"There is an internal dispute between those who imagine the world to suit their policy, and those who correct their policy to suit their realities of the world."—Albert Sorel
|W|P|82266969|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"If patriotism is 'the last refuge of a scoundrel,' it is not merely because evil deeds may be performed in the name of patriotism ... but because patriotic fervor can obliterate moral distinctions altogether."—Ralph Barton Perry, 1910
|W|P|82266917|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"He that preaches war is the devil's chaplain."—John Ray (1627-1705), English Proverbs, 1670
|W|P|82266888|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all. The bonds of words are too weak to bridle man's ambition, avarice, anger, and other passions, without the fear of some coercive power."—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
|W|P|82266873|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"If one party resolves to demand what the other resolves to refuse, the dispute can be determined only by arbitration; and between powers who have no common superiour, there is no other arbitrator than the sword."—Samuel Johnson: "Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland's Islands"
|W|P|82266857|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comYale has produced a Liberalism FAQ and a Conservatism FAQ. I don't know much about who produced these; they came via Metafilter. But they're remarkably clear, thoughtful, and even-handed.
|W|P|82241001|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFrom b3ta: "Comic book art collector Walt Parrish has an unusual hobby. He gets famous comic book artists to draw pictures of their characters on cliffs. It's amazing how many of them have responded to his idea."
|W|P|82232559|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI honestly can't tell if this is for real. The Madonna Inn is either a brilliantly deadpan lampoon of American kitsch, or (if it's real) a Superfund-worthy disaster of interior design. Click anything, it's all great.
|W|P|82232526|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoan to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoan, who gives us this assurance."—Bertrand Russell
"'Man is the noblest work of God.' Well, now, who found that out?"—Mark Twain
|W|P|82232293|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comOkay, three things:
- Blogger's "Remember Me" cookie is finally sticking, for reasons that pass understanding.
- In spare moments I've been surfing around to other random blogs, using NextBlog, and I'm continually struck at how many smart, thoughtful, anonymous observers there are in the world. And some very good writers.
- At the same time, I'm struck at how everybody (including me) is linking to the same damn things. At this moment, on blogdex, it's Guardian's best-blog winners, the make-your-own-Bush-speech thing, and an underwhelming optical illusion out of MIT. Are those the three most interesting things on the entire web today? Oscar Wilde said, "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
- There. See? Now I'm quoting Oscar Wilde! Arrrrrggghhh.
Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo has created a detailed web account of his 1971 "prison experiment," in which students were assigned the roles of prisoners and guards in an investigation into the psychology of prison life. The two-week study had to be terminated after only six days "because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated":
"Less than 36 hours into the experiment, Prisoner #8612 began suffering from acute emotional disturbance, disorganized thinking, uncontrollable crying, and rage. In spite of all of this, we had already come to think so much like prison authorities that we thought he was trying to 'con' us—to fool us into releasing him."
"When our primary prison consultant interviewed Prisoner #8612, the consultant chided him for being so weak, and told him what kind of abuse he could expect from the guards and the prisoners if he were in San Quentin Prison. #8612 was then given the offer of becoming an informant in exchange for no further guard harassment. He was told to think it over."
"During the next count, Prisoner #8612 told other prisoners, 'You can't leave. You can't quit.' That sent a chilling message and heightened their sense of really being imprisoned. #8612 then began to act 'crazy,' to scream, to curse, to go into a rage that seemed out of control. It took quite a while before we became convinced that he was really suffering and that we had to release him."
|W|P|82194558|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Ladies and gentlemen, America stands committed to wickedness ... including my own. Without persistent poverty on a massive scale, the United States would be destroyed. There can be no law of morality in my country. Saddam Hussein is great! We created suffering by [our] broken treaties; above all, we fear peace and freedom."
You can build your own Bush speech out of assorted stock phrases—and play it back!—here.
|W|P|82141405|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comReportedly the National Association of Realtors is considering a new rule that would make the multiple listing service available only to agents, not to customers. Apparently this is aimed at discount brokerages like eRealty, which let customers do their own research in exchange for a lower commission.
They'll leave up Realtor.com, but that's because it withholds some information, according to a ZipRealty executive. He believes that site is designed to produce customer leads, not to give a shopper sufficient information for decision-making. "Its purpose is to make the phone ring," he says.
