Author: Seth Anderson

Just another Gen-Xer still posting on a blog

Photographers Are Not a threat

Seth Anderson4 Comments

Architectural Photography Forbidden
[Architectural Photography Forbidden – at Riverside Plaza aka The Daily News Building, built 1929]

One of these days, I’m organizing a Flickr meetup to take photos of the ‘forbidden ‘ buildings. Photographers are not terrorists.

Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.

Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren’t being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn’t known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about — the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 — no photography.

Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?

[From Bruce Schneier: Are photographers really a threat? | Technology | The Guardian]

For instance, check out these Flickr groups –

flickr.com/groups/photography-is-legal/

flickr.com/groups/forbiddenchicago/

flickr.com/groups/photography_is_not_a_crime/

(see also here, here, here , here, for more news stories about this topic, if you have time to read). Irks me to no end.

Photography is not legal at Boeing either
[Photography is not legal at Boeing either – the guy on the left probably a Blackwater employee]

Pilates

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Several people have suggested I take up Pilates. I just hate ‘being instructed‘ by anyone. Growing up in the Canadian woods is hard to brush off. Anyway, this book is supposed to be an excellent overview of the discipline, complete with good illustrations.


“Pilates: Body in Motion” (Alycea Ungaro)

The most authoritative, step-by-step guide to Pilates available on the market. Popular for decades with dancers, athletes, and celebrities, the Pilates Method is the perfect equipment-free workout for a stronger, leaner, fitter body. With great emphasis on precision and awareness, not only is Pilates great for the body, but for the mind as well. Using step-by-step mat-work exercises and a wide range of programs, from beginner to advanced, Pilate’s Mind and Body is the only practical guide that shows you all of the proper steps to follow and how to avoid common mistakes in your conditioning.

About the Author

Alycea Ungaro is a certified Pilates teacher and licensed physical therapist who discovered Pilates at the age of 14, when a foot injury derailed her classical dance career. In 1995 she opened Tribeca Bodyworks, New York City’s largest studio devoted to the Pilates Method.

I plan on checking the book out, but wonder if a stunt-man tumbling class wouldn’t be more beneficial.

Snow Leopard

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On Site Support

Interesting, if true. Leopard hasn’t been out that long. We still have 3 PowerPC computers on line (plus a Yikes G4 PowerPC in use, pending a transfer of the Now Contact and Up-to-Date server and main database, if the vaporware, Nighthawk ever gets released.) Performance gains on the Intel Macs would be welcomed however.

The next version of Mac OS X is code-named “Snow Leopard,” and will indeed be Intel-only, we have learned. This info is hot on the heels of TUAW’s original scoop about Mac OS X 10.6 being readied for shipment as soon as Macworld 2009 and being Intel-only.

People familiar with the situation have confirmed to us that TUAW’s details are true—Snow Leopard is currently on track to come out during next January’s Macworld, and it will not contain major OS changes. Instead, the release is heavily focused on performance and nailing down speed and stability. With Apple’s current (and future) focus on smaller, thinner, and more mobile devices, this move makes perfect sense. Things like the MacBook Air, iPhone, iPod touch, and other mysterious devices that have yet to be announced need better performance for better battery life, and that’s definitely something Apple wants to excel at in the years to come.

[From:
Mac OS X 10.6 code named Snow Leopard, may be pure Cocoa]

Something to look out for

What alternative sites were explored?

Seth Anderson1 Comment

The Chicago Children’s Museum claim they looked into 37 alternative sites, even though the firm doing the searching wasn’t hired until April. Something fishy: corporations like Jones Lang LaSalle don’t usually work pro bono.

Opponents of Mayor Richard Daley’s plan to build a $100 million Chicago Children’s Museum in Grant Park demanded Tuesday that the museum release three years of records to prove it seriously considered more than three dozen alternative sites.

Last week, the Children’s Museum released a list of 20 existing buildings and 17 new construction sites it says it considered for the museum’s new home in a three-year search before zeroing in on Daley’s controversial favorite.

Residents of high-rises surrounding the Daley Bicentennial Plaza site and their alderman, Brendan Reilly (42nd), responded by questioning the veracity of the list.

On Tuesday, with a city council committee vote just two days away, they turned up the heat and demanded that the museum release the records of its board meetings and meetings with the real estate consulting firm that released the list of alternative sites.

The museum’s zoning application shows that the firm, Jones Lang LaSalle, did not begin its work for the Children’s Museum until April, so it could not possibly have conducted the search for alternatives, critics say.

Opponents of the Grant Park move also said museum officials spent the past year insisting that the “only location seriously considered” was Grant Park.

“Somebody’s not telling the truth here,” said Peggy Figiel, co-founder of Save Grant Park.

[From Museum foes demand proof of alternative sites :: The SouthtownStar ]

Tons of back story on this if you are interested.

Dr John Chile-eating champion

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“City That Care Forgot” (Dr. John and the Lower 911)

Village Voice columnist Robert Sietsema once had an eye-ball eating contest with Dr. John in New York. He lost.

So, when I heard that the dapper New Orleans musician and composer once known as the Night Tripper was back in town chilling prior to the June 3 release of his new album, The City That Care Forgot, I asked a mutual friend to call and arrange a rematch.

He’d eaten a surfeit of eyes in the interim, so we decided to switch the contest to chile peppers. And the venue would be the spiciest restaurant I could think of: Grand Sichuan House in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I knew from several previous visits that the fearsome pepper onslaught would include dried red chilies, scarlet-chile oil, fresh green chilies, and—most formidable of all—Sichuan peppercorns, the berries of a shrub that induce a scary metallic numbness in the mouth, like a Novocain overdose. I secretly hoped the peppercorns would throw my adversary off a bit and give me the advantage.

The restaurant’s awning glowed yellow as we pulled up in Scooter’s blue Honda just as the sun was setting. As usual, Dr. John looked every bit the boulevardier in a trim black beret, leather coat, striped tunic, and carved African cane dangling gris-gris, the talismans of voodoo magic. The joint was nearly empty, but the staff was welcoming and cheery. Picking up the menu, I plotted the sequence of dishes so that the food would get hotter and hotter as the meal progressed.

[From village voice > Counter Culture: Dr. John and Our Critic Embark on a Chile-Pepper Eating Contest by Robert Sietsema ]

If you didn’t click the above link for the rest of the story (which includes details of all the spicy dishes consumed at Grand Sichuan House), I’ll tell you who won, Dr. John. New Orleans cuisine has a lot of spicy elements, Dr. John must have a tongue of steel. I like a bit of heat in my food as well, but don’t think I could keep up with the Night Tripper either.

Balcony Life HDR

The album, The City That Care Forgot, looks good, btw, but I’m a big fan:

Eric Clapton, Willie Nelson, Ani Difranco and Terence Blanchard join Dr. John and the Lower 911 in this musical paean to Dr. John’s beloved New Orleans. This powerful new recording features stirring and thought-provoking songs about the post-Katrina crises in the ravaged jewel of the American South, including “City That Care Forgot,” “Time for a Change,” “Promises, Promises,” “We Gettin’ There” and many more.

Barack Obama’s Victory Soundtrack

Seth Anderson1 Comment


“Chocolate City” (Parliament)

Can’t go wrong with George Clinton in his prime…

In a refreshing sign that math and hope can just get along, Barack Obama predictably sewed up the delegate count on Tuesday night and defeated Hillary Clinton in what turned out to be a long, contested Democratic primary. And now, for the first time ever, a black man is on track to inhabit the White House, fulfilling Parliament-Funkadelic’s dream of turning Washington, D.C. into Chocolate City.

Unfortunately for P-Funk’s iconoclastic frontman George Clinton — no relation to Hillary or Bill, for you squares in the house — Reverend Ike Turner and Richard Pryor have passed away, and are unable to fill the positions of Secretary of the Treasury and Minister of Education. (Clinton invented the latter.)

Similarly, Muhammad Ali and Aretha Franklin will have to forego their positions as President and First Lady, as Barack and Michelle Obama will be handling those duties. Which leaves only Stevie Wonder to fill Clinton’s other invented position, Secretary of Fine Arts.

[From Barack Obama’s Victory Soundtrack | Listening Post from Wired.com]

Obama apparently likes classic 70s soul, that better include funk too. Don’t get me wrong, I like Stevie Wonder, but Parliament/Funkadelic/James Brown are a lot more fun to groove too, with the bonus that (seemingly) nearly half of all hip-hop songs borrowed beats from this trinity. Throw in Sly and the Family Stone, a little Fela Kuti for international flavor, and we’re talking a party, ya’ll! Whoo hoo!

David Byrne Sonic Architect

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A second reason to visit New York this summer (the first reason).

“So, what do you want to know?” asks David Byrne, beaming beneath a straw fedora, as erudite and affable as ever, even with a couple busted ribs. “What’s not apparent?” He’s gesturing to an ornate antique organ, the only adornment to this cavernous 9,000-square-foot hall in the Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan. A bewildering farm of tubes and wires runs out from the back and snakes along to the walls, the towering columns, and the pipes looming overhead, as if the instrument itself were on life support. Not much, at first blush, is apparent.

David would like it if you came and had a go at the organ. Or, more accurately, the venue itself. Playing the Building, his partnership with arts gurus Creative Time, is basically an interactive experimental-music station, a chance for you (and/or your kids) to pretend you’re a member of Einstüerzende Neubauten for a couple minutes. Each key on the organ connects to a tube, which connects to some facet of the building, which dutiful whirls or clanks or whistles or saws at your command. The tones are generally arranged low to high on the keyboard, though you can’t exactly play “Stormy Weather” on it; it’d be more satisfying, perhaps, to rattle off a few full-keyboard slides, Bugs Bunny/Jerry Lee Lewis–style, though so far, everyone seems too polite (or too fearful of busting the thing) to do this. Probably just as well. Your choice, though. Spray-painted in yellow onto the cement floor at the foot of the organ is a simple request: “Please play.”

[From village voice > music > Down in Front: David Byrne: Sonic Architect by Rob Harvilla ]

The exhibit will be open till mid-August – he ought to take it on tour to a few other urban environments around the world (including Chicago, of course).

David Byrne blogs about the installation:

Playing the Building — my installation in the Battery Marine Building — opened to the public today. Creative Time had music, hot dogs, beer and ice cream downstairs. (No food or drink from the party was allowed in the actual installation space.) My iPod provided the music and I saw at least one couple dancing! The line to play the organ traversed all the way to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. The fire department only allows 150 people in the space at one time since the exits are not all well lit — hence the long wait times. But there were other long lines were just for ice cream or beer.

Brazilian Takeover Bid Imperils Bud Brand

Seth Anderson2 Comments

V is for Victory
[V is for Victory – click to embiggen]

Blah blah blah. Bud was so eager to wrap itself with the American flag, I have no sympathy for them now.

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — As Anheuser-Busch frets over how to ward off a takeover attempt from Brazilian-run InBev, the positioning of its flagship brand might just be the closest thing the No. 1 U.S. brewer has to a poison pill.

In fact, A-B distributors and agency executives who have worked on Bud and its sibling brands have grave doubts that a brand as overtly red, white and blue as Budweiser — and, by connection, its siblings — would remain credible with consumers under a Belgian owner operated by Brazilians.

“It could be a disaster,” said an executive at one of A-B’s agencies. “It’s all-American above all else — the Clydesdales, all the imagery. It’s an enormous challenge” if the brand becomes foreign-owned. And there’s a lot at stake: In 2007, $8.5 billion of A-B’s $16.7 billion in total global revenue came from sales of Bud-family brands in the U.S.

The situation is made even more ironic by the fact that A-B has in the past been willing to play the patriotism card against competitors. Earlier this decade, after Miller was acquired by South African Breweries and Coors merged with Canada-based Molson, A-B railed against their owners as “foreign interests” with a nativist strategy that would make Lou Dobbs blush.

On its websites and in point-of-sale materials, A-B ripped Miller and Coors for sending profits abroad and closing breweries here. “With over 80% of its employees outside of the United States, it’s hard to ignore a simple question: Does Miller reflect the American spirit?” said Budweiser’s official website at the time.

[From Brazilian Takeover Bid Imperils Bud Brand – Advertising Age – News]

American corporations like Anheuser-Busch who helped the Republicans get in power are now reaping their rewards – a dollar at near historic lows, and absentee corporate ownership in countries with stronger economies. Budweiser makes crappy beer to boot. They import a few quality brews (Bass Ale, for instance), but that has nothing to do with their brewing skills, just their distributing and political clout.

Red Wine May Slow Aging

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Breakfast drinks self-portrait
[Breakfast drinks self-portrait – click to embiggen]

Is it too early to have a sip? I could pretend we lived in 17th C.E. France…

Red wine may be much more potent than was thought in extending human lifespan, researchers say in a new report that is likely to give impetus to the rapidly growing search for longevity drugs.

The study is based on dosing mice with resveratrol, an ingredient of some red wines. Some scientists are already taking resveratrol in capsule form, but others believe it is far too early to take the drug, especially using wine as its source, until there is better data on its safety and effectiveness.

[From New Hints Seen That Red Wine May Slow Aging – NYTimes.com]

What every meal needs
[What every meal needs – click to embiggen]

Far too early to take in drug form, but not too early to drink red wine in its natural state – a glass on the way to my mouth!

Oh wait, there isn’t much resveratrol in each glass:

the door has now been opened to drugs that exploit an ancient biological survival mechanism, that of switching the body’s resources from fertility to tissue maintenance. The improved tissue maintenance seems to extend life by cutting down on the degenerative diseases of aging.

The reflex can be prompted by a faminelike diet, known as caloric restriction, which extends the life of laboratory rodents by up to 30 percent but is far too hard for most people to keep to and in any case has not been proven to work in humans.

Research started nearly 20 years ago by Dr. Leonard Guarente of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed recently that the famine-induced switch to tissue preservation might be triggered by activating the body’s sirtuins. Dr. Sinclair, a former student of Dr. Guarente, then found in 2003 that sirtuins could be activated by some natural compounds, including resveratrol, previously known as just an ingredient of certain red wines.

Dr. Sinclair’s finding led in several directions. He and others have tested resveratrol’s effects in mice, mostly at doses far higher than the minuscule amounts in red wine. One of the more spectacular results was obtained last year by Dr. John Auwerx of the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France. He showed that resveratrol could turn plain vanilla, couch-potato mice into champion athletes, making them run twice as far on a treadmill before collapsing.

Seriously, even I would be challenged if I had to drink 100 bottles of wine a day. However, a glass or two? No problem, no problem at all. Clinical trials always start from a higher dosage – easier to see results that way – and then work back down to lesser dosages.

Separately from Sirtris’s investigations, a research team led by Tomas A. Prolla and Richard Weindruch, of the University of Wisconsin, reports in the journal PLoS One on Wednesday that resveratrol may be effective in mice and people in much lower doses than previously thought necessary. In earlier studies, like Dr. Auwerx’s of mice on treadmills, the animals were fed such large amounts of resveratrol that to gain equivalent dosages people would have to drink more than 100 bottles of red wine a day.

The Wisconsin scientists used a dose on mice equivalent to just 35 bottles a day. But red wine contains many other resveratrol-like compounds that may also be beneficial. Taking these into account, as well as mice’s higher metabolic rate, a mere four, five-ounce glasses of wine “starts getting close” to the amount of resveratrol they found effective, Dr. Weindruch said.

Ode to Dionysus
[Ode to Dionysus – click to embiggen]

Did the CIA give Iran the bomb

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“State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration” (James Risen)

Bush’s team should be impeached for incompetence on top of all their other crimes.

She had probably done this a dozen times before. Modern digital technology had made clandestine communications with overseas agents seem routine. Back in the cold war, contacting a secret agent in Moscow or Beijing was a dangerous, labour-intensive process that could take days or even weeks. But by 2004, it was possible to send high-speed, encrypted messages directly and instantaneously from CIA headquarters to agents in the field who were equipped with small, covert personal communications devices. So the officer at CIA headquarters assigned to handle communications with the agency’s spies in Iran probably didn’t think twice when she began her latest download. With a few simple commands, she sent a secret data flow to one of the Iranian agents in the CIA’s spy network. Just as she had done so many times before.

But this time, the ease and speed of the technology betrayed her. The CIA officer had made a disastrous mistake. She had sent information to one Iranian agent that exposed an entire spy network; the data could be used to identify virtually every spy the CIA had inside Iran.

Mistake piled on mistake. As the CIA later learned, the Iranian who received the download was a double agent. The agent quickly turned the data over to Iranian security officials, and it enabled them to “roll up” the CIA’s network throughout Iran. CIA sources say that several of the Iranian agents were arrested and jailed, while the fates of some of the others is still unknown.

This espionage disaster, of course, was not reported. It left the CIA virtually blind in Iran, unable to provide any significant intelligence on one of the most critical issues facing the US – whether Tehran was about to go nuclear.

In fact, just as President Bush and his aides were making the case in 2004 and 2005 that Iran was moving rapidly to develop nuclear weapons, the American intelligence community found itself unable to provide the evidence to back up the administration’s public arguments. On the heels of the CIA’s failure to provide accurate pre-war intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, the agency was once again clueless in the Middle East. In the spring of 2005, in the wake of the CIA’s Iranian disaster, Porter Goss, its new director, told President Bush in a White House briefing that the CIA really didn’t know how close Iran was to becoming a nuclear power.

But it’s worse than that. Deep in the bowels of the CIA, someone must be nervously, but very privately, wondering: “Whatever happened to those nuclear blueprints we gave to the Iranians?”

[Click to read a large excerpt Did the CIA give Iran the bomb? Extracts from New York Times reporter James Risen’s new book | Environment | The Guardian]

When do we get to do pointed sticks?

Apparently, these revelations came out in 2006, but this is the first I’d heard of them. Book is now available in paperback, I’m going to look for it. The plan, called Operation Merlin, was to sell slightly flawed nuclear plans to Iranian agents in the hopes that they wouldn’t realize part of the data was flawed. The agent who sold the plans pointed out the flaw, and thus helped accelerate (allegedly) Iran’s nuclear program. Yikes.

Continue reading “Did the CIA give Iran the bomb”

Blowjobs and Snow Jobs revisited

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Bee Jays
[Bee Jays – click to embiggen]

Eric Alterman notes that the corporate media hasn’t changed much since 1999. Even then, facts were less important than sensationalism.

Back in 1999, I noticed what I thought was an epidemic of stupid reporting about teenage blowjobs. Much to the chagrin of my editors at The Nation, I wrote a column called “Blowjobs and Snow Jobs,” in which I argued that some of the worst reporting you’d find anywhere could be found on this topic, much of it in The Washington Post (for reasons about which I declined, and continue to decline, to speculate). I had no position of the topic, save the desire to point out that per usual, many of the people in the MSM and all of the pundits spouting, ahem, off on it, had no idea whatever they were talking about. Read the column and enjoy the hysteria now that the data are in. According to a study written up in Newsweek of 15-to-19-year-olds by the Guttmacher Institute, “teen sexual behavior in general hasn’t changed much since 1991. Just a little more than half the teens studied had engaged in oral sex, only 5 percent more than had engaged in vaginal sex. Most teens who had had oral sex had also had intercourse, and only one in four teen virgins had had oral sex — not exactly the makings of a teen oral sex epidemic.” … According to the study’s author, Laura Lindberg, ‘There is no good evidence that teens who have not had intercourse engage in oral sex with a series of partners.’ ” And remember this: ” According to a study published in the 2005 Journal of Adolescent Health, teens who had taken abstinence pledges were six times as likely to have engaged in oral sex as teen virgins who hadn’t taken the pledge.”

Of course, the moral of my story is only partially about blowjobs. Reporting this crappy is, alas, the norm, not the exception. It’s just as evident when the topic is Bush, McCain or Obama, when one takes the trouble to look carefully.

[From Media Matters – Blowjobs and Snow Jobs revisited: Teenage (journalistic) wasteland ]

I’d posit that matters have only gotten worse since 1999. Though maybe not much. From the original article:


The Washington Post has twice succumbed to fellatio fever in recent months. One of its best columnists noted that Gore adviser Naomi Wolf “brags in her book


Promiscuities

[that] she was rather adroit” in the oral arts as a teenager. This is slander–Wolf “brags” about no such thing. She does say that as a young teenager she listened to her girlfriends’ older sisters brag about their abilities, but she makes no claims for her own prowess. When I contacted the columnist in question, he admitted that he had never seen the book and was quoting someone who made this claim on Imus, who in turn had not read the book but had seen it “in a wire story.” When the subject is blowjobs (or Naomi Wolf), that’s good enough.

(Washington Post article behind pay wall, but abstract is here, I think.)