Slate Hill - The bent windshield wipers annoyed her. The sex toy glued to her windshield back in June made her furious. But finding a horse's head in her swimming pool yesterday hit Wawayanda Councilwoman Gail Soro right where she lives.It left her angry and frightened last night, as state police scoured the Orange County town for suspects. They were treating it as a case of harassment and trespassing, at the very least.
Soro and her husband, Ed, were in the pool until about 8:30 p.m. Monday night. Yesterday morning, they noticed the water looked a bit dark. They thought that an animal might have died in the pool.
Ed Soro grabbed the skimmer, raised a dark object from a corner of the pool and called out to his wife as he dragged it to the surface: "That's a horse's head."
She quickly went back into their house. "I was hysterical," she recalled last night.
As the day went on, her hysterics gave way to anger. The stunt with the windshield wipers and the sex toy both happened at Wawayanda Town Hall, where Soro is the lone Democrat on the five-member Town Board.
Emphasis added for partisan reasons. Via the Obscure Store.
| Life Imitates Art | Wingnut |
Okay, while Mike's away I have a discussion question for you. It comes in multiple parts:
Q: What was the last rock concert T-shirt you bought?
-When did you buy it?
-Is that the last one you're going to buy?
I ask this because I saw some big guy wearing a big concert T on the street (with some anthemic paint-spatter-font slogan on the back, etc.). And I thought: you know, it's been a long time since I bought a concert T. I started to think back ... and it's been a LONG time since I bought a concert T.
I thought back to more recent stuff -- late-era Elvis Costello, Cake, Gogol Bordello, the Moonlighters -- and realized that there are several things going on. First, and most importantly, I'm much more likely to buy a CD, if I buy anything. Also, I definitely wanted T-shirts from those shows, but they either sucked, didn't quite seem cool enough, or didn't exist. (I see a lot more tiny pre-T-shirt bands these days).
So I thought back to the 90s...
Continue reading "To A Tee" » | Music |
I'm on vacation for a little while, and will stay far far away from computers, the Internet, the news, etc. So I leave the blog in the capable hands of my fellow Ishers. See ya soon!
Purchased today: One card catalog from Yale University, which is finally getting all of their collection online. Said catalog is the kind in the picture facing left, under the lights. 65 drawers of Church J through Cohen (MD), but without the actual cards.
Picture brazenly stolen from complete stranger Steve Minutillo.
| Swag | Perk | Fetish |
That thudding sound you hear is my head banging against the wall. Who the hell is in charge over there?
| Homeland Security | Graft | Incompetent Government |
Please don't send me Microsoft Word documents. Word.
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It's been a while since our last Weird Science post, and I've got a bunch of links for ya:
Everything Glows:
Robots Take Over:
Biology Notes From All Over:
ROY G. BIV?
And Finally, From the Engineering Disaster Department:
| Mad Science | Robots | Animals | Parasites | Cats | Disasters | Biology | Dinosaurs | Disease | The Singularity |
Walnut over at Balls and Walnuts does a man's reading on Cosmo's sex advice. "Honestly, three pages on THE SEX HE CRAVES and I don’t find anything, not a blessed thing, about the sex I crave."
| Cosmo |
... like a blogger scorned.
Unless, of course the whole thing is just a viral ad campaign for a CourtTV show.
Weird times we're living in. Weird times.
Update: I saw some posters ("Lost Dog" with a picture of the "ex" "Steve") on the Upper East Side this morning.
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There was the pig thing. And the open mic performance. And now he's tried to massage German Chancellor Angela Merkel. No, that's not a metaphor. Liebes-Attacke auf Merkel!
If I were in the family, I'd think seriously about staging some sort of intervention. What the heck is going on?
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Armin at Speak Up blogs on Cooperless Shoesource, or, The Rebranding that Finally Pushed me Over the Edge. Farewell, Cooper Black.
| Branding | Fonts | Cooper Black | Design |
Sadly, it's not an Onion article.
| Advertising | Eggs | Food | CBS |
An interesting interview with Drew Curtis, creator of Fark, one of the internet's most successful websites.
