Category: Links

suggested reading at other sites

Reading Around on April 26th

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Some additional reading April 26th from 07:43 to 20:01:

  • Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (or, the Privatization of the English Language) | Zen Habits – "Her lawyers asked me to insert the (R) symbol after the phrase, in my post, and add this sentence: “This is the registered trademark of Susan Jeffers, Ph.D. and is used with her permission.”
    Yeah. I’m not gonna do that.
    I find it unbelievable that a common phrase (that was used way before it was the title of any book) can be trademarked. We’re not talking about the names of products … we’re talking about the English language. You know, the words many of us use for such things as … talking, and writing, and general communication? Perhaps I’m a little behind the times, but is it really possible to claim whole chunks of the language, and force people to get permission to use the language, just in everyday speech?"
  • Democracy Now! | Flashback: A Look Back at the Church Committee's Investigation into CIA, FBI Misuse of Power – "We take a look at one of the most famous special Senate investigations of government misconduct. In the mid-1970s, a US Senate committee chaired by Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho conducted a massive investigation of the CIA and FBI’s misuse of power at home and abroad. The multi-year investigation examined domestic spying, the CIA’s attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, the FBI and CIA’s efforts to infiltrate and disrupt leftist organizations, and more. We speak with Sen. Frank Church’s widow, Bethine Church, and Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr., who served as chief counsel to the Church Committee"
  • A Guide to Beating the Fears That Are Holding You Back | Zen Habits – "Just got a copyright infring. notice from lawyers of author Susan Jeffers, bec I used the phrase "feel the fear & do it anyway" in a post."
    Some moronic author, Susan Jeffers is asserting copyright claim to this phrase, and sending threatening letters to my cousin Leo, who used these words in a blog post. Come on, get real. Hasn't she (or her lawyers) heard of the phrase, "everything that has been said has been said before". There are only 26 letters in the alphabet – phrases can't be copyrightable.
  • Que reste-il de Kurt Cobain ? | Rue89 – my photo of Kurt Cobain graffiti used (with poor link/credit, but I'm working on that)

Reading Around on April 17th through April 24th

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A few interesting links collected April 17th through April 24th:

  • FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Messing with Texas – “What Texas could choose to do, however, is to divide itself up into as many as five states, a privilege given to it as a condition of its annexation to the Union in 1845. What would Texas look like if it chose to do this? Would dividing a large, red state into five smaller, reddish states benefit Republicans in the Senate? In the Electoral College?The answers are not so clear. But first things first, we need to come up with a logical way to divde Texas into five parts.”

  • Fritinancy: Ms. Dowd Interviews the Inventor of the Telephone – MoDo “sat down with Mr. Bell, 39, and his assistant Thomas Watson, 22, and asked them to explain why they shouldn’t be condemned to a slow, painful death.

    ME: The telephone seems like letter-writing without the paper and pen. Is there any message that can’t wait for a passenger pigeon?

    BELL: Possibly the message I’d like to deliver to you right now.”

  • Gapers Block : Drive-Thru : Chicago Food – Wait, No Need to Soak Those Beans – “One revelation, to me, was the idea that beans need not be soaked before cooking–provided that they are cooked slowly for a long time. In a recipe called Gloria’s Pork Ribs and Red Beans, the red beans are rinsed, and are thrown right into the pot. The beans slowly rehydrate as they cook with the other ingredients, for about 2 hours.”

    This recipe looks quite tasty: I’m making a variant as soon as I can get into my kitchen.

Reading Around on April 16th

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Some additional reading April 16th from 17:21 to 20:40:

  • Chicago Reader | The Works | Ben Javorsky for Mayor! Responses to your responses to our story about Chicago’s parking meter lease deal By Ben Joravsky – I heard Daley on the radio say, “You have to monetize your assets or else they become liabilities.” What an idiot. Never took an economics or accounting class at the U. of C., that’s for sure. Vote the idiot out. —South Looper

    Now, now, don’t harsh on Mayor Daley. He didn’t have time for economics or accounting—he was too busy studying for that bar exam for the third time.

