Category: Links

suggested reading at other sites

Reading Around on July 30th through July 31st

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A few interesting links collected July 30th through July 31st:

George Bush and his micropenis.jpg

  • Here’s the truth: ‘Birther’ claims are just plain nuts | McClatchy – “Obama was not born in Mombasa. He was born in America,” the translator says after talking to the woman.

    “I thought he was born in Kenya,” McRae asks again.

    “He was born in America, not in Mombasa,” says the response. Another response later says, “Obama in Hawaii. Hawaii. She says he was born in Hawaii.”

    Still, the charge has spread despite no evidence that Obama was born in Kenya and compelling evidence that he was born in Hawaii.

  • Vestigial Organs Not So Useless After All, Studies Find – Appendix, tonsils, various redundant veins—they’re all vestigial body parts once considered expendable, if not downright useless.

    But as technology has advanced, researchers have found that, more often than not, some of these “junk parts” are actually hard at work.
    Case in point: the spleen, which a new study shows may be critical in healing damaged hearts

  • Daring Fireball: Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline – Microsoft is no longer ignoring Apple’s market share gains and successful “Get a Mac” ad campaign. But the crux of these ads from Apple is that Macs are better; Microsoft’s response is a message that everyone already knows — that Windows PCs are cheaper. Their marketing and retail executives publicly espouse the opinion that, now that everyone sees Apple computers as cool, Microsoft has Apple right where they want them.

    They’re a software company whose primary platform no longer appeals to people who like computers the most. Their executives are either in denial of, or do not perceive, that there has emerged a consensus — not just among nerds but among a growing number of regular just-plain users — that Windows PCs are second-rate.

    philly univac.jpg

Reading Around on July 21st through July 30th

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A few interesting links collected July 21st through July 30th:

  • caravaggio-bacchus-1596.jpg
  • The Nichepaper and the Failure of the Fourth Estate – Umair Haque – HarvardBusiness.org – “Where was the fourth estate when our political, economic, and social institutions were being systematically dismantled? What has happened to our economy parallels what Mugabe did to Zimbabwe. Was the fourth estate asleep while this happened? Like other power brokers, it was negligent — and, perhaps worse, complicit.If newspapers had protected the public interest like they were meant to, they would be more profitable. Everyone would be better off today — including newspapers — if newspapers had chronicled this transfer of value. Yet, by failing to protect the public interest, they helped create the conditions for the transfer of value away from people who do stuff, to people who speculate on stuff.”
  • hypnotism-0250-pg1.jpg
  • Plagiarism Checkers: 5 Free Websites To Catch The Copycats – “The use of this rooster of article plagiarism checking apps should be enough to make us all tread on the side of caution and keep our creative spirits intact. If you write (or publish)…do you check? Let us know.” Image: swanksalot
  • Go `Birthers’ go! – Medved has been quoted as saying that Birthers are “crazy, nutburger, demagogue, money-hungry, exploitative, irresponsible, filthy conservative imposters” and “the worst enemy of the conservative movement.” The “movement “makes us look weird. It makes us look crazy. It makes us look demented. It makes us look sick, troubled, and not suitable for civilized company.”

    Shhhh.

    If you know any Birthers, please encourage them in their efforts and don’t, whatever you do, show them these Web links (call it a Nutburgerbliography):

Reading Around on July 20th

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Some additional reading July 20th from 09:53 to 19:30:

  • The Return of the Pay Wall | The Big Money – The summer of 2009 is a terrible time to start charging for what was free. …

    So is this really the best time to start charging for online news? No. The best time was back in 1994, when the Web made online publishing to the masses a snap. And now that newspapers are finally making the move, they're applying a 1994 solution to the 2009 Web. Today, online publishers are seeing more and more traffic coming through blogs, aggregators like Google News, and social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Ignoring them is even more perilous to a paper's image than it was two years ago, when the New York Times tore down its Times Select pay walls. The hypertext link that made the Web unique is even more powerful today, and pay walls that break those links send would-be readers a clear message: Don't bother.

