled brain vacation happened last week, so I've been slacking on BI and OOB (sorry, Mike; although since Ennis and Andrea and Greg and Dot and the Owlanphy's refuse to battle me for space here, I'm carrying this corner solo). In any case, I do have a few Scooby snacks for you meddling kids. First, perhaps my favorite Big Ink post ever: Tony Snow Job hits the bigs. The newspapers didn't seem to like this invasion- of- privacy thing so much. A serious look at the police state, by Billmon. Frank Rich, on fear and loathing. In the W era, hindsight is simply painful. If it's Midterm Season, it must mean we're off to the (inferior) races. Fox News to Whites: Missionary Imposable. Being Newt means never having to say... the truth. Race (baiting) to the bottom. New Blue: Maps for a repentant nation. Mea culpa, now with headlines. The case of Web v. Print is murkier than it appears. More Big Ink to come! I'd buy that for a dollar!
You can drill down by continent and country. Looks like Pennsylvania and Sweden got hammered yesterday.
It would be cool to see an animation of a particular virus as it spreads across the globe over time.
Mano a Mano. Willy Wonkanomics.
Thurs. eve 7pm) Ranya's Student Showcase night at Lafayette, with student choreography groups, special guests and live music! Ranya's last show before shipping out to Asia again... save the date! :-) More details will be posted in late April at http://ranya.net
The Carter Family Beats the Devil
The The Bible
The Sisterhood of the Travelling Wilburys Pants
Old Yello
Puddn'head Wilson Pickett
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Right Said Fred
Little Feat on the Prairie
Stuart Little Richard
Riders of the Deep Purple Sage
The Necronomiconway Twitty
My entry "The Five People You Meet in Heaven 17" is up on the board. See, there's my name, right next to Miles P. Finley! Hey Miles!
So I, um, wrote some more:
Notes from the Velveteen Rabbit Underground
A Death Cab For Cutie In The Family
Let Us Now Praise Famous Boyz II Men
Ol' Dirty Bastard Out of Carolina
The Grendel Fuegos
The Grapes of Ratt
Gödel, Escher, Bachman-Turner Overdrive
To the Lighthouse of Pain
Henderson the Rain King Crimson
Tender is the Night Ranger
All the King's Men At Work
A Handful of Dusty Springfield
Tropic of Cancer Mix-A-Lot
The Naked and the Dead Milkmen
Jane Eyre Supply
"The USPS appears to have some collective sense of humor, and might in fact here be displaying the rudiments of organic bureaucratic intelligence."
-- Via woot.
The problem was not Cyndi Lauper as Jenny. She doesn't quite have the chops for the stage, but her solo ("Solomon's Song," with a touch of reverb) was quite affecting. The problem wasn't Nellie McKay as Polly, although doing an Audrey Hepburn imitation is not the same thing as acting innocent, darling. The problem wasn't so much Ana Gasteyer as a shrieking Mrs. Peachum. The problem wasn't that the show was nearly stolen by Jim Dale as Mr. Peachum and Brian Charles Rooney as drag Lucy Brown.
No, the problem was Alan Cumming. He's a fine actor, but he just cannot pull off the role of Macheath (Mack the Knife). On stage, it's simply unbelievable that he could be a killer, a rapist, a thug. A libertine, yes. But he plays too low status, and doesn't radiate any menace. It's essential for the play that we view him as a criminal, and about the most criminal act Cumming's Macheath seems capable of is bisexuality.
It's playing until June 25 if you must see it. I'm glad we were in the cheap seats.
My Old Kentucky Blog has the two rules for Indie Band Success:
Rule #1: Put a hot girl on keyboard or bass.
Rule #2: Cover Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart
Many MP3s follow.
Also, on the cover front, of these 101 covers of Stairway to Heaven, I think the Dolly Parton cover is my favorite.
ALA | Recommended Reading. Brought to you by the letter C and rebecca's pocket.
Guy: Hey weren't you in "The Princess Bride"?
Wallace Shawn: Yes.
Guy, gesturing to his Girl: We just saw that last night! It's like, our favorite movie.
Wallace Shawn: Really? Thank you!
Guy: I'd challenge you to a drinking game, but I'm unprepared.
Wallace Shawn laughs in a way that seems genuine, but he is an actor....
