Category: Links

suggested reading at other sites

Reading Around on January 1st through January 3rd

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A few interesting links collected January 1st through January 3rd:

  • Daily Kos: State of the Nation – Remember the Naughts – Don’t forget the naughts, because this decade, no matter what anyone on the right might say, was conservatism on trial. You want less taxes? You got less taxes. You want less regulation? You got less regulation. Open markets? Wide open. An illusuion of security in place of rights? Hey, presto. Think we should privatize war by handing unlimited power given to military contractors so they can kick butt and take names? Kiddo, we passed out boots and pencils by the thousands. Everything, everything, that ever showed up on a drooled-over right wing wish list got implemented — with a side order of Freedom Fries.They will try to disown it, and God knows if I was responsible for this mess I’d be disowning it, too. But the truth is that the conservatives got everything they wanted in the decade just past, everything that they’ve claimed for forty years would make America “great again”. They didn’t fart around with any “red dog Republicans.”
  • Ptak Science Books: Mapping the Invasion of America, 1942 – The following maps appeared in a two-page spread, detailing ways in which the Axis powers could combine their efforts, focus on America, and take over the country. Maps such as these with arrows being drawn towards America were absolutely uncommon during this time.

  • d r i f t g l a s s: “…if Christ is Not Risen – Sometimes he had to pee, but did it fountain-like, leaning backwards out the bathroom door limbo-style it with one ear cocked for the brrrring…and never flushed or washed his furry little paws for fear the white noise of running water would drown out the sound of Opportunity Calling…which is also why he hadn’t done laundry for a month, and why his sink was piled with sticky, old dishes.

    And so, as he sat in his stink, panic closing slowly over him as a tiny voice whispered to him that The Call wasn’t coming — that he was finally facing a long-overdue oblivion which would have engulfed him 20 years before in a Better Universe — Jokeline decided to take matters into his own hands, and do the one thing GUARANTEED according to the ancient and sacred rules of his lodge to earn him the approbation of the douchebag gatekeepers standing between him and the warm, healing light of the teevee cameras.

    Punching some imaginary hippies for nonexistent crimes.

Reading Around on December 29th

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Some additional reading December 29th from 17:09 to 23:39:


“The Philip K. Dick Collection” (Philip K. Dick)

  • Gregg Rickman- The Nature of Dick’s Fantasies – –None of Dick’s 1974 letters to the FBI appear in any of the FBI’s files on him (in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Washington). He received a polite brush-off response to his first letter, of March 20; it is likely that the FBI ignored his later letters entirely.–There is, moreover, good reason to doubt that many of these letters were ever sent. According to his wife at the time, Tessa Dick, “Phil told me he’d only sent the first three or four letters, and he stopped mailing them, because the FBI had lost interest (or perhaps never had any interest) in the case…” (letter to author, 6/6/91). Asked why, if this were so, so many letters existed not in originals but in carbons, she replied that Dick’s procedure was to “write a letter, address and stamp an envelope, go out in the back alley, and drop the letter in the trash bin.” Dick’s reasoning was that “The authorities will receive the letter if, and only if, they are spying on him”

  • Total Dick-Head: Merry Christmas To Me! – As a scholar I think these letters are a bit dangerous (as is any piece of evidence however small and seemingly innocuous in the Case of Philip K Dick); as they are the ‘Selected Letters’ I wonder who selected them (that’s probably in an introduction I skipped), what was left out, and why. I have lots of questions, like why does Phil refer to Tessa in one letter as Leslie? Who exactly is ‘Kathy’? And why in the world did PKD write that letter to the FBI about Disch’s Camp Concentration?

  • Transcript: Climbing Mount Criterion – Roger Ebert’s Journal – I’m extremely lazy in my film reviews, but Matthew Dessem is not. His blog is in-depth reviews of every Criterion Collection film released. Roger Ebert interviewed him: Here is the complete transcript of my Q&A with Matthew Dessum, in which he goes into much greater detail about his adventure that I had room for in the paper. The photo is by Yasmin Damshenas

  • Is aviation security mostly for show? – CNN.com – “Security theater” refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security. An example: the photo ID checks that have sprung up in office buildings. No one has ever explained why verifying that someone has a photo ID provides any actual security, but it looks like security to have a uniformed guard-for-hire looking at ID cards. Airport-security examples include the National Guard troops stationed at U.S. airports in the months after 9/11 — their guns had no bullets. The U.S. color-coded system of threat levels, the pervasive harassment of photographers, and the metal detectors that are increasingly common in hotels and office buildings since the Mumbai terrorist attacks, are additional examples.