  • Daily Kos: Why yesterday's protests were stupid – What was the message? Too much taxes? I didn't see many bank executives and Wall Street types out on the streets. And coming on the heels of the biggest tax cut in American history, almost entirely directed at the middle class, this message didn't have much salience. Furthermore, the theme of these protests "taxation without representation", was pretty silly considering that these people did have representation. It's just that they lost the elections, which sort of happens in a democracy. "Representation" doesn't mean you always get your way, it means that you have a vote. So it was an indefensible frame to base the protests around.

    That's probably why the crowds didn't easily rally around it, deciding to freelance it instead. So there was talk about pork barrel spending! And bail outs! And wanting to stick a knife in Obama's eye! And secession! And Obama's birth certificate! And Obama taking away their guns! The American taxpayers are the Jews for Obama's ovens! Obama is Hitler!

  • GO TO 2040 Blog -Edible Change is Enticing at 4th Annual Food Policy Summit – "In its fourth year the summit Edible Change! Building Networks for Policy Action, hosted by the Chicago Food Policy Advisory Council (CFPAC) reached full capacity bringing together over 250 people from the Chicago area and around the region with amazing diversity of geography, ethnicity, and age to talk, learn, and share stories about food. "

    photo of produce by me

Reading Around on April 15th through April 16th

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

  • The White House – Blog Post – A Vision for High Speed Rail – "The report formalizes the identification of ten high-speed rail corridors as potential recipients of federal funding. Those lines are: California, Pacific Northwest, South Central, Gulf Coast, Chicago Hub Network, Florida, Southeast, Keystone, Empire and Northern New England. Also, opportunities exist for the Northeast Corridor from Washington to Boston to compete for funds to improve the nation’s only existing high-speed rail service:"

    Sign me up!

  • Broward Palm Beach – The Juice – Fort Lauderdale, You Have Tea On Your Face – "And I'm a reporter, I took an (imaginary) oath to comfort the afflicted.

    "What freedoms have you had taken from you?"

    She looked confused. I thought, perhaps in the places Jane gets her news (cough cough Fox News cough) reporters don't worry about those pesky follow-up questions. There was a long pause.

    "Uh…uh…the freedom to choose…the…uh…" Awkward moment"

    idiots – protesting without any clue what they are even protesting.

  • honoria in ciberspazio – Proposal for Live Art Blogging Interactive Austin 2009 – "Problem: After a stimulating conference, attendees' notes lay black and white and sometimes unreadable on the page while vital insights are bright, yet fading in participants' memories.

    Solution: Honoria Starbuck creates live colorful abstract artworks that zing with the high energy in the conference room. Honoria's drawings highlight epiphanies and explore expanding new directions with dynamic aesthetic gusto. These abstract drawings keep the open nature of inquiry buzzing in the wake of the conference."

Reading Around on April 14th

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Some additional reading April 14th from 14:44 to 18:08:

Reading Around on April 12th through April 14th

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A few interesting links collected April 12th through April 14th:

  • Adventures In Foodie Land: darkness, lasers, ninjas, and child labor » NileGuidance: A Travel Blog – “Moto: In Chicago, the epicenter of the molecular gastronomy, Moto is the place to go for an adventure in food technology and what even qualifies as ‘food.’ Listed on the edible(!) menu are post-modern, multi-sensory concoctions by chef Homaro Cantu using mediums such as liquid nitrogen and Class IV lasers. Chili-Cheese Nachos as a dessert, made with chocolate and flash-frozen mango? Sounds like an adventure to me.”

    photo of swanksalot

  • The Inevitable Clash of Management and Unions | new curator – What’s the best way to diffuse a situation between the management of a museum and a union representing your disgruntled workers?

    Hint: Don’t go saying they give “the public sector a bad name”.