Booking Bands. Inspired by "Buena Vista Fight Club," "The Chemical Brothers Karamazov," and other book title / band name mashups, here are the ones I sent in:
The House At Pooh Cornershop
Now We Are Sixpence None The Richer
Oliver Twisted Sister
The Gulag Archipelago-go's
Great White Noise
Neutral Milk Hotel New Hampshire
The Tipping Pointer Sisters
Extraordinary Popular Delusions: And the Madness of Crowded House
Tillie and the Wall of Voodoo
Morris Day and the Time Traveller's Wife
The Five People You Meet In Heaven 17
Me Talk Pretty One Doris Day
Green Day And Ham
(Friday night, 11pm-1am) The Ginger Twins (Ranya & Autumn) take over Lafayette! See if you can tell who is who! (check out Autumn's cool website redesign at http://autumnward.com)
I was wrong to have voted for George W. Bush. In historic terms, I believe George W. Bush is the worst two-term President in the history of the country. Worse than Grant. I also believe a case can be made that he’s the worst President, period.
-- Doug McIntyre, by way of Cynical-C.
Do you remember when we had to put up with the "but he's popular!" argument? Well, not any more.
-- Via uggabugga.
I needed to print out a bunch of DonorsChoose proposals for a funder. We have a "Printer Friendly" option on each proposal page, but frankly I don't like it. Enter the MyPage Bookmarklet. I didn't even know what this baby could do when I installed it, I thought it was just an improved "Print Preview." What it actually does is much cooler.
Once you're on a page you want to print, you click on the bookmarklet. Then you can click on any element on the page. It turns yellow. Hit "R" and it disappears. Repeat until the page looks the way you want it to, hit "ESC", and you're ready to print your new and improved page.
Example:
Before
After
Cool, eh? These screencaps, actually, were taken with a little app that I actually paid for, which gives you a sense of how darn useful it is. If you've ever needed to take a screen capture of a webpage that's larger than your monitor, you would be wise to spend the $30 for Capture Wiz Pro. Push a few buttons and it will scroll through the page for you and capture the image in its own clipboard, ready to dump into whatever document you need. Try it out.
A Conversation Between Dr. Bronner and Wm. Shakespeare
"Love is like a willful bird, do you want it? It flies away! Yet, when you least expect its bliss, it turns around & it's here to stay!"
"Thou venomed unchin-snouted maggot-pie!"
"If you can think and not make thoughts your aim! If you can meet with triumph or disaster and treat those two imposters just the same! If you can bear to hear the full-truth you have spoken twisted by crooks to make a trap for fools!"
"A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are toss'd with."
"Like a beacon breaking through dark clouds that pass; your deep embrace, your sensuous kiss, who else but God can make Love last 1 trillion years of sweet eternities! Who else but God! We are not true, while calculated calm controls us; blood flows near spirit in cold divided flame!"
"I'll pray a thousand prayers for thy death."
Dr. Bronner text generator vs. Shakespearian insult machine; the former link from Boing Boing, the latter from Gazoo.
Gazoo sent over a link to this Polish movie poster site. I must say that most of these movies look better in Polish! They manage to make the shlockiest movies look like high art. Examples below the fold:
Continue reading Movie Posters Redux.
PYNCHON PAPER DOLLS! Check out the rest of the VSA too. Brought to you by Table of Malcontents.
The internet, of course, is the greatest time suck ever invented.
And RSS feeds are like mainlining.
I pretty much visit only three web sites now -- my gmail account, this blog, and bloglines, which I use to read my RSS feeds. (Link goes to list of my feeds.) Why go surfing around, when (almost all) the sites I want are brought together in one place? Yeah.
The problem is, of course, keeping up. The entries keep coming in. Look, I have 982 unread posts! Better spend some time catching up there. Whoops, where did that two hours go?
Well as of today I am announcing: only 99 feeds. No more. If I want to add one, I've got to get rid of another. If God wanted us to read more than 99 feeds, God would have built an RSS reader into our brains.
I know that's like saying "I'm gonna cut back to only three packs a day." But hey, I've gotta start somewhere.
According to a 2002 poll of co-op funeral directors in Britain, the ten most requested pop songs at funeral services are:* 1. Wind Beneath My Wings (Bette Midler)
* 2. My Heart Will Go On (Celine Dion)
* 3. I Will Always Love You (Whitney Houston)
* 4. Simply the Best (Tina Turner)
* 5. Angels (Robbie Williams)
* 6. You'll Never Walk Alone (Gerry & the Pacemakers)
* 7. Candle in the Wind (Elton John)
* 8. Unchained Melody (The Righteous Brothers)
* 9. Bridge Over Troubled Water (Simon &Garfunkel)
* 10. Time to Say Goodbye (Sarah Brightman)
Which is odd, because this is actually the entire playlist of the Muzak in purgatory.
On an unrelated note, I'm usually good to take Snopes as gospel, but this explanation of a chain email on the supposed dangers of bread explains:
For instance, the list's second item, "Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests," sounds ringingly ominous until the reader pauses to consider that standardized tests are often constructed so that half the takers will fall below an average score, just as half of the takers will score above average. Yet, by the way the statement is worded, one could easily be tricked into thinking the staff of life is at least somewhat to blame for poor academic performance.