Reading Around on December 23rd through December 29th

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A few interesting links collected December 23rd through December 29th:

  • Fun phrases in Latin – Ridiculum sum, ergo sum

  • Glenn Greenwald – Karl Rove: Champion of “traditional” divorce – [he ] engineered multiple referenda to incorporate a ban on same-sex marriage into various states’ constitutions in 2004 in order to ensure that so-called “”Christian conservatives” and “value voters” who believe in “traditional marriage laws” would turn out and help re-elect George W. Bush. Yet, like so many of his like-minded pious comrades, Rove seems far better at preaching the virtues of “traditional marriage” to others and exploiting them for political gain than he does adhering to those principles in his own life:Karl Rove granted divorce in Texas

  • Animated stereoviews of old Japan ::: Pink Tentacle – In the late 19th and early 20th century, enigmatic photographer T. Enami (1859-1929) captured a number of 3D stereoviews depicting life in Meiji-period Japan.

    A stereoview consists of a pair of nearly identical images that appear three-dimensional when viewed through a stereoscope, because each eye sees a slightly different image.

Reading Around on December 18th through December 23rd

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A few interesting links collected December 18th through December 23rd:

Reading Around on December 16th through December 17th

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A few interesting links collected December 16th through December 17th:

  • The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : AT&T: Chokehold is “irresponsible and pointless” – It’s their own fault, of course. Go look at their financial statements and open up the Financial Operations and Statistics Summary and look at capital expenditures over the past eight quarters. I’m no math whiz, but it looks like capex has gone down by about 30% over the time period. Scroll down a bit to the Wireless section and check out data revenues — they’re up 80% over the same period.

  • WordPress › Pretty Link « WordPress Plugins – Shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website. You can now shorten links using your own domain name (as opposed to using tinyurl.com, bit.ly, or any other link shrinking service)! In addition to creating clean links, Pretty Link tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser, os and host.

  • The Conway Twitty Tribute Pistol (MP3s) – WFMU’s Beware of the Blog – If you’d prefer to remember Conway Twitty for his talents as a singer and songwriter, here are a few MP3s to help you out. All were written by Twitty, with the exception of Pop A Top, which was composed by Nat Stuckey.

Reading Around on December 15th through December 16th

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A few interesting links collected December 15th through December 16th:

  • Local Taste Dept.: On Top of Spaghetti : The New Yorker – Cincinnati-style chili has little in common with the Texas variety except for the ardor of its fans. The core concoction consists of ground beef in a thin, tomato-based sauce that is tangy rather than spicy. (Chocolate is rumored to be a secret ingredient.) In the basic presentation, the chili is poured over slightly overcooked spaghetti and topped with shredded Cheddar cheese; this is known as a “three-way.” Adding onions or red beans makes it a four-way; adding onions and red beans turns it into a five-way. There is no such thing as a six-way, although oyster crackers are the customary garnish. Chili and cheese on a hot dog is called a Coney.Sounds gross to me
  • A Million Times – Louis Sullivan designed the facade of the building that was built by architect, William Presto (Presto!) in 1922. It was his last commission before his death and I just think it’s one of his prettiest. Clad in terra cotta (basically a baked clay) the excellent, intricate design frames the large retail window, bringing your eye to the goods being sold inside. Even though the building is smaller than the ones that surround it, the Krause store seems to stand taller and larger because of its awesome.

  • Superheroes Throughout History – This interesting collection of images by Indonesian artist Agan Harahap, titled “Super Hero”, features famous superheroes (and villains) inserted into iconic war photographs.

    Though it’s not “photography” per se, we found this set of images quite amusing.

Reading Around on December 14th through December 15th

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A few interesting links collected December 14th through December 15th:

  • Zillow starts charging for listings | 1000Watt Consulting – Starting tomorrow Zillow will be charging for all manual listing uploads to their site. This, as they also add rental properties to their site as well…photo by swanksalot

  • Beer Money at the MCA

  • Should We Launch a War on Immigration? – Harry Shearer – What’s striking is that none of these governments acknowledges, in these long-running, rancorous debates, that the issue is anything other than a particular, localized one, and, further, that none of these governments seems to have discovered and implemented a solution–a quota, a points system, an electric border fence–that works, that can be adapted or shared by its brethren. In this, the immigration problem resembles nothing so much as the drug problem.

