There's one other very special person whose birthday is today: Natalie Claire "Gnat" Lileks, James Lileks' daughter. After reading Lileks' Bleats for so long, I have to say, Gnat is the most important person born on this day. (I like the Gnat Bleats best of all; the rants sometimes leave me cold, but Gnat is what keeps me coming back.) Happy Birthday, Gnat!
Posted at 1:14 AM
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I'd like to wish a Happy Birthday to Rat Scabies, drummer for original punk rock band The Damned, and to Paul Anka, who's having your baby. Also to Lisa Kudrow, an actress last seen on Bob Newhart's wonderfully funny but ill fated television show "Bob", where she played the wacky friend of Bob's daughter. And to Arnold Schwarzenegger Kennedy, washed up ex-body builder. Anita Hill, Happy Birthday! Felicitous regards to Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, the great uncle of television. Helene Blavatsky, noted Theosophist, would have been 171 years old today if she had lived. Happy Birthday to Emily Bronte, who we unfortunately have to hold responsible for the career of Kate Bush, also born today. The city of Baltimore is 273 years old today; happy birthday, Baltimore! The US motto, "In God We Trust", is 46 years old. Can that be true? Only 46? Must be another one of those Cold War relics. Happy Independence Day, Vanuatu! And finally, a happy 139th birthday to Nazi sympathizer and war profiteer Henry Ford. Some days, I feel 139 years old myself.
To celebrate, why not visit Anybirthday.com, search for your name and those of your family members, and tell them to remove you from their database. It won't work (they added me and mine again after I told them not to), but it's worth trying.
Posted at 12:32 AM
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I got a neat new toy today, an Eye TV, which turns my Mac into a TiVO-like video recorder. And thanks to my actually having a look at TV schedules for the first time in ages, I was able to catch this evening's installment of ESPN Classic's SportsCentury, which was about my favorite baseball player of all time, Mark "The Bird" Fidrych. My family had moved from Detroit to Illinois by 1976, his magical year, but my brother and I spent the summer of 76 in Michigan, first with one set of grandparents and then with the other. That was just an amazing time. I still remember sitting with my Grandpa Brandi in the cottage up north and grandpa telling us that we just had to watch the game on TV, that we wouldn't believe this new pitcher the Tigers had. He groomed the mound. He talked to the ball. He ran around like a little kid, thanking his teammates when they made good plays. He played with a joy that had maybe never been seen in big league baseball before. And with that, we caught Bird Fever, just like the rest of the state of Michigan. I'm pretty sure that was the nationwide Monday night telecast that played a prominent part in the story told in SportsCentury, the one they describe as making Fidrych a star. I remember the two newspapers in Detroit printed up full page graphics one week with special ink that you could use to make Bird t-shirts. I still have mine.
There are two more airings of the Mark Fidrych SportsCentury. Set the VCR or the TiVO or the Eye TV to grab it. He was a special ball player, and 1976 was a magical year.
Posted at 12:26 AM
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The New Republic has a couple of interesting articles. One from this week argues that the country is becoming increasingly Democratic, and that the gains that Republicans like to trumpet so loudly as harbingers of their coming dominance are actually signs of weakness and marginalization, since they occur in segments of the population that are shrinking. Conversely, Democrats are making gains among growing sectors, such as professionals, working women, and suburbanites, who are turned off by the increasing conservatism of Republican candidates. The second article, by one of the same authors and from this past April, is kind of the precursor to the first, arguing that the Republicans are marginalizing themselves with their increasing identification with the caveman wing of the party.
Meanwhile, James Dobson of Focus on the Family, one of the leading advocates over the years of the wingnuts taking over the Republican party, is despairing at the prospects for his 25 year old project to remake the US in his theocratic image. He's taking in less money. His people are staying home on election day. And fewer people agree with him than in the past. (The first article from TNR found thanks to Backup Brain.)
Posted at 1:35 PM
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Dick Hutchinson lives in Circle, Alaska, near the Arctic Circle, and gets to see the Aurora Borealis quite a bit. Lucky for us, he likes to share the beautiful photos he takes of it. I've only seen the Aurora once in my life, and feel pretty damned lucky to have done so, since I understand that only 5% of the people on Earth have ever had the experience.
Posted at 11:15 PM
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The radio stations are there in force. The transmitters have been set up with care, in the hope that the listeners soon would be there. But it seems someone forgot to bring the manufacturers in on the deal. The radio stations in the UK that have gone digital say there are tens of thousands of listeners, but if the experience of Gareth Mitchell of NPR's On The Media is anything to go by, God only knows where they're getting the radios. Why not? Well, according to the people who sell radios, nobody seems terribly interested. At least nobody's asking them for digital radios....