  • pandagon.net – these things don't just blame themselves – Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation’s pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday afternoon at his home by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in.. Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, had trouble unlocking his door after it became jammed.
    He was booked for disorderly conduct after “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior,” according to a police report. …
    Now, I can understand why the police might think that a middle-aged black man was breaking into a home during lunchtime by trying to ram the front door with his shoulder, because it’s what many middle-aged black men do with their time, between Young and the Restless commercial breaks.
    … I’m sure that a significant number of people will read this and think that this is just a black man screaming racism because he handled a situation poorly, because a significant number of people like being dead fucking wrong.
  • The Return of the Pay Wall | The Big Money – The summer of 2009 is a terrible time to start charging for what was free. …

    So is this really the best time to start charging for online news? No. The best time was back in 1994, when the Web made online publishing to the masses a snap. And now that newspapers are finally making the move, they're applying a 1994 solution to the 2009 Web. Today, online publishers are seeing more and more traffic coming through blogs, aggregators like Google News, and social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Ignoring them is even more perilous to a paper's image than it was two years ago, when the New York Times tore down its Times Select pay walls. The hypertext link that made the Web unique is even more powerful today, and pay walls that break those links send would-be readers a clear message: Don't bother.

  • Hullabaloo – Wrecking Ball – Davis really had only bumped the fee back to its historic level: to 2% of a vehicle's value, rather than a recently enacted 0.65%.

    Schwarzenegger's canceling of the fee hike actually amounted to the single biggest spending increase of his reign. That's because all the revenue from the vehicle license fee had gone to local governments, and Schwarzenegger generously agreed to make up their losses by shipping them money from the state general fund.

    The annual drain on the state treasury was $6.3 billion until February. Then the governor and Legislature raised the fee to 1.15% of vehicle value, saving the state $1.7 billion.

  • Kennedy ’suicide ramp’ improvements to increase suicide rates | The Daily Blank – "According to an official Illinois Department of Transportation report, the notorious “suicide ramps” on Chicago’s downtown Kennedy Expressway will undergo much-needed improvements in order to bring the annual number of suicide deaths back up from what has been a startling decline in the past decade."

Reading Around on July 18th

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Some additional reading July 18th from 20:56 to 23:29:

  • Falling Off the Turnip Truck… – ” four heads of cabbage? Some of us fled the shtetl and crossed the North Atlantic precisely to avoid having to eat four heads of cabbage n a single week…”
  • Drug WarRant – Prosecutors Scared of the Constitution – Of course prosecutors are scared by this ruling. It makes their job harder and it also means that more drug cases might go to trial in the hope that they could get a dismissal if the prosecutor can’t produce the analyst. The only way prosecutors manage the huge load of drug cases is to see to it that only 5% go to trial (through piling on charges to make the plea deal attractive in comparison to the alternative). If more drug cases go to trial, the whole system falls apart, particularly in a time when more money for courts is unlikely to be found.

    And the system is corrupt. This Supreme Court ruling merely states that the prosecutors and judges must do their job as specified in the Constitution. If they can’t handle it, then maybe we’ll finally take a look at why we’re prosecuting so many people.

  • heroin
  • From Israel to the N.B.A., Missing the Hummus – NYTimes.com – The first Israeli in the N.B.A., Omri Casspi, is busily trying to adapt to life in the United States.

    For starters, he needs a cellphone with a local number. He just received a $4,500 bill for about two weeks of calls, which is expensive even by N.B.A. standards. He needs new chargers for all his gadgets. But he is struggling most to find comfort food.

    “Hummus,” Casspi said, with a hard h and a long u, stressing the first syllable in a way that conveyed utter seriousness. “You don’t have that here, though.”

Reading Around on July 13th

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Some additional reading July 13th from 11:10 to 19:39:

  • Unscientific America and those awful atheists : Pharyngula – Mooney and Kirshenbaum are busily carping at these ghastly “New Atheists” for imagined transgressions against reason and the appropriate application of science, but what do they have to say about Christians who believe that crackers turn into Jesus in their mouths, or that a magical ensoulment occurs at fertilization to turn a zygote into a fully human being, or that children should be kept in ignorance about sex, or that woman’s role is as subservient breeder, or that using condoms to prevent disease is a violation of a divine dictate that the only purpose of sex is to have babies, or that people who love other people of the same sex deserve stoning…? Compared to the “New Atheist” insistence that remarkable claims about magic sky fairies ought to be regarded as patent nonsense, those can be rather destructive to society…and also negatively affect the acceptance of science. Rick Warren surely deserves as much condemnation as Richard Dawkins.

  • Baglione

  • Unscientific America, the gift that keeps on giving : Pharyngula – “Ultimately, this whole exchange illustrates the failure of Mooney/Kirshenbaum’s arguments. The demotion of Pluto, the rise of the “New Atheism”, PZ Myers, and blogging are all recent phenomena — they do not deal with the causes of the disconnect between society and science, and treating them is a distraction from dealing with the real problems. This book is more like a collection of poor rationalizations for complaining about stuff they don’t like than a serious and scholarly attempt to address a significant social problem. To useless, I must also add the adjective lightweight.”

  • Atheist

  • Greetings in a Taxi – “A raised hand generates an irresistible magnetic pull on a taxi driver. After some years the mind is trained to seek it out to the point of forming light-poles, reflections in parked cars, weaving tree branches, and on a slow night, just about any shape into that desired sign, the symbol of time not spent in vain. Depending on the time of day or night, what follows that hopeful hand will vary from absolute silence to aggressive and usually unwanted camaraderie, but in every case it always begins with some sort of greeting..”
  • Palin’s Long March to a Short-Notice Resignation – NYTimes.com – Oh, boo fucking hoo. Her acid tongue was able to destroy her base all on its own.

    “Lawmakers who had supported her signature effort to develop a natural gas pipeline turned into uncooperative critics.

    Ethics complaints mounted, and legal bills followed. At home Ms. Palin was dealing with a teenage daughter who had given birth to a son and broken up with the infant’s father, a baby of her own with special needs and a national news media that was eager to cover it all.

    Friends worried that she appeared anxious and underweight. Her hair had thinned to the point where she needed emergency help from her hairdresser ”

eat a bag of dicks

Reading Around on July 9th through July 10th

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

Reading Around on July 8th through July 9th

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

  • The New York Times > Magazine > Second Gilded Age – “A picture essay in The Times Magazine on Sunday and an expanded slide show on NYTimes.com entitled “Ruins of the Second Gilded Age” showed large housing construction projects across the United States that came to a halt, often half-finished, when the housing market collapsed. The introduction said that the photographer, a freelancer based in Bedford, England, “creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation.”A reader, however, discovered on close examination that one of the pictures was digitally altered, apparently for aesthetic reasons. Editors later confronted the photographer and determined that most of the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show. Had the editors known that the photographs had been digitally manipulated, they would not have published the picture essay, which has been removed from NYTimes.com.”
  • PDNPulse: New York Times Magazine Withdraws Altered Photo Essay – The New York Times Magazine has withdrawn a photo essay by Edgar Martins — described in print as having been produced “without digital manipulation” — because several of the photographs show signs of digital manipulation. The photo essay, which ran in the July 5 issue of the magazine, shows abandoned real estate projects.

  • Straight Dope Chicago: Followup: Is the late arrival of summer in Chicago proof of global warming? – “Here we begin to see a pattern. The long-term winter temperature trend is up, though not dramatically. Clearly the 1950s were an unusually warm time. Considered over a shorter period, however — from the bitterly cold winters of 1977-79 to the present — winter temperatures in Chicago have risen sharply. The past decade has been the warmest stretch in the past 60 years. That’s in line with the common observation among climate-change specialists that winters have warmed up more than summers.Now look again at the early fall chart. We see the same rising trend, although it started later. The average high temperature declined until 1993, but has risen markedly since then. Is this evidence of the seasonal shift some experts claim to have detected — an unmistakable sign of global warming? Eh, 15 years is too short a time to judge. But could “


“70INX70IN Versatol Tri-pod Screen Matte White Keystone Elim.” (Da-Lite Screen Company, Inc.)

Reading Around on July 7th through July 8th

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A few interesting links collected July 7th through July 8th:

  • Fox report suggests Pentagon policy nixing religious flyover is a sign Obama is anti-Christian | Crooks and Liars – The military was regularly providing flyovers at countless evangelical Christian events all over the country, not only violating the regulations prohibiting military participation in religious events, but spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money in the process.

    MRFF began exposing these events, which included flyovers on the five holidays when flyovers at civilian events are permitted, and even a few at National Day of Prayer events, and began to see some decline in their frequency, but we weren’t sure if the number of flyovers at these events was really decreasing, or if the military and organizers of these events were just being more careful not to make the nature of the events so obvious.

    Well, needless to say, the following letter denying, for the first time in 42 years, the request for a flyover at one Christian rally…was the best 4th of July present MRFF could have asked for.

  • Branding blunder gives Russia-Nigeria energy linkup a bad name – Russia’s attempt to create a joint gas venture with Nigeria is set to become one of the classic branding disasters of all time ‑ after the new company was named Nigaz.

    …the name has “rather different connotations” for English-speakers.

    It recalled other international branding mishaps including the Ford Pinto ‑ which in Brazil means small penis ‑ and the Pepsi slogan “come alive with the Pepsi generation”. In Taiwan this rousing motto translated as “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead”.

  • Living the “art” Life – … there is more, so much more to art…

Reading Around on July 6th through July 7th

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

  • Sarah Palin Speaks to ABC News – ABC News – Palin said there is a difference between the White House and what she has experienced in Alaska. If she were in the White House, she said, the “department of law” would protect her from baseless ethical allegations.

    “I think on a national level, your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we’ve been charged with and automatically throw them out,” she said.

    There is no “Department of Law” at the White House.

  • Where in the World Are the Federal Trade Commissioners? | Mother Jones – Since President George W. Bush appointed Kovacic to a Republican slot in 2006, he has averaged nearly 100 days of foreign travel a year. So far in 2009, he has been abroad for more than 60 days. (He spent the end of June in Taiwan, Rome, and London, and celebrated July 4th in China at a conference on competition law.)

    All this jetting about appears somewhat out of sync with the commission’s largely domestic role. The FTC’s wide-ranging mandate includes everything from enforcing used car sales regulations to ensuring that clothing manufacturers properly instruct consumers whether or not to put their shirts in the dryer. It runs the “do not call” registry to keep telemarketers at bay and cracks down on bogus weight loss cures. The agency also shares responsibility with the Justice Department for overseeing mergers and acquisitions of big companies and enforcing antitrust laws.

  • Retro Comedy: The 15 Creepiest Vintage Ads Of All Time – “What do murder, pedophilia, suicide and a baby tiger have in common? They have all been used to sell stuff in these amazingly disturbing vintage ads!

    These are real, untouched advertisements from the good old days. It doesn’t matter if it’s lovely ladies or adorable clowns, somehow these old-time ad wizards found ways to traumatize us while pedaling everyday products.”

    Some of these I’ve seen before, but some were new-to-me

Reading Around on July 6th

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Some additional reading July 6th from 08:35 to 14:46:

  • Boston to debut ‘killer app’ for municipal complaints – The Boston Globe – “they think they’ve hit on something big: a “killer app’’ that marries 21st-century technology with Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s old-school devotion to pothole politics.

    City officials will soon debut Boston’s first official iPhone application, which will allow residents to snap photos of neighborhood nuisances – nasty potholes, graffiti-stained walls, blown street lights – and e-mail them to City Hall to be fixed.”

  • President Obama’s first 167 days – The Big Picture – Boston.com – “U.S. President Barack Obama has now been in office for 167 days, and it’s time for a look back. Why 167 days? Why not – it’s just as arbitrary a number as the usual “100 days”. In that time, President Obama has contended with stimulating the U.S. economy, reshaping U.S. policy abroad, and starting work on domestic issues such as health care reform. As he and his family arrive in Moscow today for an official visit, find here a look back at some of the first 167 days of the Obama administration. (38 photos total)”

    Barack Obama is the centrist Democrat we thought he was, and I have several policy disagreements with his administration already, that said, still am charmed by the man. So many of these photos make me smile.

  • The Brick Testament – “Ever performed a magic trick for your friends? Committed adultery? Worshipped an idol? Are you cowardly? How about filthy? Have you ever told a lie? If so, bad news. You are going to be ceaselessly tortured for all eternity.Good news, though, if you are a male Jewish virgin. A lucky 144,000 of you are going to get to live on the New Improved Earth with Yahweh”

Reading Around on July 4th through July 5th

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A few interesting links collected July 4th through July 5th:

  • Can I Get a Witness? | TPM – yet more evidence that the Washington Post is in a death spiral”But it is bizarre to say that Palin is uncomfortable in the role of the victim. In fact I’m not sure I’ve ever found a better use for this much over-used word. As Noam Scheiber explained in one of the earliest and perhaps most insightful profiles of Palin, victimhood and resentment are Palin’s twin touchstones. They define who she is.”

  • Cat M.D.s prevent heart attack fatalities | The Daily Blank – Image by swanksalot via Flickr “Owning a cat could mean the difference between life and death. The University of Minnesota recently released a study that the risk of dying from a heart attack is 40% higher among people who have never owned a cat, compared to people who have.”
  • Confirmed: God is slightly gay – “Behold, the ongoing, increasingly startling research: homosexual and bisexual behavior, it turns out, is rampant in the animal kingdom. And by rampant, I mean proving to be damn near universal, commonplace across all species everywhere, existing for myriad reasons ranging from pure survival and procreative influence, right on over to pure pleasure, co-parenting, giddy screeching multiple monkey orgasm, even love, and a few dozen other potential explanations science hasn’t quite figured out yet. Imagine.

    Are you thinking, why sure, everyone knows about those sex-crazed dolphins and those superslut bonobo monkeys and the few other godless creatures like them, the sea turtles and the weird sheep and such, creatures who obviously haven’t read Leviticus. But that’s about it, right? Most animals are devoutly hetero and straight and damn happy about it, right?

    Wrong.”

  • Daily Kos: State of the Nation – Palins Poetry – Awesome.
    “The following is the complete text, directly transcribed, of the portion of Sarah Palin’s resignation speech available on video. The text is accurate and unaltered; a portion of the speech is missing from the beginning because the video does not start until then.The lines have been transcribed, however, in the form of vers libre poetry, which seemed appropriate under the circumstances.”

  • War: Retreat of the 20,000 — Printout — TIME – “Retreat, hell!” snapped Major General Oliver Prince Smith, commander of the 1st Marine Division, with which he had fought on Guadalcanal, New Britain, Peleliu, Okinawa (TIME, Sept. 25). “We’re not retreating, we’re just advancing in a different direction”

    Wait, you mean Sarah Barracuda Palin flubbed a quotation, again? She needs to stop letting Trig vet her speeches

Reading Around on July 3rd

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Some additional reading July 3rd from 14:02 to 18:15:

  • Photos of Sarah Palin from RunnersWorld.com – “I used to joke around with John McCain during the campaign about coming jogging with me. And once I asked him what his favorite exercise was, and he said, ‘I go wading.’ Wading. He lives on a creek in Arizona, so he goes wading. That cracked me up.”

  • Matt Taibbi – Taibblog – Goldman Sachs is reeling under public pressure – True/Slant – That a company as rich and powerful as Goldman would stoop to peering through the web version of a locker-room peephole to make a few extra pennies either front-running random trades or somehow using visitor data “not for their benefit” shows how completely and utterly morally absent this company is. There is not an ill-gotten dollar they will not chase, no matter how small or insignificant the sums might be.

    Word should be spread about this and anyone who used the Goldman 360 portral for trading should seriously investigate this situation, as it is entirely possible you’ve been ripped off …

    More to the point, the fact that Goldman is getting enough public pressure that it feels it has to respond to these queries shows that the company is reeling. And the fact that their public statements have been so hilariously transparent and clumsy shows that they’re rattled and don’t know how to handle this kind of heat, which they’re not used to getting

  • Email Full-resolution Photos From the iPhone 3G S | Geek stuff – “What I found was, the photos contained in the email were full-resolution 2048×1536 photos, not the puny 800×600 photos that get sent via the “Share” method.”
    basically, use copy/paste

Reading Around on July 2nd through July 3rd

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A few interesting links collected July 2nd through July 3rd:

  • Dovecote Records Limewire is a bunch of hypocrites Gets mad at Us for stealing –

    Woman: “Who the FUCK are you? And why are you eating our pizza?”

    Kosuke: Well our friend came in and told us there was free pizza at the bar. We are. So. Sorry. It was a misunderstanding.

    Woman: (with unbridled entitlement) This is a company party our CEO is here and you STOLE our pizza. Are you from out of town? Because let me tell you, NOTHING is free in New York City. Nothing is free… well maybe except for the condoms in Times Square.

    Paul and Kosuke continue apologizing. They offer to pay for the two slices.

    Woman: (didactically snobbish) We don’t want your money. No. Enjoy the pizza, but you can’t steal other people’s things. You can’t take what’s not yours

    Kosuke: What company do you guys work for?

    Woman: We work for Limewire.

    <Long pause> Kosuke’s eyes go wide. Anger festers in his pupils.

    Kosuke: Oh ok. Well I work at a record label so fuck you. You’ve stolen from us enough. (Bites pizza. Begins to walk away.)

  • That’s Right! I Said It’s Caipirinha Time! on Flickr – Photo Sharing! – Every time I look at Friendly Joe’s awesome caipirinha making instructional Flickr page, I get a mighty, mighty thirst.

    “Caipirinhas are the Brazilian national drink. That said, we won’t conject on the overall condition of the Brazilian populace at large. No worries- They’re refreshing and the weather’s warmin’ up –
    Follow these simple guidelines and you’ll be ready to samba in your neighbor’s flower beds in no time… “

  • Tour № 2 – Ogden Avenue Extension | Forgotten Chicago –

    “Left: A brief aside, in case you forgot who built this damn city!

    Right: Remnants of Ogden’s bridge supports are still visible south of Division Street.”

  • Saddam And Goldman Sachs: Who Is The Student, And Who Is The Master? –

    The funniest part is, you could legitimately argue that Goldman Sachs has killed more people than Saddam.

Reading Around on July 2nd

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Some additional reading July 2nd from 13:49 to 19:05:

  • Travel With Your Mind: Sky Saxon Remembered – Sky Saxon, lead singer with 60s garage punk legends the Seeds, died on the morning of June 25, 2009 (or as his official web site put it, he “passed over to be with YaHoWha”); as it happened, he died the same day as both Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, ensuring that the entertainment press, who might have been expected to treat his passing like a one-line filler item, didn’t even give it that much attention. But Saxon hadn’t been a celebrity in the traditional sense for a very long time. Sky may have been a rock star for about two years on the strength of the singles “Pushin’ Too Hard” and “Can’t Seem To Make You Mine,” but after those twenty-four months as a bargain-basement Mick Jagger, he evolved into Flower Power’s Last Man Standing, a guy who let his freak flag fly with a wild-eyed sincerity that made most of his peers from the Sunset Strip scene look like weekenders, and transformed his story into something far more interesting than the typical two-hit wonder and cult hero.
  • The Perfect Burger and All Its Parts – NYTimes.com – While some chefs have groused quietly about the insatiable demand for burgers, most are philosophical. “All chefs can be frustrated by the buying public sometimes,” said Clark Frasier, a chef with restaurants in Massachusetts and Maine. “In this economy I’m happy to sell anything they want to eat.”

    All this high-powered attention has produced some new ways of thinking about and cooking burgers. Interviews with 30 chefs provided dozens of lessons for the home cook that aren’t terribly difficult and don’t cost much money. And it all yielded the ideal burger.

  • Daily Kos: How a Kos diarist helped spark McCain-Palin infighting – Schmidt put the matter to rest with an breathtaking reply to Palin:

    "Secession," he wrote. "It is their entire reason for existence. A cursory examination of the website shows that the party exists for the purpose of seceding from the union. That is the stated goal on the front page of the web site. Our records indicate that todd was a member for seven years. If this is incorrect then we need to understand the discrepancy. The statement you are suggesting be released would be innaccurate. The innaccuracy would bring greater media attention to this matter and be a distraction. According to your staff there have been no media inquiries into this and you received no questions about it during your interviews. If you are asked about it you should smile and say many alaskans who love their country join the party because it speeks to a tradition of political independence. Todd loves his country

Reading Around on June 30th through July 1st

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A few interesting links collected June 30th through July 1st:

  • MenuPages Blog :: Chicago: Feasting on Flickr – Aren't those pictures up there pretty? They're from our new Flickr pool, and they are, from left, a luscious-looking burger from Feed taken by ehfisher, some New Tokyo takeout from D. Majette, and a spinach salad at Mia Francesca by Swanksalot
  • One in four U.S. Internet users 'snacked' on entertainment news in May | Technology | Los Angeles Times – Snacking on celebrity gossip online is on the rise. Credit: swanksalot via Flickr.
  • Todd S. Purdum on Sarah Palin | vanityfair.com – In dozens of conversations during a recent visit to Alaska, it was easy to learn that there has always been a counter-narrative about Palin, and indeed it has become the dominant one. It is the story of a political novice with an intuitive feel for the temper of her times, a woman who saw her opportunities and coolly seized them. In every job, she surrounded herself with an insular coterie of trusted friends, took disagreements personally, discarded people who were no longer useful, and swiftly dealt vengeance on enemies, real or perceived. “Remember,” says Lyda Green, a former Republican state senator who once represented Palin’s home district, and who over the years went from being a supporter of Palin’s to a bitter foe, “her nickname in high school was ‘Barracuda.’ I was never called Barracuda. Were you? There’s a certain instinct there that you go for the jugular.”
  • Create spoken caller ID ringtones for iPhone via AppleScript – This AppleScript will generate a spoken name file, optionally looking for first, last, and nicknames, for selected Address Book Contacts. For example, "Jennifer Frickin' Connelly is calling….". It will optionally add a traditional (or other) ringtone of your choice to either the beginning …