Sounds like real-estate agents will soon join the ranks of stock brokers and travel agents, whose industries monopolized information but added comparatively little value themselves. I think we're getting value out of our current agent, but she's really earning her money at the back end, in organizing inspections and referrals and managing the paperwork. Any industry that tries to survive by withholding information is doomed today, I think.
|W|P|82141245|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"There's two things I wouldn't do on film—and I said this when I was in my 20s," says Mel Gibson. "I will never play myself, if it ever comes to that, and I will never play Jesus."
But now the devout Catholic says he wants to direct a movie, Passion, about the last 12 hours of Jesus' life. And he wants to do it entirely in Latin and Aramaic, without subtitles.
And you thought Hamlet was overreaching. "No one wants to touch something in two dead languages. They think I'm insane. Maybe I am."
|W|P|82107503|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"The United States' entire approach to empire looks quintessentially Roman. It's as if the Romans bequeathed a blueprint for how imperial business should be done—and today's Americans are following it religiously."
So writes Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, after interviewing leading British historians of the ancient world in preparing a BBC documentary. He quotes Charles Krauthammer: "No country has been as dominant culturally, economically, technologically and militarily in the history of the world since the Roman empire."
"Anti-Americans like to believe that an operation in Iraq might be proof that the U.S. is succumbing to the temptation that ate away at Rome: overstretch," Freedland writes. "But it's just as possible that the U.S. is merely moving into what was the second phase of Rome's imperial history, when it grew frustrated with indirect rule through allies and decided to do the job itself. Which is it? Is the U.S. at the end of its imperial journey, or on the brink of its most ambitious voyage? Only the historians of the future can tell us that."
|W|P|82107098|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI see that Rodney Brooks' company iRobot has been hired to explore the Great Pyramid, and in fact found a new chamber there in 1993. I'm still reading Flesh and Machines, which isn't very good. It's badly edited and seems to have been written off the cuff. And Brooks shows surprisingly little imagination in trying to predict the future of robotics. But the content is interesting, and at the end I think he may address transhumanism.
|W|P|82052593|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comGoogle's new News is a model of unbiased reporting: "This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors. No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page."
I hate to say it, but I really like this idea. I don't see an RSS feed, though ...
|W|P|82040055|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIt's official: the tech bubble is over. A Monday selloff sent the Nasdaq composite index to its lowest point since Sept. 12, 1996.
In the past two years, the collapse has destroyed $4.4 trillion of wealth in the Nasdaq composite stocks—including $1 trillion in Silicon Valley's 150 largest companies.
But "the big problem is that there is no earnings visibility," says one analyst. "There's nothing that would make you say, 'Hey, I can see things are going to get rolling again.'"
|W|P|82039867|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comYeee dawgy! Sharon just locked in a 30-year fixed mortgage at 5.75 percent! With no points! Yeee dawgy!
|W|P|82004044|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is ... the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of existence."—John Quincy Adams
|W|P|81989260|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comOkay, I am resolved to play one serious game per week and analyze it seriously. Here's this week's, fortunately a victory against a stronger player:
|W|P|81964626|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
I feel pretty good about this house! We did the inspection this afternoon, and turned up nothing really significant—just a lot of little things we can ask them to fix. The seller subcontracted all the work himself when he was building it, and intended to stay in the home for his retirement, so it's got insulated walls and copper pipes and a lot of other premium upgrades. The inspector called it a true custom house. And Sharon and I agreed that the house itself looks very well suited to us, even apart from its condition. Good layout, no stairs, a decent amount of storage, quiet neighborhood, good commute to the park, and it's in the watershed, so it's protected from too much development. I think we picked the right one. And interest rates are around 6% now—I'm hoping we can lock in a mortgage early next week, even though the closing's about 60 days off.
It's weird—a year ago I was living in a different house, with a different job, in another state. It's been a stressful year, but I think I'll be back to "normal" pretty soon.
|W|P|81933646|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMore evidence of the need for parenting licenses (as if we needed any): "The girl, who police believe is just four years old, got into the car. Her mother looked around and then for some unknown reason the assault began. According to officials, the little girl received at least five initial blows before she was hit and shaken several more times. At one point during the assault the woman grabbed the child by her hair. Once in her car seat, she was punched in the face more than a dozen times. The assault lasts just over 25 seconds."
|W|P|81872118|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHey, kids! What do you get when you cross unspeakable marine disaster with inflatable party-time fun? The Titanic Super Slide, that's what! "The spacious center cabin features an easy-to-climb stairway with rails for safety."
|W|P|81874003|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI've been interested in aphorisms for a long time now (Montaigne, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius), but I've only recently discovered Piet Hein (1905-1996), a scientist, architect, and poet who is revered in his native Denmark but largely unknown elsewhere.