Posted at 8:45 PM
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Mary Lu Wehmeier has a cautionary note on eating at Denny's and living to tell the tale. Ouch! Get better soon, Mary!
Posted at 1:33 AM
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Interesting article from Reuters about the National Radio Quiet Zone in West Virginia, where even microwave ovens are a problem. There's a giant radio telescope there, so great efforts are made to ensure that the electrically-noisy devices that wreak such havoc with the radio spectrum don't disrupt the scientific activities. Radio stations in surrounding areas have to beam their signal away from the telescope. Scientists use spark plug-free diesel vehicles when approaching the computer. And sometimes the biggest problem can be a dog's heating pad. (Thanks Dan Say on the swprograms mailing list.) Incidentally, I used to work at the birthplace of radio astronomy in Holmdel, New Jersey. I love the fact that there's now a monument in the shape of the first radio astronomy antenna at the exact location where signals from space were first heard.
Posted at 11:54 PM
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I spent a good part of this evening watching the House of Representatives debate whether to throw ten-time felonist Rep. James Trafficant (D-Mars) out of the House on C-SPAN. To my surprise, I found myself feeling bad that it happened. I have never been a fan of the man with the weedwhacker haircut. I've long felt he had no business being in the House. And I don't think it speaks well of his district that they kept electing him. But they did. And you don't overthrow that lightly. Still, it's hard to see how you can allow a man convicted on ten felony counts to stay.
Trafficant offered a rambling defense, alternately accusing and pleading with his soon-to-be-ex-colleagues. If you weren't familiar with the intimate details of the court case against him, and I wasn't, much of it didn't make much sense. Given Trafficant's history, it probably didn't make much sense even if you were in the courtroom for the whole thing. Most of the other lawmakers who spoke basically said "we've looked at the evidence, we all know he did it. We have no choice." There was only one Representative who challenged Trafficant on his charge that there wasn't a single piece of physical evidence by ticking off a long list of papers, phone records, faxes, cancelled checks, etc., that proved the case against him.
He didn't dress in denim. He didn't moonwalk. He didn't kick his accusers in the crotch. No karate chops. Neither John Wayne nor Willie Nelson, Will Smith, or James Brown showed up. None of the stuff he promised ahead of time. So from that standpoint, it was a disappointment.
He had a hard time finishing up. The chairman of the Ethics committee let Trafficant be the last to speak, contrary to the normal order of such things in the House. And when it came time for him to end, there was quite a pause before he could say it. I felt sorry for the guy. That surprised me.
In the end, there was only one Representative who voted not to expel him, the lame duck Gary Condit.
I tried to find him in the crowd as they were taking the vote, but I couldn't. I guess they beamed him up.
Posted at 10:50 PM
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Dori Smith is troubled by the existence of this technical conference, attendance at which is restricted to women. Laura and I discussed this last weekend when she received an e-mail about it. She thought it was so outlandish that it was a joke. But after looking at the web site, we concluded that they were serious, and it wasn't a forgery or something. The worst bit, and the part that made Laura think it was a joke, was this, which also appears on the front page of the conference site:
[W]e are having special sessions of Birds of a Feather (BOFs) that will focus on self-expression and self-nurturing to improve the quality of life when you return to the workplace.
I'm sure there are technical aspects of self-nurturing, but I suspect that discussion of them belongs at a completely different type of conference.
Posted at 6:22 AM
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Boy, this is funny. Harvey Pitt, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a man surrounded by controversy and whose head is being called for by prominent Senators of both parties, has sent a memo to Congress asking for a raise and a promotion (New York Times link, registration required). I particularly like this quote from the article: "Democrats and Republican critics of Mr. Pitt snickered at the proposal, which they said had no chance of passage and demonstrated Mr. Pitt's political tin ear."
This at a time when Pitt should be run out of town on a rail.
Posted at 5:41 AM
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The latest music interview in UK newspaper The Independent is with The Be Good Tanyas, who I've rhapsodized about here in the past. They were absolutely wonderful when we saw them in Asbury Park this past spring. And you just can't fault their timing, releasing their debut just as the old-timey music that's such an influence in what they do getting such a high profile. This past weekend, Laura and I were listening to a couple of singles the band released in the UK that I ordered from Rough Trade. One of them includes the semi-infamous live performance on the BBC of "Light Enough to Travel", a song that contains a naughty word and that allegedly caused the host of the show they were on to do a double take at the thought of it going out over the UK airwaves. Whoops! Anyway, if you're familiar with them, there's nothing really new in the article, but they're a great band and it's great to see them get press.