    What we need, obviously, is a War on Immigration.

    Photo Credit: Flickr User swanksalot

  • immigration rally6

  • Jane Fulton Alt’s “After The Storm” – Chicagoist – Like the rest of America, Chicago photographer Jane Fulton Alt watched the events, the destruction, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on television. But unlike many people, she found herself in a position to do something. Within weeks of Katrina’s landfall, Jane found herself in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, the hardest hit part of the city, block after block wiped out by flood waters as the levees gave way. Jane was part of a program run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that assisted residents in returning briefly to their homes to see what they could find but who also had to immediately turn around and leave. And in this time in New Orleans – as well as several subsequent visits – Jane found herself taking photos of the destruction.

Reading Around on December 11th through December 12th

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A few interesting links collected December 11th through December 12th:

  • No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded) » Squidgate. Update. – I have three comments about the allegations therein. Firstly, the story claims that I was entering the US, not leaving it: this is empirically false. Secondly, I find it interesting that these guys characterise “pulling away” as “aggressive” behavior; I myself would regard it as a retreat. And thirdly, I did not “choke” anyone. I state this categorically. And having been told that cameras were in fact on site, I look forward to seeing the footage they provide.

  • Chicago Eats | Travel | Smithsonian Magazine – In 1951, author Nelson Algren wrote of Chicago streets “where the shadow of the tavern and the shadow of the church form a single dark and double-walled dead end.” Yet President Barack Obama’s hometown is also a city of hope. Visionaries, reformers, poets and writers, from Theodore Dreiser and Carl Sandburg to Richard Wright, Saul Bellow and Stuart Dybek, have found inspiration here, and Chicago has beckoned to an extraordinary range of peoples—German, Irish, Greek, Swedish, Chinese, Arab, Korean and East African, among many, many others. For each, food is a powerful vessel of shared traditions, a direct pipeline into the soul of a community. Choosing just a few to sample is an exercise in random discovery.


  • Butchers trimming pork bellies for bacon at Swift meat packing Packington Plant -1930

  • Earth’s Atmosphere May Have Alien Origin | Wired Science | Wired.com – krypton and xenon now present in the air — and many other atmospheric components as well — may be remnants of gas clouds swept up by the newly forming Earth. Or, they suggest, the gases may have been delivered to Earth by comets, in which the proportions of light isotopes for xenon and krypton are relatively higher.

Reading Around on December 10th through December 11th

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A few interesting links collected December 10th through December 11th:

    • Dr Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer, beaten and arrested at US border– “Along some other timeline, I did not get out of the car to ask what was going on. I did not repeat that question when refused an answer and told to get back into the vehicle. In that other timeline I was not punched in the face, pepper-sprayed, shit-kicked, handcuffed, thrown wet and half-naked into a holding cell for three fucking hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation (although they did try to get me to waive my Miranda rights. Twice.). Nor was I finally dumped across the border in shirtsleeves: computer seized, flash drive confiscated, even my fucking paper notepad withheld until they could find someone among their number literate enough to distinguish between handwritten notes on story ideas and, I suppose, nefarious terrorist plots. I was not left without my jacket in the face of Ontario’s first winter storm, after all buses and intercity shuttles had shut down for the night.”In some other universe I am warm and content and not looking at spending two years in jail for the crime of having been punched in the face.”

  • The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T – By April, twelve weeks after that album came out, the Beatles had the top five spots on the Billboard chart.Now there was a lot of demand for that record — so much that the plant that printed the records could not keep up. Now here’s the lesson. Do you think the guys who were running Capitol Records said, Gee whiz, the kids are buying up this record at such a crazy pace that our printing plant can’t keep up — we’d better find a way to slow things down. Maybe we can create an incentive that would discourage people from buying the record. Do you think they said that? No, they did not. What they did was, they went out and found another printing plant. And another one and another one, until they could make as many records as people wanted. … Randall, baby. we’ve got a hit on our hands. We’ve got the smartphone equivalent of Meet the Beatles.
  • ‘Editor & Publisher’ to Cease Publication After 125 Years– Editor & Publisher, the bible of the newspaper industry and a journalism institution that traces its origins back to 1884, is ceasing publication.An announcement, made by parent company The Nielsen Co., was made Thursday morning as staffers were informed that E&P, in both print and online, was shutting down.

Reading Around on December 9th through December 10th

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A few interesting links collected December 9th through December 10th:

  • From the Desk of David Pogue – Free Speech (Recognition) – NYTimes.com – Remember the Gmail brouhaha? … At the time, everyone was hysterical about the supposed privacy violation: Google will be reading my e-mail! Of course, no humans were looking at your e-mail. It was just a bunch of servers analyzing keywords. Today, everybody’s forgotten all about it. But now the issue rises again with Dragon Dictation.

    As for the names in your Contacts: they’re sent to Nuance so that the app will recognize the names when you dictate them. No other information (phone numbers, e-mail, addresses, etc.) is transmitted.

    What I don’t understand is: Why don’t these same people worry that Verizon or AT&T is listening in to their cellphone calls every single day? Why don’t they worry that MasterCard is peeking into their buying habits? How do they know Microsoft and Apple aren’t slurping down private documents off the hard drive and laughing their heads off?

    I mean, if you’re gonna be paranoid, at least be rational about it.

  • Jon22 » today’s grammar lesson: rob enderle – Rob Enderle is the Sarah Palin of the technology world, minus all the fun jokes about the front-door view of Russia.

  • Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly | Electronic Frontier Foundation – privacy option telling Facebook to “not share any information about me through the Facebook API.”

    That option has disappeared, and now apps can get all of your “publicly available information” whenever a friend of yours adds an app.

    Facebook defends this change by arguing that very few users actually ever selected that option — in the same breath that they talk about how complicated and hard to find the previous privacy settings were. Rather than eliminating the option, Facebook should have made it more prominent and done a better job of publicizing it. Instead, the company has sent a clear message: if you don’t want to share your personal data with hundreds or even thousands of nameless, faceless Facebook app developers — some of whom are obviously far from honest — then you shouldn’t use Facebook.

Reading Around on December 9th

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Some additional reading December 9th from 16:37 to 19:54:

  • Glenn Greenwald – Why don't the powerful get grilled like this? – One can watch what Rachel did in last night's interview — what made it so effective — to see why this virtually never happens on, say, Sunday shows when politically powerful people who interviewed:

    (1) Rachel had obviously done a substantial amount of work prior to the interview, having even read the guest's books and being able to refer to various parts of them quickly; doing real work and real reading is far too burdensome for most of our coddled, vapid media stars.

    (2) Rachel, despite being unfailingly civil and polite, was obviously indifferent to whether the guest liked her. She bombarded him with questions that made him extremely uncomfortable and which conclusively proved that he was simply lying. Media stars who host political interview programs would never subject powerful people to treatment like that for fear of losing access and/or their standing in the Beltway world.

  • Healthy Food Lithuanian Closing – Chicagoist – Healthy Food's closing marks the end of an era; they've been in business in Bridgeport since 1938 serving practically the same menu of fresh-squeezed juices, homemade soups, Lithuanian sausage dumplings (koldunai), blynai (rich Lithuanian pancakes stuffed with cheese and fruit), roast duck and the amazing potato and bacon bit pudding known as kugelis. Healt
  • Healthy Food Lithuanian Restaurant retiring along with its owner | Crain's Chicago Business – Healthy Food Lithuanian Restaurant, a Bridgeport staple, is closing Tuesday after 70 years of serving up kugelis and sauerkraut soup.
    Owner Grazina “Gina” Biciunas-Santoski said she is hanging up her apron and retiring after running the restaurant at 3236 S. Halsted St. for the past 30 years. Ms. Biciunas-Santoski took over the neighborhood spot in 1978 from her parents, who bought it in 1960. Healthy Food Lithuanian opened in 1938.

Reading Around on December 8th through December 9th

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A few interesting links collected December 8th through December 9th:

  • News America Paid $29.5M in Mysterious Floorgraphics Acquisition | BNET Advertising Blog | BNET – The suit has a certain chutzpah to it. A source tells BNET that FGI had sales of less than $1 million. Many outside observers believed that at the time of the deal, FGI existed mostly to resolve its litigation against NAM, not as a functioning business. It’s hard to believe NAM thought it was buying a genuine business and not settling a lawsuit, which is essentially what NAM is arguing in its suit.
  • Stooper supports a family by cashing in erroneously discarded betting slips Boing Boing – (Image: OTB and me, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike image from swanksalot’s photostream)

  • The Spending Wars | The American Prospect – How did military spending become sacrosanct? – Excellent question: How did military spending become sacrosanct?”When Rep. David Obey, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, recently proposed a surtax that would pay for the Afghanistan War, the collective response from most of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle was, “Are you nuts?” Nancy Pelosi quickly put the kibosh on Obey’s “Share the Sacrifice Act,” and all talk of funding the war has been banished. Meanwhile, Democrats have spent untold hours debating how to finance health-care reform, all while Republicans carp about how doing so is just too darn expensive, what with our ever-climbing deficit.”