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Portable Freeware has a list of games you can run from a USB stick. Here are a few that I've played and liked:
Are there other freeware games that you all would recommend?
| Freeware | Stickware |
Sometimes in Big Ink! A nasty cold, humidity, intermittent Web access, and the Brooklyn Cyclones have all conspired against me this summer, but they won't win in the long run. (Well, the humidity might.) Here's what we're talking about in the meantime: Greenwald reminds us that we're all traitors; the GOP is flipping a two-headed coin; truth in the media turns out (go figure) to have consequences; Kristoff clues in; Rupert sees future, rubs hands together ominously; Al Gore goes mano-a-robot with Bender; Digby sees future, writes useful chalk diagram; though time continues to pass, as of today David Brooks is still no closer to reality; though they doth protest too much, you know who's the hatahs; I try to get in on the Ennis explosion; budget math so fuzzy it could be a muppet; and a very special treat (for being such patient readers), the unaired Buffy pilot. Gooooooooooaalllll!
| Media | Journalism | Politics | Culture | Buffy |
I've rewritten the Ishbadiddle: Different Trains and The Devil of History post -- hopefully it's a bit more coherent, and not as grossly cynical as it sounded the first time around.
Would like to see my collection of my own navel lint?
| Navel Gazing |
Boing Boing, Pajamas Media, and Talking Points Memo all link to his Sepia Mutiny post on why the mainstream American political blogs have mostly ignored the 7/11 bombings in Mumbai. A nice post, Ennis, and good to see the issue getting some attention.
In the meantime, I need to rewrite my own essay dealing with the bombing since it's largely incoherent and seems to say something other than what I want it to. Not sure I'll get to it today, though. I will say that I'm personally not dealing with this very well. I've had a buildup of PTSD triggers, and this isn't helping muchly. But I'll muddle through. Roll the rock up the hill, etc.
Blissful ignorance would be so much easier.
| Sepia Mutiny |
If you enjoyed Dolly Parton singing Stairway to Heaven you owe it to yourself to hear Margie Brandon sing Folsom Prison Blues.
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Justice Department Lawyer To Congress: The President Is Always Right. Thanks for clearing that up.
| George W. Bush |
I've been thinking about history and History.
history with a small h is the brownian motion of capital and ideas and people. It's your grandpa's story about how his dad helped manage a vaudeville theater. It's the book you picked off the shelf in the used book store, and you read it, and it changed who you are. It's the small series of events that led to you getting your job. It's the story of how you met your wife.
Then there's History, the Great and Grand History, the Events that Will Be Recorded. The ones that will end up in the big shabby textbook, given to you at the start of the semester with the names of the students who had it before you inscribed on the inside cover, and their doodles and marks and scrawls throughout, until the book is too old, its recent history section too far in the past, and the thing is sent out to pulp.
Most of us live our lives in history, but occasionally the Events of History interrupt us. There are three such Events that have changed my own history.
The first is the Cold War. The Eighties Version. The Reagan Version. The Day After Version. The one where synthpop stars sang bad songs about how they'd very much like for the world to be not destroyed, please and thank you. The one where Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov saved us all from annihilation, and none of us knew it.
I started working for SANE, because it seemed the only sane thing to do. I was fourteen. I thought I could do something about politics.
The second is the L.A. riots in 1992. I was in the last days of my senior year of college. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. My political science studies, my work for various members of Congress, had all soured me on the political idealism of my earlier youth. Perhaps I should go into publishing, where I had some experience, and making books is a good thing, right?
"Have you heard? Los Angeles is burning." Sometimes History's herald is a fellow student whose name you will never remember, later. And over the next few days, watching a city tear into itself, I resolved that whatever small thing I could do, I would do it. And, ever since, I have been.
The third is 9/11.
I'm still figuring out that Event.
I started thinking about History's interruptions after reading an article in the New Yorker about how close we came to foiling the 9/11 attacks. (The article isn't online but you can read an interview with the author Lawrence Wright here.) And how infighting between agencies kept us from doing so. I've been reading intelligence history from WWII, so trust me, this is nothing new. But I was gripped by a profound sense that my small thing wasn't worth a damn. What can one person ever do? What damn difference does it make?
I am gripped by this sense, because it seems that if there's anyone who could have stopped the attacks it was Paul O'Neill and Ali Soufa of the FBI. If you were to describe them -- the brash FBI commander who didn't play by the rules, and the young Muslim FBI agent who argued theology in Arabic with the terrorists he was interrogating -- you'd say that they were too perfect, made-for-TV. The fact that O'Neill, having left the FBI for a job as head of security for the World Trade Center, died on 9/11 further adds to the strangeness of this history, a history that seems like fiction.
I am gripped by this fear that my own small thing I'm doing to repair the world is fruitless. Because it easy to believe that we can change our history. It is hard to think that we can change our History.
One of the marvels of history is how haphazard it seems; a series of accidents lead up to where we are. I could have picked a different college and never met my wife. I could have picked a different book off the shelf. I could have taken a different train.
But History carries with it the myth of its own Inevitability. Events happen, and afterward we explain the Forces that led up to them: this ideology, that economic trend, this political movement, that technology. Even O'Neill and Soufa can't stand up to History. That's what I'm thinking about when I'm reading the article.
Later that day, they announce the arrest of a group that was thinking of bombing the Holland Tunnel. My family and I live on an island.
Today 172 people died in a series of terrorist bombings on a train in India. Seven explosions.
My first thought is to all of our Indian and South Asian friends -- both those we know by face and those we've met through this blog -- I hope and pray that your families are all right. Hope and prayer seem like thin paper stretched over sticks of balsa wood. In a world on fire.
Whom were you trying to target? The working class men who struggle for an inch of space in local trains? The working women who knit and cut vegetables in trains on their way home? Young, dreamy students discussing exams and love? The babies accompanying their mothers, smiling back at the women around them? Darkness is fast falling. Its raining like it will not stop. Will the rains wash away the blood?
I start reading what the bloggers are writing, the firsthand accounts and the anguish and the recriminations, and then I just can't anymore.
So tonight I sit down and think about History. I put on Joni Mitchell's Blue, because nothing else will do right now.
There's some other music, actually, that I'm thinking of, a composition by Steve Reich, called Different Trains. Reich weaves taped interviews about World War II into his music. "During the war years, Reich made train journeys between New York and Los Angeles to visit his parents, who had separated. Years later, he pondered the fact that, as a Jew, had he been in Europe instead of the United States at that time, he might have been travelling in very different trains."
172 people could have travelled on a very different train. I could have taken a very different train. We get on trains every day, thinking they will take us where we always go. But then History arrives instead.
There is something terrifying in the idea of a History we cannot change. It is why I reject the myth of the inevitability of History. And yet there is a demon, a devil of History, who whispers in our ears that the myth is true, that we are ceaselesly borne forwards and cannot change what happens to us. We are on the train and there is no stopping it.
Some researchers in South America have recently found that a people called the Aymara point in front of them when talking about the past, and behind them when talking about the future. This reminded more than one commenter of Walter Benjamin's angel of history:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
It seems to me that there is something quite natural about the Aymara's perception of the past before them and the future behind them. We can see the past, as we can see what is before us. The future is as invisible as the back of your head. Where your eyes don't go.
The angel of history is terrifying because as he looks backwards into the past, he can do nothing. The devil of history, or more properly, of History, is more terrifying still because he looks forwards into the future we cannot see:
The devil of History looks forward. His back is always toward us and we cannot see his face. He sees the glaciers melting, hears knives being sharpened in the dark. Species turn into fossils, empires will fall. Newer and clever machines are built. Humanity remains stubborn and beautiful and cruel. All this, he says, is in your future.
You, who cannot see the future, clutch at the devil whose back is always to you. It's not set in stone! you cry. You cannot know.
He laughs as events hurtle past you both. Look at the past, he says. Look at its follies and murders and grand disasters. Do you really think the future can be better?
But we can change it! You are angry. It's not too late. Someone is always the first to suddenly stand up from their soft chair. We can all do something.
You think you can stand against History? The devil mocks you. History will take no more notice of you than a tank takes notice of a pebble caught up in its treads as it grinds its way toward a distant battle. Tend to your clever machines. Write words that will not last. Only my words will last. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
You don't believe the devil. The devil is there to trick you, to make you give up. Perhaps his unseen eyes are blind. But you have no better answers to his prophecies and proclamations and predictions.
There is a great wind coming from the future. The devil's back is to you. So you turn your back on him. Hope and prayer are thin paper stretched over sticks of balsa wood. A sure knot, and the string is reeled. It goes from the kite to your hand, to the vessels that lead from your hand to your heart.
There is a great wind coming from the future. It bears your kite aloft. This is your banner. Your call to arms. Perhaps others will see it; perhaps not. Perhaps you can change something, prove the devil wrong; perhaps not. Perhaps nothing will come of your attempt and the devil's History will arrive. Then again, perhaps not.
There is a great wind coming from the future. Here you stand, with a kite of paper in a world on fire. You can do no other. May God help us all.
| India | 7/11 Mumbai Bombing | 9/11 | History |
A pro-life blogger joins Fred Phelps and the Beijing Evening News in totally misunderstanding The Onion. Apparently there is no bridge which can span this sarchasm.
| Sarchasm | Satire | Abortion |
Frank reports that chocolate rations tax revenues are up despite tax cuts. Well, I guess I was wrong about that one.
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A while back I mentioned John's Background Switcher, a nifty little freeware Windows app that will change the wallpaper on your desktop at any interval you define. I've uploaded some of the the wallpaper files I use to Flickr. None of these are original but they're all free, grabbed from various sources. I suppose if you Google the titles you could find them? Anyway I've reached my Flickr limit for the month but I'll upload some more to this set later. Enjoy!
| Wallpaper | Flickr |
Felix has a great post up on Fast-Food and Glocalization: Shantou and the "Faking" of Brands. Yes, "Glocalization" is a word. Go read.
| Globalization | Fast Food | China | Brands | Authenticity |
Evidently, Make-a-Wish and others in the "wish-granting industry" are facing a problem: they are running out of dying children. So they're trying to give wishes to, well, healthy babies. And old people. And people who are sick but not terminal. Leading to scenes like this one:
"I said: 'I am OK, right? I am not dying, right?'" said Woodcock, recalling her panic when a nurse showed up with the Make-A-Wish paperwork. "I looked at the nurse. I looked at my dad. I said, 'Don't you tell me I am doing OK and then get Make-A-Wish in here.'"
Folks, if you've outlived your mission, then it's time to close up shop. There are plenty of other charities out there who could use the cash.
Via Trent Stamp, who runs Charity Navigator, which just gave DonorsChoose a four-star rating!
| Non-Profit Institutions | Social Enterprise |
I just got a call from Earthlink, hawking their free security suite. Why they're spending their resources on calling their customers for a free product I don't know. I suppose they figure if x% upgrade to their "premium" security package it's worth it. Anyway, here's how the call goes more or less:
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Clueless Earthlink Guy: May I please speak to Mik-a-el Everett-Lane?
Me: You mean Michael?
CEG: Well there may be a typo sir. But I have Mik-a-el down here.
M: Well, I've been going by Michael my whole life.
CEG: We may have a typo, sir. I have Mik-a-el. CEG then launches into a pitch for their security suite, to which I will not link. He cites its anti-identity-theft features.
M: How does it work against identity theft?
CEG: I don't know the specific details, sir, but it gives you better encryption when you send your data over the internet.
M: It re-encrypts it? (I'm not baiting him here, I'm seriously interested in how they accomplish this. Doesn't ehanced encryption require both parties to be using it?)
CEG: I don't know the technical details, sir.
M: What does it do about phishing?
CEG: I don't understand.
M: Phishing, how does it protect you against phishing?
CEG: Fishing for what, sir?
M: Grits teeth. Look, if you're going to be talking to people about security software they should teach you what phishing is. P-h-i-s-h-i-n-g. It's a form of identity theft through e-mail.
CEG: I don't have the technical details of that, sir. But if you have a piece of paper I'll give you the web address where you can download our free security suite.
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Yeah, I'll be doing that right away. I hope they recorded that call for quality purposes.
| Customer Support | Identity Theft | Malware | Phishing |
Sometime during my science-fiction-reading youth -- I think when I decided I was not going to read all 27 Dune books -- I vowed that I wouldn't read any series longer than a trilogy. It just wasn't worth it.
I'm telling you now, the 12 books of Gene Wolfe's Solar Series? Worth it.
Gene Wolfe is an amazing writer. He writes science fiction. He is also a Catholic. (And he also helped invent Pringles!) I think the crux of these novels is the question a Christian SF writer must ask: If God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son -- what about other worlds?
| Science Fiction | Books to Buy | The Curious Bookshelf | Isaac Asimov | Cory Doctorow |
Via TPM comes the claim that the Bush administration NSA was tracking calls before 9/11:
The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.``The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11,'' plaintiff's lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. ``This undermines that assertion.''
The lawsuit is related to an alleged NSA program to record and store data on calls placed by subscribers.
``The U.S. Department of Justice has stated that AT&T may neither confirm nor deny AT&T's participation in the alleged NSA program because doing so would cause `exceptionally grave harm to national security' and would violate both civil and criminal statutes,'' AT&T spokesman Dave Pacholczyk said in an e-mail. [Link]
| Civil Liberties | NSA |
Design Observer’s got a guest column up about the culture of Conservatism, which would be more accurately titled The Culture of the Republican Party. My father fits squarely in line with this description — while he’s no screaming reactionary, he does love trying to get my goat, even if he fails.
-- Tk | (1)
20 Generations on just 3' x 10'!
An interesting example of both info design and type wonkery, this man put together what seems to be a pretty good, dense, readable family ancestry chart.