Barbara! Half of the scores are below average by definition! Math is hard!
UPDATE: Barbara wrote back: "You have confused the average and the median."
/me Hangs head in shame.
Go watch the video over at Crooks and Liars before the NBC laywers send their cease & desist.
Via Big Ink.
This Week In Big Ink! Finally finished up the term, and not a minute too soon. Still groggy, but here are few posts from this ridiculous week. The Randy Duke had many friends; "I'm not evil, I'm an idiot!" Er, ah, either way...; It's all some meta-joke on 'hook, line and sinker'; NPR=Not Particularly Reliable; Say Again, Mr. President?; We may never know, but there are certainly some ominous rumblings; and finally, Tony Snow will be taking questions when he's damn good and ready, thanks. Yoiks! And away!
That is the question. The answer is a little Jacob's Ladder for my taste, but cool nonetheless.
The US government is data mining phone calling patterns in a serious way:
The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth ... The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.The government is collecting "external" data on domestic phone calls but is not intercepting "internals," a term for the actual content of the communication... The data are used for "social network analysis," the official said, meaning to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together. [Link]
Remember the administrations' promises that they weren't engaging in large scale data mining, that they were only looking at communications of known terrorists? Well, they're not in this program. Nor are they just snowball sampling out from known terrorists. Instead they're collecting it all:
"Are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with Al Qaeda?" asked Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the committee's ranking minority member. [Link]
Recent consolidation has made this easier than in times past:
Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T are the nation's three biggest telecommunications companies; they provide local and wireless phone service to more than 200 million customers... Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants. [Link]
The administration's dealings with Qwest either show how sketchy the program was (they were afraid they couldn't get authorization from FISA or the AG's office) or how set they are on executive principle:
Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused... NSA [also] rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.[Link]
Qwests' scruples may be the only protection that citizens have:
"FISA does not prohibit the government from doing data mining," said Butler, now a partner with the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington, D.C.[Link]
There's a lot more information in the article. Read it and tell us what you think :( Are there any legal problems for the companies if the President signed an executive order, even if they got paid for giving away customer information that they were previously not allowed to sell?
Will this cause problems for Hayden, or will this actually give the Republicans more popular support as they paint the Democrats as soft on terrorism?
More generally - WTF?
WARNING: EXTREMELY FREAKY. The Official Recursive Mouth Appreciation Page. via Cynical C.
No, not the French jet -- an actual mirage that lasted for four hours. Cool.
This one actually involves Edward Tufte. Via xBlog, which apparently hasn't discovered the "permalink" yet.
Google Trends. Neat. Via Gadgetopia.
Fay Grim. Good to see James Urbaniak still getting work, he was great in Thom Pain. Via Coudal Partners.
We haven't had a Rock-Paper-Scissors post since waaay back in 2001 so here's another via randomWalks: the 9-Option RPS Variant: Cowboy, Ninja, Bear, Judge, Terrorist, Assassin, Spy, Gangster, Madcow!. Warning: includes algorithm.
Update: Related, the massive Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling game. Via ebRb.
Over the weekend, at our host's annual fete, several friends came up to me to express their opinions on some recent posts here on Ish.
Recently, another friend emailed me a comment on a recent post.
Folks, there's a comments function here. Please use it.
I know not everyone feels they have something to say. Heck, I read lots of blogs and don't always comment on them. Lurking is a time-honored activity on teh internets, at least as time-honored as anything is for a medium that's two decades old. But I try (especially on less-trafficked blogs) to leave the occasional comment, even if it's "hey, funny!" or "interesting post!" or "buy Cialis here!" (OK, not that last one.)
Why? Call it Egoboo or Whuffie or what have you, the comment is a way to "pay" your friendly neighborhood blogger. It's the quarter tossed into the busker's open hat. It lets the blogger know that yes, people are reading the damn thing, that readers give a damn, and that the effort is worth it, dammit!
You don't need to write an essay. Spelling does not count. But if you feel the need to say something, if you have an opinion about something that's written here, or even if you just want to say "hey, that link totally made my lunch hour," then speak your mind. Thank you.
PS Curious, I ran the numbers -- at 1939 days of this blog, 3581 posts have been written, making 1.85 posts/day. 6420 comments have been left, an average of 1.79 per post, although a full 11% of those comments were left on the Post Secrets post. Removing that post takes the historical average down to 1.60 comments / post.
German 'Robin Hoods' give poor a taste of the high life
A GANG of anarchist Robin Hood-style thieves, who dress as superheroes and steal expensive food from exclusive restaurants and delicatessens to give to the poor, are being hunted by police in the German city of Hamburg.