Posted at 6:31 PM
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Dan Gillmor says that the biggest problem facing the financial markets today is panic. I don't know, I think that maybe the massive sell-off hitting the markets the past couple of weeks is a rational reaction.
Arthur Anderson was a big company; they audited a lot of books. And before the Enron debacle, it wasn't exactly a secret that their corporate specialty was acting as corporate lapdogs. The reason the government went after them for Enron is because what happened there made it crystal clear that the company hadn't learned a damned thing from its previous close encounters with justice in the cases of Waste Management and Sunbeam. There were a lot of companies that felt pressure during the go-go days of the Internet boom to compete with the sexy stocks in Sillycon Valley for capital. And as a result, there were a lot of companies that cooked the books. As Dick Cheney would be happy to tell you, Anderson provided lots of services for their clients. They were like the easy girl who would open her legs for anyone. You want an auditor who will let you get away with anything? Go talk to Arthur Anderson. My dad had complained for years that Anderson were nothing but a bunch of yes men. "You want to count simultaneous bandwidth trades as bookable revenue? Go ahead! Sounds great to us!" With all the dot.coms sucking the oxygen out of the market in the late 90s and the added incentive of their own stock options to pump up, I honestly can't imagine that there aren't dozens more Enrons and WorldComs out there just waiting to be exposed.
The Economist this week, in an article entitled "Stop This Dream" (on page 63 of the print edition, only available to subscribers on their web site), examines the stock market, and among other things points out that by historical standards, price-to-earning ratios are well more than double the norm. Historically, the ratio is 15; even after the past couple of weeks in America, today the number is 40. The Economist thinks that the S&P 500 may need to drop by another 50% to bring the market back into equilibrium.
I don't consider moving a substantial portion of my retirement savings into bonds to be panic. I consider it a prudent move right now. I still have a not insubstantial portion of my money in stocks, but given that I believe that the market is still far overvalued, I think getting the hell out can be a rational reaction. When I moved my money, I said that I would look at the market in six months and decide whether stocks were more reasonably priced or whether bonds still looked like a better investment, and I intend to stick with that. Right now, stocks look like a bad bet. Rationally speaking, that is.
Posted at 9:33 PM
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Jeremy Keith at Adactio.com has a picture on his site that any self-respecting web geek should find damned amusing.
Posted at 8:41 PM
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One of my favorite bands, The Handsome Family, has a new Internet-only CD of crap that wasn't good enough for a real record. Of course, I had to snap it right up. This is an interesting trend I'm seeing a lot of lately, bands that make own-release CDs to sell via their web sites. I think this maybe started with them making tour-only CDs. Sometimes they're live, sometimes they're demos. It's fascinating to see this happen. It didn't used to work like this in the old days. Oh, maybe once in a while a band would release some demos through a fan club, like the tape XTC released through Little Express in Canada back in 1987, but it wasn't a common thing. Or at least it wasn't something you could get your hands on without being well-connected. But today, the confluence of the easy availability of CD burners and the ability of the net to publicize things among a small group of devoted fans, the practice seems to be expanding. The other day, I received a package of CDs that I ordered from Calexico's web site that are not available in stores! And next week or thereabouts, I should be receiving a few Billy Bragg official bootleg CDs. Not to say that these are CD-Rs, mind you; the ones I've seen are actual full-fledged CDs, not something that the musicians burned on their Macs in their spare time. But the advent of home CD recorders, home studios, etc., makes it easy for the artists to set up their own cottage industry in parallel to the Big Bad Record Industry. I'm not sure if it's possible for someone to bypass the industry completely like so much hype claimed in recent years, but I think something like this that adds another revenue stream for artists while not hurting the fans is a good thing.
I wonder if online stations would have to pay royalties for broadcasting these official bootleg CDs. I suspect not, since they're not officially released, and stations like KPIG which have shut down their webcast of commercially-recorded music (disappointing some high-profile fans) are continuing by streaming nothing but music they've recorded live. I'm not sure I'd want to be the one to take on the RIAA over this, but it's an interesting thought.
Posted at 8:56 AM
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Christina Wodtke has an interesting post about language and the difficulties of translation on Elegant Hack, illustrated by an amusing sound clip of John Cage (posted on Derek Rogerson's site) talking about a variety of translations of a haiku he was interested in. I was tempted to post my lengthy reply here, but I posted on her site instead. You can read it there.