  • Can the Statusphere Save Journalism? – Recently, I enjoyed a refreshing and invigorating dinner with Walt Mossberg. While we casually discussed our most current endeavors and experiences, the discussion shifted to deep conversation about the future of journalism in the era of socialized media with one simple question, “are newspapers worth saving?”
    [photo by swanksalot]

Reading Around on April 9th through April 12th

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A few interesting links collected April 9th through April 12th:

  • Technic News » Can the Statusphere Save Journalism? – Recently, I enjoyed a refreshing and invigorating dinner with Walt Mossberg. While we casually discussed our most current endeavors and experiences, the discussion shifted to deep conversation about the future of journalism in the era of socialized media with one simple question, “are newspapers worth saving?”

    photo by swanksalot

  • Gapers Block : Mechanics : Chicago Politics – The Erosion of Daley and the Coward Defense – The excuse we always hear (off the record of course) from Aldermen, community groups, think tanks, and the rest, is that taking on the Mayor is just too darn scary. He’s too powerful. But what makes him powerful, like all bullies, is the constant refusal of anybody to stand up to him. And of course, it isn’t fear: its convenience. That whole “…but he’s our sonofabitch” mentality. We saw how well that worked with Augusto Pinochet and Saddam Hussein.
  • Washington Post Reporter Says It’s Not His Job to Check the Accuracy of People He’s Quoting – talk about stenography to the powerful. Why would anyone read the Washington Post with this sort of attitude towards politicians? Can just read press releases at the Senator’s website for all the good Paul Kane does.

    Pathetic. and this quote makes me laugh, perhaps not in the way Mr. Kane intends:
    Someone tell Media Matters to get over themselves and their overblown ego of righteousness.

Everything In Its Place

Reading Around on April 9th

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Some additional reading April 9th from 09:50 to 15:24:

  • Fair Use for Fair People – Anil Dash – “Both independent bloggers on the web and the Associated Press are in the news this week for asking for appropriate credit for their work when it’s excerpted for fair use by online news aggregators. But the web natives frame their argument in terms of respect for the reader and defending the credibility of the information being published, assuming correctly that their businesses will grow if they honor these principles. In contrast, the AP leads with its business argument first, establishing an atmosphere of legal threats and aggrieved arguments about licensing fees with no mention of what readers want, or what respect they have for the very stories they’re ostensibly fighting to present. “

  • Daring Fireball Linked List: Kottke on Extreme Borrowing – “And yes, this is yet another instance of me standing up and saying that I’m doing it right where others are doing it wrong, so suck it.“

    quoting myself (Twittered):
    I’ve had a blog nearly ten years, and visitors hardly ever click-thru to the original article. Like 1 in 10, or 1 in 20. I don’t know if the click-thru failure is a failure on my part (probably) or on the part of my visitors (maybe), but hasn’t changed w/ time. So when big-dog blogs like AllThingsDigital or HuffPo take 3 graphs from an indie blog, doubt much traffic gets generated to the indie blog. Of the last 100 visitors to my (tiny) blog, 3 clicked to another site (and 2 more clicked a photo, and one to an Amazon link).

  • Extreme borrowing in the blogosphere – “So I guess my question is: why is All Things Digital getting put through the wringer receiving scrutiny here for something that seems a lot more innocuous than what thousands of blogs are doing every day? Shouldn’t we be just as or more critical of sites like Huffington Post, Gawker, Apartment Therapy, Engadget, Boing Boing, Buzzfeed, Lifehacker, etc. etc. etc. that extensively excerpt and summarize?“
    More discussion (with interesting comments) of the All Things Digital mini-dustup which feeds into the whole copyright vs. blogosphere vs. corporate media discussion that is the story of 2009 so far.

  • Chicago Reader | FAIL: The Story of Chicago’s Parking Meter Lease Deal – How Mayor Daley and his crew hid their process from the public, ignored their own rules, railroaded the City Council, and screwed the taxpayers | By Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke – “How Daley and his crew hid their process from the public, ignored their own rules, railroaded the City Council, and screwed the taxpayers on the parking meter lease deal“For me, am glad I hardly ever use meter parking (CTA, bike, walking are always better options), but I can see why folks are outraged.