Hein discovered the Soma cube and created the super-ellipse. And he was also interested in building a bridge between science and the humanities, as was C.P. Snow in The Two Cultures, which I also just finished.
Anyway, all this relates to aphorisms because Hein wrote thousands of "Grooks," short, often humorous poems that often carry deep insights:
PROBLEMS
Problems worthy
of attack
prove their worth
by hitting back.
A PSYCHOLOGICAL TIP
Whenever you're called on to make up your mind,
And you're hampered by not having any,
The best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find,
Is simply by spinning a penny.
No�not so that chance shall decide the affair
While you're passively standing there moping;
But the moment the penny is up in the air,
You suddenly know what you're hoping.
Hein wrote these in several languages, but I think he's out of print in English. He had the bad luck to be born into a country with a relatively obscure language. I'll keep looking. It makes me wonder how many other great minds of the past were cursed by geography.
|W|P|81831079|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comRejection letters sent to Henry James:
"A duller story I have never read. It wanders through a deep mire of affected writing and gets nowhere, tells no tale, stirs no emotion but weariness. The professional critics who mistake an indirect and roundabout use of words for literary art will call it an excellent piece of work; but people who have any blood in their veins will yawn and throw it down�if, indeed, they ever pick it up."
"It is surely the n+1st power of Jamesiness. ... It gets decidedly on one's nerves. It is like trying to make out page after page of illegible writing. The sense of effort becomes acutely exasperating. Your spine curls up, your hair-roots prickle & you want to get up and walk around the block. There is no story�oh! but none at all ..."
|W|P|81833058|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"There's an old saying in Tennessee�I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee�that says, fool me once, shame on�shame on you. Fool me�you can't get fooled again."�George W. Bush, Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002
|W|P|81822234|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI bought a house today! Last night we made an offer on a three-bedroom ranch in northern Raleigh, about a 20-minute commute to the office. We went back and forth a few times today, and came out at a better price than I thought we'd get. Interest rates are about 6 percent now, and they agreed to close in late November, which means we don't have to break our lease (or not by much, anyway).
This doesn't feel nearly as momentous as the first time. Now it's just one more project, and another onerous move, though this one shouldn't be nearly as bad as the last one. And it will be good to get out of our cramped little apartment in bullet-riddled Durham.
|W|P|81785364|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWell, this is just getting pathetic. Epic is now gluing its CDs inside Walkmans before sending them to reviewers. They even glue the headphones in, to prevent piracy. How analog. The genie's out of the bottle; no amount of rubber cement will keep it in now. (Fittingly, Details' reviewer has already freed his copy.)
|W|P|81730822|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIf Cole Porter were alive today, I think Robert Christgau would call his songs slick, inauthentic, and self-consciously commercial. He'd have to; they are. So were Irving Berlin's and Rogers and Hart's. So are all the classic American popular songs. A strong melody and a sympathetic, cohesive lyrical idea—that's what makes a great song. Everyone agrees on that.
So I'm kind of pissed off at Chuck Klosterman's assessment of Billy Joel in the New York Times Magazine: "If cool were a color, it would be black�and Joel would be kind of a burnt orange. The bottom line is that it's never cool to look like you're trying ... and Joel tries really, really hard."
When have you heard anyone talk like that outside of high school? I'm not a particular Billy Joel fan, but he does have 16 platinum albums and membership in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He studied piano (apparently this counts against him) and he writes intelligent, well-crafted songs. Surely we should consider the songs when evaluating a songwriter?
"He's not good enough," Christgau says. "He and Don Henley are really notable for how resentful they are about their lack of respect. You don't catch Celine Dion complaining about a lack of critical respect, and she's a lot worse than Billy Joel. But she doesn't care. Billy Joel cares deeply about that respect, and he wants it bad."