-- Via Boing Boing
(Tues. eve 7pm) @ Lafayette (54 Franklin St., NYC http://lafgrill.com )--showcase with Ranya, Rayhana, Aszmara, guest artists and students, to the live Middle Eastern jazz music of Souren Baronian, Haig Manoukian, and Mal Stein! contact Rayhana at RayhanaMadonna@aol.com or 718-497-2125 for ticket info. Call Lafayette at 212-732-5600 to reserve a table.
Picked up recently at the comic shop:
All the action is psychological as Emma messes with Scott's mind. Oh, and there's some, um, behind-closed-doors action with Kitty and Peter. Pick it up if you're following the Joss Whedon X-Men Arc.
Greg's latest. Man, this series is his best so far. He takes the gladiator genre and just nails it, even if it's set on an alien planet and the Hulk is the reluctant Spartacus. Plus: Cool Kirby-style flashback!
This is the big Marvel "event." Ambivalence about super-heroes comes to a head, and all heroes are supposed to register with the government, pitting hero against hero. Does this sound like The Watchmen? It does. Nonetheless it will be interesting to see where this goes.
Unless you're married to Debbie, you'll need to read the 12 principles of finding anything. Via Rebecca Blood.
Dan, my BOMBIL, has a new blog up, now added to our ever-growing sidebar of links: coffee grounds for dismissal. Looking forward to more caffeine-infused blogging!
Update: Also added is Dot's new blog, Dot goes to Europe, in which Dot goes to Europe. Her latest is on a visit to the S&M Cafe.
This Week In Big Ink! I'm totally bringing it in hot here at the end of the term, so apologies for being late and keeping it short/sweet! Here's the better part of two weeks' postings. Click! Enjoy! Billmon on the Mother of All Dozens; the press won't; talking heads! (for political geeks, sorry); old school goes old school on W; a little more on Det. Zadroga; they broke it, we bought it; family values and the estate tax repeal; spy toys!; tough love at Gitmo; O'Reilly... in... Spaaaace; the (Josh) Marshall Plan; when I think about this, I do solemly swear; Big Ink 101! (Thanks, Mike!); Horowitless; mind like a Steele trap. Serenity now!
Andrea sent this over. Neat.
ASCII Maps. Thanks to Kerim for the tip.
I haven't been following the Moussaoui case. This has been a bad month PTSD-wise -- it's like every frickin' day there's a 9/11-related headline in the paper. So I don't know the legal arguments that have been made, evidence presented, etc. But I was more than a little disturbed to read the verdict -- that he was not going to get the death penalty.
Don't get me wrong. I am morally opposed to the death penalty. But the people sitting on that jury were not, since you can't sit on a capital case unless you agree that you can apply the death penalty. What I find disturbing is not the verdict, but the jury's reasoning.
In the list of mitigating factors, more of the jurors found that Moussaoui's past was a mitigating factor than any other factors. His dad was abusive. He had a hostile relationship with his mother. He was placed in an orphanage. He was subject to racism.
Well, boo fucking hoo.
I could understand if the jury had come back and said, look, he's going to spend the rest of his life in jail, we don't want to make more martyrs for Al Qaeda recruiting posters. Or even, we have a reasonable doubt as to his role in the terrorist mass murder.
But this?
We looked evil in the face, and called it -- what? A social disease?
Something I’ve been noodling around with lately: How many songs are there that are titled with years, and years only? Just for starters, there’s “1969” (and “1970”) by the Stooges and “1979” from Smashing Pumpkins, but what else? I’ve gotten through the ’70s, but I cheated and used AllMusic.
That does sound like a band name, doesn't it? Well so does Laura Fields and the Page Three Sutra, I suppose.
New to the blogroll, Ms. Frizzle! She's one of the blogs taking part in the Blogger Challenge -- check out the new leaderboard which just went live yesterday.
... before visiting The Saddest Thing I Own.
Imagine Garrison Keillor, Lindsay Lohan, and Robert Altman in a horse drawn carriage together. Now add a marching band.
-- Patrick
With samples -- I suppose so you can re-oversample them. Via robotwisdom.
For ten Ishpoints...
Improv Everywhere is at it again -- this time, flooding a Best Buy with blue-shirted agents who look like employees, but aren't. The rank and file were amused:
Another employee after being told to go get some merchandise from the back, declared, "You should ask one of these other 50 people to do it!"
But security less so:
Security guards and managers started talking to each other frantically on their walkie-talkies and headsets. "Thomas Crown Affair! Thomas Crown Affair!," one employee shouted. They were worried that were using our fake uniforms to stage some type of elaborate heist. "I want every available employee out on the floor RIGHT NOW!"
My favorite part of this was their using Best Buy's own cameras to capture photos and video.
... but the flight 93 PR Blast pretty much clinches it. Via torrez.