Reading Around on April 6th through April 8th

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A few interesting links collected April 6th through April 8th:

  • Attribution and Affiliation on All Things Digital – Waxy.org – ” Also, where the source of the article is acknowledged, there’s no corresponding link to the page/URI to which it refers (something I’d regard as a convention that’s at least a decade old now). “

  • Roger Ebert’s Journal: Roger Ebert: April 2009 Archives – awesome remembrance of the long-ago vanished world of print journalism. “One of my editors at the Sun-Times once asked me, “Roger, is it true that they used to let reporters smoke at their desks?” This wasn’t asked yesterday; it must have been ten years ago. I realized then, although I’m only writing about it now, that a lifestyle had disappeared. “
  • Audio: Bob Dylan on Barack Obama, Ulysses Grant and American Civil War ghosts – Bill Flanagan: In that song Chicago After Dark were you thinking about the new President?Bob Dylan: Not really. It’s more about State Street and the wind off Lake Michigan and how sometimes we know people and we are no longer what we used to be to them. I was trying to go with some old time feeling that I had.


Reading Around on March 31st through April 1st

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Chortle At Joker’s Boner
A few interesting links collected March 31st through April 1st:

  • ESPN – OTL: Gotham’s Savior – E-ticket – Then I ask whether he’s driven to build a new thing here that will prove Phoenix was no fluke, that will show everyone that his system really works, that will silence the naysayers once and for all, and he says that until he has won it all, they can say anything they want about him and he can’t say boo back.I say Yeah, but aren’t you burning to shut ’em up?

    He says it doesn’t consume him.

    I say I get that, but wouldn’t you relish it?

    And he leans forward in his chair and reaches across the desk to wipe up a little mess of popcorn kernels with his left hand.

    He cups the bits of shell in his right hand, then pours them casually into the nearby wastebasket, and looks up with a sly grin and says, “You’re asking if I’m human?”

    Wish Mike D’Antoni would have accepted the Bulls job, oh well.

  •  
  • AIG Exec Whines About Public Anger, and Now We’re Supposed to Pity Him? Yeah, Right | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet – DeSantis has a few major points. They include: 1) I had nothing to do with my boss Joe Cassano’s toxic credit default swaps portfolio, and only a handful of people in our unit did; 2) I didn’t even know anything about them; 3) I could have left AIG for a better job several times last year; 4) but I didn’t, staying out of a sense of duty to my poor, beleaguered firm, only to find out in the end that; 5) I would be betrayed by AIG senior management, who promised we would be rewarded for staying, but then went back on their word when they folded in highly cowardly fashion in the face of an angry and stupid populist mob.I have a few responses to those points. They are 1) Bullshit; 2) bullshit; 3) bullshit, plus of course; 4) bullshit. Lastly, there is 5) Boo-Fucking-Hoo. You dog.

    AIGFP only had 377 employees. Those 400-odd folks received almost $3.5 billion in compensation in the last seven years…averages out to over $9 million of compensation per person.

  •  
  • One Killer Smoked Brisket Recipe | Meaten – Anyway, that is how I do it, I hope that it made sense, and let me know how yours turns out.Viva Meat!

    Image courtesy of swanksalot1

 

Footnotes:
  1. is it so fracking hard to give proper credit?? Still disappointed that TreeHugger is such a corrupt website. Meaten.com, which I imagine has a lot less traffic than TreeHugger figured out how to properly give credit to my photo. [↩]

Reading Around on March 30th

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Some additional reading March 30th from 14:16 to 19:48:

  • jimmy's cocktail hour: Whiskey for the People. – "Pikesville Rye is widely distributed, and is usually available for around $11.99. Some parts of the country get it for $9.99. Let's call it $12. This is good rye at a bargain price. If you have a bottle of bitters on hand, you're all set. "
  • Cocktail Hacker » Blog Archive » MxMo XXXVI: Recession Gin and Tonic – So how hard is this cocktail going to hit your wallet? It’s not going to hit it hard at all. It’s going to be like a kitten falling on a pile of pillows.