Does anyone remember Irving Berlin's personality? Does anyone care? Rock criticism has become the worst sort of in-club politics. Celine Dion doesn't suck because she's popular, she sucks because her output is musically undistinguished and lyrically generic. Joel's is neither of those. But apparently rock critics consider neither music nor lyrics anymore.
|W|P|81721478|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Lord's Prayer, as given in the Hawaiian Pidgin New Testament:
�God, you our Fadda.
You stay inside da sky.
We like all da peopo know fo shua how you stay,
An dat you stay good an spesho,
An we like dem give you plenny respeck.
We like you come King fo everybody now.
We like everybody make jalike you like,
Ova hea inside da world,
Jalike da angel guys up inside da sky make jalike you like.
Give us da food we need fo today an every day.
Hemmo our shame, an let us go
Fo all da kine bad stuff we do to you,
Jalike us guys let da odda guys go awready,
And we no stay huhu wit dem
Fo all da kine bad stuff dey do to us.
No let us get chance fo do bad kine stuff,
But take us outa dea, so da Bad Guy no can hurt us.
Cuz you our King.
You get da real power,
An you stay awesome foeva.
Dass it!�
"People have a voice inside of them that talk to them. That is the voice that these people must listen to, because in everything you're going to do there is a wrong way and a right way, and if you listen good you will know the right way."—Bob Marley
|W|P|81666706|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comNow you can write a 6,000-character message and Project KEO will put it on a satellite that won't return to Earth for 52,000 years.
What could anyone say that will be remotely relevant (or even comprehensible) in the year 54,000? "Turn off the stove?"
|W|P|81636050|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Allah said, 'He who attacked you, attack him as he attacked you,' and also, 'The reward of evil is a similar evil,' and also, 'When you are punished, punish as you have been punished.'"
So wrote Al-Qa'ida spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith in a three-part article titled "In the Shadow of the Lances," originally posted on the website of the Center for Islamic Research and Studies.
Abu Gheith concludes, "We have not reached parity with them. We have the right to kill 4 million Americans—2 million of them children—and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons, so as to afflict them with the fatal maladies that have afflicted the Muslims because of the [Americans'] chemical and biological weapons."
I realize these guys are wackos, but he's citing chapter and verse: "The words of the sages on these verses are clear: Ibn Taimiyya [in his book] Al Ikhtiyarat Wa-Al-Fatawi; Ibn Al-Qayim in I'lam Al-Muqi'in and in Al-Hashiya; Al-Qurtubi in his Tafsir, Al-Nawawi in Al-Muhazab; Al-Shukani in Nayl Al-Awtar; and others, may Allah's mercy be upon them."
Did Allah really sanction revenge? If so, how has this religion survived even this long?
|W|P|81591842|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThere's now an H.P. Lovecraft search engine, inevitably called Cthuugle.
|W|P|81558924|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comSeptember 19 is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. It's also the 20th anniversary of the first smiley.
|W|P|81551194|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWhat if Ingmar Bergman did standup comedy?
|W|P|81550977|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comDamn. Warren Zevon has untreatable lung cancer. "I'm OK with it," he says, "but it'll be a drag if I don't make it till the next James Bond movie comes out."
I went home with the waitress
The way I always do
How was I to know
She was with the Russians too?
Well, he's a scrappy little guy, I'll give him that. "At some point we will certainly make the case concerning Iraq and its links to terrorism," a senior administration official told The Washington Post. "We still have to develop it more."
Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien says he asked the president specifically about links between al Qaeda and Iraq. He says Bush responded, "That is not the angle they're exploring now. The angle they're exploring is the production of weapons of mass destruction."
Meanwhile, Nelson Mandela told Newsweek, "The attitude of the United States of America is a threat to world peace. Because what [America] is saying is that if you are afraid of a veto in the Security Council, you can go outside and take action and violate the sovereignty of other countries. That is the message they are sending to the world. That must be condemned in the strongest terms. And you will notice that France, Germany, Russia, China are against this decision. It is clearly a decision that is motivated by George W. Bush�s desire to please the arms and oil industries in the United States of America."
|W|P|81501548|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."—George Bush, Aug. 27, 1988
"I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature."—Thomas Jefferson
"I do not believe in the divinity of Christ, and there are many other of the postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe."—William Howard Taft
"I do not believe in God because I do not believe in Mother Goose."—Clarence Darrow
"All thinking men are atheists."—Ernest Hemingway
"I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time."—Isaac Asimov
"I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people."—Katharine Hepburn
"Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever."—Sigmund Freud
"God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith ... and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. ... From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person."—Salman Rushdie
"I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: Nobody can prove that there is not between Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptic orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely."—Bertrand Russell
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."—Albert Einstein
"I'm an atheist, and I thank God for it."—George Bernard Shaw
|W|P|81500673|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMemepool presents the worst phrasebook ever written.
|W|P|81464487|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn the face of our national 9/11 anniversary depression, Kuro5hin thought it might be refreshing to list stuff that happened on other September 11ths:
- 1789: Alexander Hamilton was appointed treasury secretary.
- 1847: "Oh! Susanna" was first performed.
- 1931: Lucky Luciano whacked Salvatore Maranzano.
- 1965: The U.S. Army's 1st Cavalry Division arrived in Vietnam.
- 1970: The Ford Pinto hit the market.
- 1998: The Starr report was released on the web.
Maybe it is kind of depressing after all ...
|W|P|81469691|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
This is the UNext Bloomington office, the best group of people I've ever worked with, anywhere, ever. We were all laid off a year ago yesterday, the day before the WTC attack, after only a year and a half together. If I work another 30 years without finding such a smart, adaptive, fun group of people, I'll still be plenty satisfied.
We're only just now starting to discuss the layoff. Worrying about our personal circumstances seemed so petty in the face of a national crisis that I think a lot of us never really processed it. Happy anniversary, guys.
|W|P|81471030|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHere's an archive of international television coverage of 9/11.
|W|P|81458898|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMARY: Oh, Mom!
MOM: What's the matter, dear?
MARY: Do you remember when you told that I might have such strong feelings about a boy that it might be hard for me to decide what's right to do?
MOM: Yes, I remember. Why?
MARY: It was something like that tonight with Jeff. You know I like him an awful lot, and we have such fun at dances. But tonight the feelings between us kept getting stronger and stronger ...
Listen online to 19 hours of WJSV, an AM radio station in Washington, D.C., recorded on Sept. 21 ... 1939.
|W|P|81407929|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comPLAYBOY: How much did John's praise mean to you when he was alive?
PAUL: A lot, but I hardly ever remember it, actually. There wasn't a lot of it flying about! I remember one time when we were making Help! in Austria. We'd been out skiing all day for the film and so we were all tired. I usually shared a room with George. But on this particular occasion, I was in with John. We were taking our huge skiing boots off and getting ready for the evening and stuff, and we had one of our cassettes. It was one of the albums, probably Revolver or Rubber Soul ... I'm a bit hazy about which one. It may have been the one that had my song, "Here, There and Everywhere." There were three of my songs and three of John's songs on the side we were listening to. And for the first time ever, he just tossed it off, without saying anything definite, "Oh, I probably like your songs better than mine." And that was it! That was the height of praise I ever got off him. (mumbles) "I probably like your songs better than mine." Whoops! There was no one looking, so he could say it.
|W|P|81371209|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn my arms
I held a babe,
Treasure of
the earth;
Tightly I clasped
its form—
The miracle
of birth.
Oh, yeah?
|W|P|81359194|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI was going to put off getting a haircut for another week or so, but apparently Jesus wants me to do it now.
|W|P|81358967|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Thank goodness they got those buildings. I've always hated them! They're so ugly."—A New York woman, overheard in a London airport on the day of the attacks.
Salon has published a collection of inappropriate responses to 9/11.
|W|P|81316109|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comJeezy-peezy! AP lists changes to Americans' legal rights by the Bush administration and the USA Patriot Act following September 11.
"Government may jail Americans indefinitely without a trial."
"Government may search and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable cause to assist terror investigation."
You know what we need? We need a political party that believes in a smaller, less intrusive government—one that believes in individual freedoms and that mistrusts Washington. Now, what could we call such a party ... ?
|W|P|81279693|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comVerdi can make anything look grand.
|W|P|81244382|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comLast year, the Chaos Computer Club celebrated its 20th anniversary by turning a Berlin office building into the world's largest computer monitor.
This year they'll do the same thing to the Biblioth�que Nationale de France, illuminating 20 x 26 windows, for a monitor size of 3,370 square meters. You can play Tetris using your mobile phone.
The best part: Using their software, anyone can design and submit an animation to be displayed during eleven-night event (timed to coincide with the Nuit Blanche art festival in Paris).
|W|P|81244930|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Cooooool! This is one of the models used in the famous "lost scene" in the original King Kong, in which Kong shakes sailors from a log bridge into a chasm, where they're eaten alive by giant spiders and scorpions.
"This sequence was intact when the film previewed in 1933," says the King Kong FAQ, "but producer/director Merian C. Cooper was afraid it interrupted the pacing of the film and is quoted as saying, 'It stopped the picture cold, so the next day, back at the studio, I took it out myself.'"
Reportedly many in the audience screamed and ran out of the theater. Those who remained spent the rest of the movie talking about the scene. I certainly would have.
|W|P|81239126|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves. For example, if my neighbour hath a mind to my cow, he hires a lawyer to prove that he ought to have my cow from me. I must then hire another to defend my right, it being against the rules of law that any man should be allowed to speak for himself. Now in this case, I who am the true owner lie under two great disadvantages. First; my lawyer, being practised almost from his cradle in defending falsehood, is quite out of his element when he would be an advocate for justice, which as an office unnatural, he always attempts with great awkwardness, if not with ill-will."—Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, part IV, ch. 5
|W|P|81231363|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comLeft at the vet for surgery, Alex, an African gray parrot, called after her keeper, "Come here. I love you. I'm sorry. I want to go back."
In his book Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights (reviewed in Salon), Steven M. Wise contends that his own 1-year-old son might have been judged less worthy of "personhood" (defined as reflexive intelligence and intentionality to fulfill desires) than Alex.
Specifically, he asks whether seven different animals—gorillas, orangutans, parrots, dolphins, elephants, dogs and honeybees—are entitled to legal rights. He suggests we may be rationalizing our treatment of animals today just as we rationalized human slavery.
|W|P|81203131|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe new trailer for the Jerry Seinfeld documentary Comedian is funny, but it rips off a Janeane Garofalo bit. I always wondered what that guy looked like, though.
|W|P|81201015|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comCrash Bonsai is exactly what you think it is.
|W|P|81187714|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWow. Apparently George W. Bush wasn't taking calls from Nelson Mandela while in Texas, so Mandela called his dad.
"We are really appalled by any country, whether it be a superpower or a small country, that goes outside the United Nations and attacks independent countries," Mandela said.
Good for him. If Bush sticks by his promise to seek congressional authority for an attack, I can't believe we'll actually do anything.
|W|P|81187678|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe new Spock's Beard CD, Snow, is apparently a two-disc concept album.
alt.music.progressive: "This is the record they were destined to make. One wonders anew how they are going to top it."
Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy: "5 of 5, 10 of 10, 100 of 100—whatever the magazine's highest rating is. ... This is a CD that will be giving me mileage for years and even decades to come. Not only is it hands-down my favorite album of the year 2002, but likely to be one of my favorite CDs of the 2000s."
Amazon: "To live in a world where there are people who can write such amazing music is truly a great thing. This is the best album I have ever heard in my entire life. I don't really have anything else to say. One million stars."
Maybe that's, uh, a little much. Progressive rock tends to get bombastic, particularly at this length (26 songs, 115 minutes). But their preceding record, V, is probably my favorite album of the last five years. I'll check it out.
|W|P|81190310|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI have no reason to link to the Leonard Nimoy Should Eat More Salsa Foundation.
|W|P|81155062|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe World Federation of Bridge wants the game to be recognized as an Olympic sport, so it is requiring that bridge "athletes" be drug-tested. This year's silver medalist has been stripped of her title for refusing the test.
|W|P|81150457|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe September 11 Archive is preserving a digital record of the attack. That includes some pretty chilling e-mails. There's also a Sonic Memorial Project.
|W|P|81135331|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Washington Post's Federal Page gives some telling numbers about the Bush presidency:
- Bush has spent 42 percent of his term so far at a leisure destination: Camp David (123 days), Kennebunkport (12), or his Texas ranch (115).
- He has spent more time playing golf (15 rounds) than giving solo news conferences (six). He held three news conferences in his first four months, but only three in the last 15 months.
- In 2000, Bill Clinton had to attend 203 events in order to set the all-time fund-raising record ($105 million). Bush needed only 48 GOP events to break that record (he's now at $114.8 million).
Today's NYT says that Lower Manhattan may be much more vulnerable to lightning strikes now that the World Trade Center is gone.
|W|P|81099762|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMatt Drudge is reporting that the next Lord of the Rings film, The Two Towers, has already been leaked and is circulating on the Internet four months ahead of its scheduled release. That seems unlikely—sources say the film isn't even finished yet—but I suppose this will become a real concern as Hollywood moves to digital photography. The music industry probably misses the days of analog recording. They had much more control over their intellectual property.
Speaking of The Two Towers, that's a really unfortunate name for anything right around now, isn't it?
|W|P|81093255|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"If you want to make life easy, make it hard."—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
"The perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose; do not like, do not dislike: all will then be clear."—Seng-ts'an
|W|P|81084941|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBela Lugosi's epitaph reads "Beloved Father." Dean Martin's says "Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime." Seriously. See The Epitaph Browser for a lot more.
|W|P|81091540|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comZbigniew Brzezinski wrote a sane, reasonable piece in Saturday's NYT suggesting that we should understand the political motivations behind the September 11 attacks. We can't win a "war" against an abstract noun, and in the meantime other states can justify almost any action by framing it in those terms.
|W|P|81085532|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Nothing he [Saddam Hussein] has done has convinced me�I'm confident the Secretary of Defense�that he is the kind of fellow that is willing to forgo weapons of mass destruction, is willing to be a peaceful neighbor, that is�will honor the people�the Iraqi people of all stripes, will�values human life. He hasn't convinced me, nor has he convinced my administration."—George W. Bush, Crawford, Texas, Aug. 21, 2002
|W|P|81088894|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comCNN reports that the Kentucky Department of Corrections is suspending satanic worship services at its Green River Correctional Complex. It's trying to determine the extent of prisoners' rights in order to come up with a consistent statewide policy.
"We've looked at the satanic bible and are convinced that what it advocates would put our prisons at risk, safety-wise," said Donald Kaspar, chaplain for the Texas system. "One of their tenets is revenge—if somebody hurts you, hurt them back."
Though Texas boasts 150 Satan worshippers in its penal system, only two inmates showed up last week for the satanic services at the Kentucky facility.
Satan, who is working on the new N'Sync album, could not be reached for comment.
|W|P|81034089|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHeadline Haikus: "All Your News in Seventeen Syllables."
|W|P|81063539|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability, and something is bound to come of it."—Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think," 1945
|W|P|81060915|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI just saw The Conversation, with Gene Hackman. It strikes me that John Cazale has a higher batting average than any other film actor I can think of.
Everyone has duds. Harrison Ford made The Devil's Own. Mel Gibson made Hamlet. Tom Hanks made Bachelor Party. And The Man With One Red Shoe. And Volunteers and The Money Pit and Nothing in Common, and Dragnet and Punchline. And The 'Burbs. And Turner & Hooch, and Joe Versus the Volcano. And You've Got Mail.
Cazale made only five movies, and every one was nominated for best picture: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon, The Deer Hunter. He died of bone cancer at 43.
|W|P|81009424|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWell, I like this reverse Sicilian thing quite a bit. This is just a 15-minute game against an inferior player, but it feels right. White has the long-term chances, so slow prophylactic play works. Maybe I should be playing the Dragon as black?
|W|P|80991734|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIt's been raining this week. I spent last night reading Donald Barthelme's Forty Stories. I wanted to dislike it, but found I couldn't. I'm finding that what I admire in fiction is craftsmanship.
"The yellow roses are delivered, no, white baby orchids, the cream-colored walls of the room are severe and handsome, tall windows looking down the avenue toward the Angel-Garden." That's just a beautiful sentence.
I finally understood that about Dickens. His plots are bad, his characters are flat, but he can write an 800-page novel that's almost grammatically perfect, and in this language that in itself is a beautiful thing.
I'm such a copyeditor.
|W|P|80991057|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Bond. James Bond. And ... I'm an alcoholic." Throughout 20 films, 007 consumes one drink every 26.8 minutes. If you count the novels, he downs 57 champagnes, 40 scotch whiskeys, 37 bourbon whiskeys, 37 vodka martinis ... a total of 337 drinks. And this count will go up—they're not finished tallying the novels yet.
Blofeld, interestingly, is a teetotaler.
|W|P|80990816|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"A man must make his opportunity, as oft as find it."—Sir Francis Bacon
|W|P|80990597|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com