Reading Around on December 6th through December 7th

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A few interesting links collected December 6th through December 7th:

  • “Do I have the right to refuse this search?” | Homeland Security Watch – TSA Terrorism Theater is a Joke, and not the 911 kind1 “Within the last few months, I have been singled out for “additional screening” roughly half the time I step into an airport security line. On Friday, October 9, as I stepped out of the full-body scanning device at BWI, I decided I needed more information to identify why it is that I have become such an appealing candidate for secondary screening.

    Little did I know this would be only the first of many questions I now have regarding my airport experiences.

    Over these last few months, I have grown increasingly frustrated with what I view as an unjustifiable intrusion on my privacy. It was not so much the search (then) as it was the embarrassment of being singled out, effectively being told “You are different,” but getting no explanation as to why.”

  • Mark the Spot: Tell AT&T where the iPhone sucks – Well now there is an electronic version of that crosswalk button for me to push whenever my signal degrades. This app, free in the App Store lets you pinpoint your location when the call was dropped. Expect a good constellation of points around my house

  • Oxford American – The Southern Magazine of Good Writing :: Ode to a Pecan Pie – The pecan pie has been on the Brigtsen’s menu for all twenty-three years of the restaurant’s history. It is evidence of Brigtsen’s broader philosophy.

    “I wanted it to be just that: a classic Southern dessert. I am not out to change the world with my food. I am not out to reinvent the wheel. I’m only here to make people happy. And whatever it takes to do that is my goal. I also believe that just because something is one hundred years old or twenty-three years old doesn’t mean it isn’t good anymore.”

Footnotes:
  1. or the 9/11 kind [↩]

Reading Around on December 1st through December 3rd

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A few interesting links collected December 1st through December 3rd:

Reading Around on November 26th through December 1st

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A few interesting links collected November 26th through December 1st:

  • Movie Review – Gomorrah – Lesser-Known Mobsters, as Brutal as the Old Ones – NYTimes.com – A snapshot of hell, the film takes its biblically inflected punning title from the Camorra, or Neapolitan Mafia, the largest of Italy’s crime gangs, with 100 barely organized, incessantly warring clans and some 7,000 members. Based in and around Naples, the Camorra (it means gang) smuggles cigarettes, drugs, guns and people, polluting the province with fear and worse. Unlike the better-known Sicilian Mafia, which took root in America in the late 19th century and in Hollywood thereafter, the Camorra has never had a significant presence in this country, pop cultural or otherwise. Until now, its reign of terror has been largely in reality and not on the screen, which explains why the world in this film can feel so alien: the movies haven’t yet imagined it.
  • Gomorrah :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews – The film is a curative for the romanticism of “The Godfather” and “Scarface.” The characters are the foot soldiers of the Camorra, the crime syndicate based in Naples that is larger than the Mafia but less known. Its revenues in one year are said to be as much as $250 billion — five times as much as Bernard Madoff took years to steal. The final shot suggests that the Camorra is invested in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. The film is based on fact, not fiction.

  • This Progression of What – I’ve been writing
    These poems every day
    For many months now.
    Even though I haven’t been paid
    A single cent, I’d rather be remembered
    For this, these words,
    Over being recalled
    As an efficient
    Account executive
    Any day.


  • “Trouble in Paradise – Criterion Collection” (Criterion)

  • Trouble in Paradise :: rogerebert.com :: Great Movies – The sexual undertones are surprisingly frank in this pre-Code 1932 film, and we understand that none of the three characters is in any danger of mistaking sex for love. Both Lily and Mariette know what they want, and Gaston knows that he has it. His own feelings for them are masked beneath an impenetrable veneer of sophisticated banter.

    Herbert Marshall takes ordinary scenes and fills them with tension because of the way he seems to withhold himself from the obvious emotional scripting. He was 42 when he made the film, handsome in a subdued rather than an absurd way, every dark hair slicked close to his scalp, with a slight stoop to his shoulders that makes him seem to be leaning slightly toward his women, or bowing. His walk is deliberate and noticeably smooth; he lost a leg in World War I, had a wooden one fitted, and practiced so well at concealing his limp that he seems to float through a room.