    Burnett’s Gin (1.75 L) $15.99 -> 2 oz $0.54
    Realime (15 oz) $3.09 -> 1 tsp $0.04
    C-Dry Tonic (6×12 oz) $2.99 -> 6 oz $0.25
    Total Cost Per Drink $0.83
    Eighty three cents. Try to wrap your head around that number. That’s cheaper than a soft drink nearly anywhere. It’s cheaper than a crappy cup of coffee from the vending machine in my office.

  • The Cocktail Chronicles » MxMo Hard Times: Drink Like a King(sley) – Need to read this book!
    "Vital requirement: prepare pre- and post-dinner drinks in some undiscoverable pantry or broom-cupboard well away from the main scene. This will not only screen your niggardliness; it will also make the fetching of each successive round look like a slight burden, and will cast an unfavorable limelight on any individual determined to wrest additional drinks out of you. Sit in a specially deep easy-chair, and practise getting out of it with a mild effort and, later in the evening, a just-audible groan, though beware of overdoing this."
  • Twitter Blog: Replies Are Now Mentions – Seems like this should pick up on re-tweets too (RT @swanksalot for instance). Good tweak to the API.
  • The Art of Sampling | TheFrontloader.com – "Sometime late last year, I was looking through the new releases when I came across a sincere tragedy. Hilary Duff was back, and THIS time, it was personal… “Personal Jesus”-personal. It seemed that, for her “Best Of” album, she needed a new song and thus decided to sample Depeche Mode’s 1989 hit “Personal Jesus” for her single, “Reach Out.”

    At first I couldn’t believe it because I consider Depeche Mode music sacred ground, but then I found a link to the music video and decided to see if it was true. For those of you that have been lucky enough to miss this, consider yourself very unlucky right now"

  • The Washington Monthly -IF IT'S SUNDAY, IT'S JOHN MCCAIN – John McCain has appeared on Meet the Press – just one of the multiple Sunday morning talk shows – 54 times, and I would guess that most of them have come in the years since announcing for President in 1999, since before that he was a more obscure figure in Washington. I can't imagine there's anyone else even close to that number. And yet McCain is an easy guy to find on the Rolodex and get to appear on your show. It points to a staleness in the official discourse.

Reading Around on March 28th through March 29th

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A few interesting links collected March 28th through March 29th:

  • The Washington Independent » After the Laughter, Grim GOP Numbers – While reporters hooted at the comically simplistic charts and lack of details in the House Republican leadership’s budget plan, the green eyeshade types at Citizen’s for Tax Justice crunched the numbers (PDF). They conclude that a quarter of all households, most of them poor, would pay more taxes under the GOP plan, while the richest one percent would pay $100,000 less.

  • TidBITS Media Creation: iMovie ’09 8.0.1 Update Brings More than Just Bug Fixes – “I understand that Apple isn’t creating its products for writers, and it can (and does) change features whenever it wants. The updates here are great for iMovie users. But since the development teams must keep internal lists of what’s changed anyway, is it really so hard to spend an hour and turn those into useful release notes?”

    Amen to that. Maybe make a preference toggled in Software Update: terse details as the default, but have the ability to set a preference and get more detailed release notes. Please Apple, it shouldn’t be so difficult to say what’s new.

  • Mady Comfort – Biography – Mady (or Mattie) Comfort was a jazz and lounge singer, dancer, and model. She was married to bassist Joe Comfort, who worked with Lionel Hampton and Nat King Cole, and who played on many of the Frank Sinatra/Nelson Riddle Capitol recordings. Gene Santoro, in his biography of Charlie Mingus (Myself When I Am Real), says that she was also a girlfriend of Duke Ellington, and that she is the “Satin Doll” about whom Ellington, Strayhorn, and Mercer wrote the song “Satin Doll.”

    Also sang the hell out of a Nat King Cole song, I’d Rather Have The Blues (aka Blues From A Kiss Me Deadly) in the 1956 noir film, “Kiss Me Deadly”“. Whoa.