(Incidentally, I originally tried to post the title of this entry in Polish, but it was tough to overcome the western encoding of the page. Setting the language to Polish with a span tag wasn't enough, and BBEdit's ability to translate odd characters to character entities doesn't extend beyond western languages. Dreamweaver understands the different encodings, but I think I would have to change the encoding of my site to some form of Unicode to get the browser to allow me to post the Polish letters. And then I'm not sure if the database behind this site would handle it gracefully. So instead, you get a title auf Deutsche.)
Posted at 7:36 PM
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Alan Lomax died yesterday; he was quite possibly the most important figure in American music (and yes, that includes Elvis Presley; without Lomax, Elvis wouldn't have been possible). Anyone who has ever listened to country, folk, blues, bluegrass, or any other form of what's known today as "roots" music, owes Alan Lomax and his father John a tremendous debt of gratitude for the work they did collecting and preserving the music of an era that was dying even as they recorded it. And since many of those musical genres were part of the stew that made up rock and roll, anyone who has ever enjoyed that form of music owes the Lomaxes a massive debt, too. An important part of our cultural heritage would likely have disappeared without the efforts of Alan and John Lomax. And if they were occasionally guilty of bad taste and a little condescension, such as their insistence that Leadbelly wear prison stripes in performance shortly after his pardon and release from prison, well, you don't hear it in the music they recorded.
Posted at 11:07 PM
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Spaceweather.com has some beautiful pictures of the sun blowing up. CNN has an explanation. And the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory web site is a mother lode of amazing pictures of the sun in all its volatile glory.
I pay attention to this stuff because every time the sun does something like this, it changes conditions on shortwave radio and I can sometimes hear stuff that I can't hear at other times. But I also just love looking at the pictures.
Posted at 9:37 PM
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Steve Jobs, in this morning's keynote address from Macworld Expo, described Sherlock 3, the update to the Macintosh's built in search tool, as making a move toward web services. But the demonstration didn't really have much to do with what people like Dave Winer or companies like Amazon describe as web services, based on XML-RPC or SOAP. I know Apple built support for those two protocols into Mac OS X 10.1, but now I'm curious if Sherlock is now built around that. It would make an interesting front end to web services. Nobody seems to have picked up on this; maybe I'm just misinterpreting what Jobs said. Maybe I'll have to wait until 10.2 comes out to see any press on this.
Unfortunately, one other thing that came out of the keynote today is a nearly complete lack of upgrade pricing for the new version of Mac OS X that was demonstrated today. I paid for the Mac OS X Public Beta. I paid for the release version of Mac OS X 10.0. I paid for whatever portion of a new computer goes to support OS development, which is to say, I bought a second copy of Mac OS X 10.0 when I bought this new computer. Then I bought the upgrade CDs to Mac OS X 10.1 because none of the dealers around here knew from nothing about the supposed free upgrade. And for this, I've been rewarded with a user interface that is still miles behind what they spent 17 years developing as Mac OS 9 and its predecessors. I boot into Mac OS X to do web development work, but for the vast majority of the rest of my computer time, I'm sticking with Mac OS 9. And I'll be damned if I'm going to spend $129 to get yet another half-baked OS from Apple. Others have described much better than me the overwhelming sense of frustration that comes with using Aqua, Mac OS X's user interface. It's doubly frustrating because user interface is something that Apple did so well for so long, redefining what using a computer meant. It astonishes me that of all companies, they no longer consider following basic precepts of usability important, since it's what gave the Macintosh enough of an edge to survive. I can't believe that the number one requested new feature in the Finder was spring-loaded folders when the Dock is crying out to be axed in favor of a return to the user-configurable Apple menu and the application menu, which worked so much better and didn't muddle the difference between running applications and unlaunched applications. I would be willing to pay up to $30 for the next version of OS X; $130 is just totally out of the question. I know things are tough in the computer business, but I refuse to be milked like that. I don't expect Apple to come up with a usable interface for at least another two years, so if they don't reconsider this, I'll be sticking with OS 9.2.2 for my daily work and OS X 10.1 for UNIXish stuff. Feh.
Posted at 9:11 PM
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Dave Kernick, keeper of the incredibly useful Interval Signals page (well, it's incredibly useful if you try to listen to distant radio signals on shortwave in unusual languages where sometimes the only way you can ID the station is by their signature tune; it's probably just silly for the rest of you), went to Afghanistan and brought back some pictures. Some are mostly of interest to radio geeks like me, but the rest would be of interest to anyone.
Posted at 7:53 AM
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Today's the big day that the Macintosh faithful have been waiting for: the opening of Macworld Expo in New York. This is going to be the first east coast one in close to ten years that I've missed. I didn't feel right about taking time off from the new job after being there such a short time. So I'll be following along on the web, just like I do for the San Francisco shows. The rumors sites have been abuzz for weeks with breathless speculation about what His Steveness will announce, but so far it appears either that the Apple security team has clamped down pretty well or that the most exciting news is going to be a bigger screen for the iMac and a bigger hard drive for the iPod. Yawn. We'll see; Steve's keynote is this morning, and I expect the usual suspects will keep running commentary on whatever he announces. Maybe he'll announce a return to a usable interface for Mac OS X, but I doubt it. Pity; that would really be exciting news.
You know, in a way the web makes these trade shows superfluous anyway. The ability to keep up with the news in virtually real time and the tendency of companies to offer their show specials via the web as well means that the big thing you miss these days by not showing up is the traffic. Still, it would be nice to be there.
Posted at 7:16 AM
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Most of what Mark Pilgrim has been posting in his 30 Days to a More Accessible Weblog series hasn't been new to me, but today's entry contains something I hadn't seen before: a way to hide CSS from Netscape 4.x in a single stylesheet, rather than having separate stylesheets where the LINKed one is for Netscape and the @imported one is for everyone else. Damn, that's clever. I'm always impressed by the lengths web designers will go to to discover these bugs so they can exploit them. From the further readings on Mark's post today, it appears that the credit for this technique goes to Caio Chassot.
Posted at 6:59 AM
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Speaking of minimalist HTML, here's the antithesis. British Telecom spent a million pounds Sterling to create a site called Connected Earth that I'm told is about the history of commununications, yet forgot to make sure they would be able to communicate. I say I'm told it's about that because I was unable to get through to the site. Instead, I was presented with a dialog box that told me I needed to use Internet Explorer 5 or greater (I was using IE 5.1.5 for the Mac), that I needed to have at least Flash 5 plugin loaded (I have Flash 6 loaded), and that I needed to have QuickTime loaded (a Mac without QuickTime loaded? Don't make me laugh!) No wonder BT is going down the tubes.
By contrast, when I was the webmaster for Bell Labs, we managed to put together a decent site that served as a tutorial about how telecommunications works for literally orders of magnitude less than what BT spent. (Don't blame me for the look and feel of the site today; they've changed it completely in the six months since I left. And damnit, the pages used to validate when I was webmaster, too.) BT probably spent more on lunch than we did on this site. Not that Lucent was incapable of spending BT-like sums. There was another subsite on the Bell Labs site, one that I had nothing to do with developing, that cost quite a substantial fraction of what BT spent on their site. It was intended to stay up for a week. It wasn't quite as useless, but for the money they spent on it, they could have kept me as an employee for another decade at least instead of laying me off. (Another link stolen from Zeldman.)
Posted at 10:20 PM
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Zeldman points at the Minimalist Web Project, dedicated to chronicling those web sites that display a minimalist design aesthetic yet are still attractive. I've long used the term minimalist to describe my preferred approach to web design. We'll see if any of my sites are attractive enough to be accepted.
Posted at 9:58 PM
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This Flash version of the old board game Battleship is damned addictive. About the only thing it's missing is the sound of an annoying eleven year old whining "Hey! You sunk my battleship!" (Found via Flazoom.)
Posted at 10:24 AM
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Steve Albini reviews Mission of Burma, then interviews them. At the very end, Clint Conley tells him that the first band he ever saw was the Velvet Underground at a high school in Summit, New Jersey, in 1965, when he was, like, nine years old. Damn, that explains a lot. I remember reading about that gig somewhere in one of the dozen or so books about the Velvet Underground that Laura has.
(Incidentally, I don't know how my brother missed linking to Roger Miller's personal web site in his snarky post that obliquely replied to my post about how Burma wasn't as obscure as they're being made out to be now. Feh. That's the thanks I get for introducing him to Burma in the first place. Ungrateful little bastard.)
Posted at 6:57 PM
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Not too far from where we live, there was a utopian community in the 1840s and 50s called The Phalanx, based on somebody's pre-Marxist socialist ideals. To this day there's a road in Middletown called Phalanx Road that I pass on my way to work every morning. Laura found a page on a web site about Monmouth County history that talks about the eleven year history of The Phalanx. The book the article was taken from was written in 1885. I find it interesting that the author mentions that the locals at the time the commune existed and in 1885 as well thought it was a hotbed of free love, even though it wasn't, because that myth about the commune exists to this day in this area. It's also interesting to see that even in such an enlightened community, the women were still expected to do the housework.
Posted at 12:44 PM
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You can always count on Molly Ivins to give the straight scoop when it comes to Dubya. (I like the bit about New Orleans toward the end, too.) It seems like some papers are starting to pick up on the insider trading angle of the story, too. Like, how is it that a stock that was basically illiquid, trading only a few thousand shares a day, could be snapped up? Well, it seems there was an anonymous buyer who just happened to want shares of a stock that would drop to a third of the sales price within a week. Seems fishy to me, but apparently it didn't to the SEC at at time, which coincidentally had its head appointed by Dubya's father, and has as its General Counsel a man who had been Dubya's personal lawyer and who negotiated the sale of the Texas Rangers to a group including Dubya. That was a deal the sale of the Harken stock was supposed to pay off loans for.
I don't believe the Resident can deal with this crisis in the market, given all the baggage he brings to the table. I just can't take seriously a suggestion that corporate officers take personal responsibility for the financial reports of their companies when it comes from a man who blames everyone he can think of for the fact that he blew off the SEC for nine months on a matter it was clearly his responsibility to take care of. I think it's a good time to get out of stocks and into bonds, because I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg on exposure of corporate malfeeance (as the Resident would say). And if Congress could spend seven years investigating whether Bill Clinton got blown in the White House, I think they damned well ought to start investigating whether Dubya broke the law. And I haven't even mentioned Dick Cheney....
Posted at 11:17 PM
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Four newspapers and a news wire service in England are facing legal problems, including possible jail time for their editors, for refusing to hand over leaked documents about a potential takeover of a rival brewer to lawyers from a Belgian brewing company from whence they were leaked:
David Sandy, partner at Simmons & Simmons, solicitors for Interbrew, spent two hours travelling across London in a dark blue Skoda to personally serve legal notices to officials of the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Times and the Independent. Later in the day, Geert Linnebank, editor in chief of Reuters news agency, also received legal papers.
I guess the lawyer business doesn't pay very well in England. You would think an expensive solicitor could afford something a little tonier than a Skoda, an inexpensive Czech-built automobile. It reminds me of the old joke about Skodas. How do you double the value of a Skoda before selling it? Fill up the gas tank. (In fairness, I know that Skodas are much nicer now than they were when that joke was current back in the days of the Berlin Wall....) So what is England doing right that we don't do?
Posted at 10:49 PM
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I see the All-Star game ended in a tie for only the second time ever. I've got the perfect solution for that, taken from the sport I defected to after the 1994 strike: penalty kicks. Put Bud Selig and Donald Fehr in a room and have them kick each other until one cries uncle. No, wait, that's the solution for the oncoming strike....
Posted at 9:36 AM
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I don't like to steal links, especially not from my brother, but Salon has an article about one of my absolute favorite bands, Mission of Burma, that I might not have noticed but for his post. While I enjoyed reading it, and pretty much everything else I've read about Burma recently, I have to say that everyone is getting something terribly wrong. Burma were not ignored during their lifetime. I remember when Signals, Calls and Marches came in to the radio station I worked at in college. We damned near played that record to death. If you were paying attention, Burma's brilliance shone madly even in the day, not merely in retrospect. I thought Michael Azzerad's book, Our Band Could Be Your Life, was a great read, but it seems to have set off a ton of revisionist history about Mission of Burma. I don't know, maybe State College, Pennsylvania, was a weird little hotbed of Burmaism, but everyone I knew loved their music, even though it was impossible to find the records at any of the stores in town.
I did eventually find a copy of Signals, Calls and Marches somewhere, but it was damned hard. I never did find an original copy of Vs. I got a lead on some copies at Midnight Music in NYC around 1987, but by the time I got there, they were gone. (Interestingly, within minutes after I left the store, dejected at not finding a copy of the album, I read in the Village Voice about the impending release of the Rykodisc compilation.) And that may have been the source of Burma's so-called obscurity, the fact that they had lousy distribution, and perhaps a reluctance to tour (insecurity?). But everyone I know who heard the records, and that was a lot of people, loved them, swore by them. Burma was huge among the crowd I hung with, and we knew at the time that they were one of the best bands around. They stood out, head and shoulders above their contemporaries, and we knew it. They didn't reach Nirvana-like sales, but who did back then? The Azzerad book and the slew of articles that have come in its wake seem determined to position Burma as the greatest band you never heard of, but damnit, everyone I knew listened to them back in the day, and we knew how good they were.
Posted at 11:18 PM
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Our friend Shirley Beth Tobias had her five favorite bookmarks published in the Columbus Dispatch yesterday. Now she's World Famous in central Ohio. She would like you to know, however, that the correct site for the Kodak birdcam is birdcam.kodak.com, without the extraneous www.
Posted at 9:27 PM
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One of my duties at The New Job is bringing the online help system for their main application up-to-date. It's a small company, so I'm the only writer there, and I was mentioning on my pal Christina's blog how much I appreciated editors from my days as a tech writer. Hey, you gotta love someone whose job it is to make you look good. :-)
Daniela Meleo saw my post there and pointed me to a book written by Jean Weber, a tech editor/writer of long standing in Australia about editing online help systems. I had a quick look at it and it was immediately clear that the author had plenty of experience in the trenches, because her first chapter, after telling you about the importance of planning, task analysis, outlining, etc., has a section entitled "What do you do when there's no plan and no time?" When I saw that, I plunked down the eight bucks for the downloadable version of the book. It's also good to have something that's a bit more recent than my other reference on the topic of online help, William Horton's classic Designing and Writing Online Documentation. My edition of that is the 1990 one, but even the 1994 would be getting a little long in tooth at this point. Incidentally, I took a course from Horton in multimedia on the cheap back years ago when I worked for AT&T. He's an excellent teacher. I wish he would update the book. But Weber's book looks like filling the gap quite nicely, thank you.
Posted at 9:19 PM
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BBC Radio 3 is rerunning two World Routes programs that feature Andy Kershaw and a trip he took to Haiti. The BBC archives all their programs online for a week, so if you go there between now and next Saturday, you can hear the first program, about the traditional music of Haiti. Next week, they'll be running the second program he did, which focused on more contemporary music. Andy's been to Haiti a number of times, and it's probably his favorite country, so the programs are chock full of great insights and excellent music, most if not all performed live for Andy's tape recorder. Great stuff.
Posted at 9:36 AM
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Lots of stuff about patriotism around Blogistan the past few days (and I don't even look at the warbloggers). Not that that's surprising, given what's happened over the past year. I've always had an ambivalent attitude about it. I feel vaguely uncomfortable about the flag, and resent having it shoved in my face or down my throat. I never liked pledging allegiance to the flag, although pledging it to the republic for which it stood was fine by me (please keep God out of it, though). Whenever I hear Sousa, I start singing along: "Be kind to your web footed friends / For a duck may be somebody's mother...." The symbols of patriotism just plain don't do anything for me.
But last autumn, in the wake of September 11, one person on a mailing list I subscribe to started advocating that licenses be required to participate in the net, and made the claim that "Freedom of Speech and of the Press is one thing, freedom to offend the majority is sickening."
I was appalled. I was sickened. I was pissed. And I let loose with both barrels.
And with that, the roots of my patriotism were exposed. America isn't a flag, or some monuments, or some music. It's an idea, or rather a few ideas that came out of one simple truth, that each human has inherent value. The idea that speech should be regulated, or that offending the majority was grounds for stifling someone, was and is repugnant to me, to the very core of my being, and the fact that my oh-so-patriotic friend was trying to gag people with the flag to shut them up made me furious. Talk about missing the forest for the trees. Speech that offends the majority is exactly what the First Amendment protects. The remedy for bad speech is more speech. And more speech is what I gave him.
The USA is a great country not because we have a bunch of stars and stripes, or because there's a statue in New York harbor, or because we gather together to watch fireworks every year, or whatever other visible manifestations of patriotism you choose to think of. The USA is a great country because of the stuff that's baked into us as we grow up, the idea that every person has boundless opportunities, that each of us is important, that we are free and able to say anything, and that there's no higher power allowed to tell us otherwise. We are important. Our lives mean something. And if America doesn't always live up to those ideals, we're free to call ourselves on it. Some times I think we miss this in our zeal for the physical manifestations.
So forgive me if I don't join you in waving the flag. I'm just expressing my love of country in my own sweet way.
Posted at 9:29 PM
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Dan Gillmor notes a web site (which he found through a page set up by Ben Edelman) that retransmits terrestrial television signals over the net, and asks if it's legal. This story sounds very familiar; there was a Canadian company called I Crave TV a couple of years ago that tried the same thing but was shut down by a judge in Pittsburgh (where the company was originally founded before moving to Canada to try to take advantage of a more forgiving legal atmosphere). This article from Wired News in March points out that this new company is not officially related to the old one, even though it's using more-or-less the same name. So I guess the short answer, Dan, is that no, it's not legal. At least not in Pittsburgh.
Posted at 12:12 PM
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Last night Laura and I braved the miserable 90+ degree heat and 90+% humidity to venture into Red Bank and watch the fireworks. It's always a spectacular show. Last time I'd been was about ten years ago, but Laura had never been, and her friend Katya promised we'd have great seats.
We did.
Katya's a member of the Monmouth Boat Club and just about half insane, so she managed to gather up chairs from all the people she invited and set them up right on the riverbank at 2 in the afternoon, then hold that ground until reinforcements started showing up around 7. She also got pizza for everyone. :-) Thanks, Katya!
The fireworks in Red Bank are done by the Grucci family, who also do the Macy's fireworks in New York the following day. I've heard that they use Red Bank as their dress rehearsal for New York, but I have no idea if that's true. All I know is that the show is spectacular. And according to their web site, it's of the highest caliber that they perform, "world class". It looks like they're only doing 11 world class events this year. Red Bank is one of them, and we had front row seats. It's pretty amazing.
Usually, the only bad things about going to see the fireworks in Red Bank are 1) finding parking when you get there, and 2) getting out of town once they're over. Red Bank is not a town blessed with abundant parking. So, following the recommendation of one of my co-workers, we cheated. We took the train from Long Branch to Red Bank. Only two stops away, but plenty of empty spots in the parking lot. :-)
If you've ever wondered how fireworks are created, The Discovery Channel has a nice brief explanation.
Posted at 7:35 AM
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Laura and I were in Philadelphia this past weekend for a concert, and for some reason, I was reminded of an old college friend of mine from Philly, Lisa Marie Russo. She used to work at WHYY-TV in Philadelphia, and back in the day, she tried to get me a job there working for a new local radio program called "Fresh Air". I wonder whatever became of that show....
So this morning I was thinking of her again and searched for her name on Google. Most of what came up was about a film producer in London. Hmmmm. I don't remember if she went on the Manchester exchange program back in college, but I think she might have. One of the articles I found was from a local Philly weekly rag that mentioned that the film producer in London was a former producer at WHYY. Neat!
Another one of the links I found was to a short film she produced called Clueless (not the big hit film), which you can watch on the Atom Films web site. It's a clever little ten minute short. The site says she also wrote it, but the credits at the end of the film say the director wrote it. Anyway, it's a neat little film, even if I had to scrounge through the source code of the window that came up to grab the URL to get it to play directly in my RealPlayer so I could turn up the volume well enough to hear it (it was too quiet to hear otherwise). The My Movies site has a Windows Media Player version of the film, but you have to register to see it.
It's great to see that an old friend from school is actually succeeding in what we majored in.
Posted at 8:10 AM
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Andrew O'Hehir has a very nice World Cup wrapup in Salon that talks about what an amazing feat Ronaldo's performance was. For someone like me who basically watches soccer every four years, it just seemed like he picked up where he left off in 1998 (except for the final that year), but O'Hehir does a nice job of making the point that Ronaldo had basically been out of action for almost the entire past four years between World Cups, and had been largely written off as washed up at 25 due to injuries. His performance in the World Cup was a marvel, and if the Brazilians weren't always playing the Beautiful Game, they were certainly more fun to watch than just about any other team out there.
There was no goal that I saw in this World Cup to match Michael Owen's amazing 40 yard dash in 1998, but no matter, this World Cup was one for the ages, from the very first game. Strange, though, that a World Cup noted for its upsets and the progression of unheralded teams should end in a final match between the two countries that have won it the most times. Ah, it was a fun run; I'm going to miss getting up at 2:30 in the morning....
Posted at 7:45 PM
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Belarus, home of the Last Great Soviet-Style Dictator, Aleksandr Lukashenko, is unlikely to get his fondest wish, union with Russia, something that Lukashenko pushed hard for when Boris Yeltsin was in power. Vladimir Putin is considerably less enamored of his neighbor to the west. So says The Guardian, anyway. Lukashenko is a real tyrant; a few years ago, he forced a number of western embassies out of their locations because he wanted their land for a grand Presidential palace. Never mind that embassies are sovereign land of the countries they represent. No time for such niceties of international law in Belarus. But then, that's nothing compared to the horrors he visits upon his own people. The Guardian speculates that the deteriorated relations between Russia and Belarus may spell trouble for Mr. Lukashenko. That can only be good for Belarus.
Posted at 7:15 PM
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Here's a better link about how the World Cup is better than sex. This story is uncluttered by all that unimportant stuff about sambaing and scoring goals and such.
Posted at 11:46 PM
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