Reading Around on March 24th through March 27th

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A few interesting links collected March 24th through March 27th:

  • Is Jon Stewart Our Ed Murrow? Maybe… – Mr. Stewart. Yes, he makes funny faces and starred in Death to Smoochy, but, along with Stephen Colbert, his ability to entertain is what lends him his authority in the first place. Think about it. Why should we care who this or that newspaper publisher endorses for president? Answer: we only care because we care about the editorial influence on the audience. Presidential candidates don’t go seeking the endorsement of high school newspapers because, well, dude, kids don’t vote. Stewart and Colbert have the audience that powerful people want to reach; yet at the same time, these two men do not participate in a pack mentality, and that’s what makes them politically invaluable (and at this point, irreplaceable).

  • The President Vs. the Press – The Daily Beast – There you have it. CNN wants emotions, theatrics, the stamping of feet, mano-a-mano anger, and outrage contests. This is a presidency defined by cable news food-fights and Maureen Dowd-style armchair psychoanalysis. Obama wants to “know what he’s talking about,” pick the best policy to achieve it, and explain it as calmly as he can to his country. … Take a look at the blogging of the news conference by the New York Times’ Helene Cooper and Jeff Zeleny: At 8:28, Cooper writes: “Finally! A break from the wonkish budget talk.” Eight minutes later, Zeleny adds, “At the half-way mark, Mr. Obama has yet to make much news.” In the meantime, Obama has been trying to explain, in part using the press and in part going over the heads of the press, why what he’s trying to do with his budget will address the source of their concern about their futures. Where’s the fun in that?

  • All Ears: Dancing with the Scars (Emotional Ones) – Photo Credit: Seth Anderson

  • Beer drinkers could purchase direct from local breweries under compromise plan | Texas Watchdog – Shiner beer photo by flickr user swanksalot, used via a Creative Commons license.

Reading Around on March 23rd through March 24th

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A few interesting links collected March 23rd through March 24th:

  • Rick Steves | Salon Life – lot of my outlook and writing have been sharpened by enjoying a little recreational marijuana. If you arrested everybody who smoked marijuana in the United States tomorrow, this country would be a much less interesting place to call home.

    The fact is, the marijuana law in the U.S. is a big lie. It’s racist and classist. White rich people can smoke marijuana with impunity and poor black people get a record, can’t get education, can’t get a loan, and all of sudden go into a life of desperation and become hardened criminals. Why? Because we’ve got a racist law based on lies about marijuana.

    There’s 80,000 people in jail today for marijuana. We arrested 800,000 people in the last 12 months on marijuana charges

  • [image via]

  • Rick Steves | Salon Life – I don’t say we’re an empire. I say the world sees us as one. I say there’s never been an empire that didn’t have disgruntled people on its fringes looking for reasons to fight. We think, “Don’t they have any decency? Why don’t they just line up in formation so we can carpet bomb them?” But they’re smart enough to know that’s a quick prescription to being silenced in a hurry.

    We shot from the bushes at the redcoats when we were fighting our war against an empire. Now they shoot from the bushes at us. It shouldn’t surprise us. I’m not saying it’s nice. But I try to remind Americans that Nathan Hales and Patrick Henrys and Ethan Allens are a dime a dozen on this planet. Ours were great. But there’s lots of people who wish they had more than one life to give for their country. We diminish them by saying, “Oh, they’re terrorists and life is cheap for them.” They’re passionate for their way of life. And they will give their life for what is important to their families.

  • Chicago Reader Blogs: News Bites – Cassanos and I talked by phone, and I sent her a link from Gawker.com mourning that a recent 82-page issue of the New Yorker had just under ten pages of ads. But she noticed it was a January issue — the slowest part of the year — and she said that among Conde Nast magazines the New Yorker is in the middle in terms of ad losses. And on the other hand, circulation is up 20 percent since 2001 and the renewal rate is 85 percent and the magazine just led all others with ten nominations for National Magazine Awards.

    Cassanos made me feel good when she said I was the first reporter who’d contacted her to find out if Charles’s rumor was true

Reading Around on April 9th

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Some additional reading April 9th from 09:50 to 09:50: