Category: Links

suggested reading at other sites

Reading Around on January 29th through January 30th

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A few interesting links collected January 29th through January 30th:

  • Zero – "I would imagine the crude calculus is something like this. In 1993-94 the GOP minority relentlessly sought to obstruct a new president’s legislative agenda and were rewarded with a big electoral win in 1994. In 2001-2002 the Democratic minority relentlessly sought to compromise with a new president’s legislative agenda and were rewarded with a big electoral defeat in 2002. Simplistic lesson is that there’s no upside to cooperation.

    The lesson I would hope the administration learns here is this: He needs to spend less time seeking political cover to mitigate the downside to possible policy failure, and more time trying to implement the best policies he can."

  • The Fifty Most Loathsome People of 2008 – "After promising that he was “not going to go to…the Republican convention, and spend my time attacking Barack Obama,” Lieberman went to the Republican convention and attacked Barack Obama. But that was just the beginning of his descent into a self-dug hole of betrayal that should have proved inescapable. Lieberman thought it was “a good question” to ask if Obama was a Marxist. He campaigned not just with McCain, but with Palin and down-ticket Republicans, another thing he said he wouldn’t do. But the most loathsome trait Lieberman exhibits is that most loathsome of all: Smearing dissent as treasonous."

Reading Around on January 28th

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Some additional reading January 28th from 14:57 to 16:32:

  • DownWithTyranny!: Outrage Continues To Build As Limbaugh’s Hateful Remarks Repulse Most Americans But Seem To Inspire More GOP Members Of Congress – Ahh, the vulgar pig boy, back in the news… ” Alan Grayson, the outspoken member from Orlando, as usual, wasn’t mincing words: “Rush Limbaugh is a has-been hypocrite loser, who craves attention. His right-wing lunacy sounds like Mikhail Gorbachev, extolling the virtues of communism. Limbaugh actually was more lucid when he was a drug addict. If America ever did 1% of what he wanted us to do, then we’d all need pain killers.””

  • Bisphenol A – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – “There are seven classes of plastics used in packaging applications. Type 7 is the catch-all “other” class, and some type 7 plastics, such as polycarbonate (sometimes identified with the letters “PC” near the recycling symbol) and epoxy resins, are made from bisphenol A monomer.[4] When such plastics are exposed to hot liquids, bisphenol A leaches out 55 times faster than it does under normal conditions, at up to 32 ng/hour.[81] Type 3 (PVC) can also contain bisphenol A as antioxidant in plasticizers.[4] Types 1 (PET), 2 (HDPE), 4 (LDPE), 5 (polypropylene), and 6 (polystyrene) do not use bisphenol A during polymerization or package forming”

And in case you didn’t see this elsewhere, or previously, Amazon has several hundred full length free MP3 files. Some good stuff here, actually, and for the record, much easier to purchase albums from artists who are not antagonistic to downloading options…

Free MP3s from Amazon

Reading Around on January 27th through January 28th

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A few interesting links collected January 27th through January 28th:

  • EveryBlock partners with New York Times to expand NYC site / The EveryBlock Blog – We're excited to announce a partnership with The New York Times and a new section on EveryBlock New York City: political news items.

    One of our goals at EveryBlock is to notify you when local news sites or blogs mention something in your neighborhood. This far, we've focused on specific addresses and places, which you can see in our "locations in the media" section. There, we catalog local news coverage to figure out which articles mention which particular places.

    Now, we're taking this philosophy further by applying it to local elected representatives. This new section, "political news items," notifies you whenever your local elected representatives — such as your city councilman or state assemblyman — are mentioned in The New York Times.

  • http://www.flightbasketball.com/100-0-Texas-Game-Response-From-Coach.html – Re: Dallas Covenant School girls basketball team lopsided 100-0 victory, the coach writes:

    "The game started like any other high school basketball game across the nation. …We started the game off with a full-court press. After 3 minutes into play, we had already reached a 25-0 lead. Like any rational thinking coach would do, I immediately stopped the full-court press, dropped into a 2-3 zone defense, and started subbing in my 3 bench players. This strategy continued for the rest of the game and allowed the Dallas Academy players to get the ball up the court for a chance to score. The second half started with a score of 59-0. Seeing that we would win by too wide of a margin, running down the clock was the only logical course of action left. Contrary to the articles, there were only a total of four 3-point baskets made; three in the first quarter, and only one in the third quarter. I continued to sub in bench players, play zone defense, and run the clock for the rest of the game"

Reading Around on January 26th

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Some additional reading January 26th from 10:22 to 22:31:

  • The Washington Monthly – This Explains a Lot– “On the one hand, the Bush administration released some detainees who apparently turned out to be pretty dangerous. On the other, the Bush administration refused to release other detainees who weren’t dangerous at all, and were actually U.S. allies.How could this happen? In light of these revelations about the lack of files, it starts to make a lot more sense.But to put this in an even larger context, consider just how big a mess Bush has left for Obama here. The previous administration a) tortured detainees, making it harder to prosecute dangerous terrorists; b) released bad guys while detaining good guys; and c) neglected to keep comprehensive files on possible terrorists who’ve been in U.S. custody for several years. As if the fiasco at Gitmo weren’t hard enough to clean up.”
  • The three primary roles your local website should play | yelvington.com– “Journalists tend to gravitate to only one of these roles: the town crier, the quaint colonial-era village character who walks around ringing a bell telling you what’s happening. It comes naturally. This is why 24×7 coverage teams and the “continuous news desk” concept take root so quickly when newsrooms suddenly awaken to the urgency of taking the Internet seriously.
  • But the other roles aren’t secondary. They’re coequal, and they’re grossly neglected by most local news websites.Moreover, they consistently surface in qualitative research as poorly met needs. The language people use is a little different, but recognizable: “Help me connect with people.” “Help me get answers I need.” “Help me find people like me.” “Help me pursue my interests.”
  • drop.io: simple private file sharing, free internet file sharing – Hmm, seems useful
    “Use drop.io to create drops and privately share your files by web, email, phone, fax, and more. Drops are protected from search engines so you can conveniently share what you want, how you want, with whom you want.”
  • Undercover Black Man: Bad news for David Milch fans– “Now I hear that HBO has pulled the plug on Milch’s latest project, a New York City cop drama set in the 1970s called “Last of the Ninth.”They filmed a pilot episode… with British actor Ray Winstone (pictured) as one of the leads. Evidently HBO was not digging it.That’s a show I wanted to see. Since the ’90s, Milch has talked about creating a series based on Bill Clark’s early career in the NYPD.

    Clark spent two years undercover as a white radical. He hung out with Black Panthers (including Tupac’s mama).”

  • Food Is A Weapon
  • Mirror, Mirror on the Wall – Errol Morris Blog – NYTimes.com– Awesome! “Photographs make this somewhat more difficult. They are a partial record of who we were and how we imagined ourselves. …The traveling pool of press photographers that follows presidents includes representatives from three wire services — AP (The Associated Press), AFP (Agence France-Presse) and Thomson Reuters. During the last week of the Bush administration, I asked the head photo editors of these news services — Vincent Amalvy (AFP), Santiago Lyon (AP) and Jim Bourg (Reuters) — to pick the photographs of the president that they believe captured the character of the man and of his administration. …. It is interesting that these pictures are different. They may be of the same scene, but they have different content. They speak in a different way.(The photos are reproduced here with their original captions, unedited.)”
  • Tijuana Bibles– “If you are offended by depictions of sodomy, bestiality, “alternative sexual practices,” racial and ethnic stereotypes, or just about anything else, you should leave now.Tijuana Bibles were pornographic tracts popular in America before the advent of mass-market full-color glossy wank-fodder such as Playboy. A typical bible consisted of eight stapled comic-strip frames portraying characters and celebrities (eg. John Dillinger, Popeye, Disney characters) in wildly sodomistic situations. Many could be considered grossly racist, sexist, and otherwise wholly “politically incorrect.” Browser discretion is advised.”

Reading Around on January 25th through January 26th

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A few interesting links collected January 25th through January 26th:

  • How to Replace a Sky in Photoshop – “Got an image that is great, except for that lifeless dull sky? Learn how to replace the sky in an image using Photoshop in this tutorial.”
  • Op-Ed Columnist – Will Obama Save Liberalism? – NYTimes.com – “This is William Kristol’s last column.” Awesome news.

  • Blog-Sothoth: netflixed What Times Is It There – Sounds awesome. Added to my Netflix queue.”What Time is it There? is a quiet masterpiece–and literally quiet, because there is about ten minutes of dialogue in a two-hour film. If you need traditional plot in your flicks, avoid this one like the plague. It moves like an ethereal dream.”
  • Media Matters – Goldberg publishes badly doctored version of Rose/Brokaw interview as purported evidence of Brokaw’s bias – Bernie Goldberg is just a hack, talentless, bitter hack. “In another house-of-cards example of purported media infatuation with President Obama offered by Bernard Goldberg in his new book, Goldberg echoes Rush Limbaugh by printing badly doctored “snippets” of an interview between Charlie Rose and Tom Brokaw. Goldberg’s doctored transcript of the interview falsely suggests, among other things, that Brokaw expressed the view that “there’s a lot about [Obama] we don’t know,” when, in fact, Brokaw attributed that assertion to “conservative commentators” and that comments Brokaw and Rose made about their lack of familiarity with the candidates applied only to Obama when, in fact, they were referring to Sen. John McCain as well.”

Reading Around on January 24th through January 25th

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A few interesting links collected January 24th through January 25th:

  • Want to Know What Flickr Thinks Should be Censored, Public Art, Museum Paintings and Screenshots of the Flickr Blog When They’re Critical of Flickr | Thomas Hawk Digital Connection – Censorship and communication re: censorship is the consistently bad part of Flickr, ever since their beginnings, actually. Early on, Flickr marked my entire stream as “restricted”, but I never did find out why. “If you’d like to see if Flickr is censoring any of your images as well, go to the Flickr Organizer and click on “more options” under the search function and then tell the organizer to show you only “Restricted” content. You might just be surprised that Flickr has censored some of your images as well.”

  • Johnny Red Kerr – Peter Vecsey – “On that disheartening note, longtime Bulls broadcaster John “Red” Kerr is ailing with prostate cancer. After working the microphone for the first seven or eight games this season, the 33-year veteran and expansion team’s original coach (of the year, 1966-67, gaining entry to the playoffs) was forced to stay close to home.

    A ceremony honoring Kerr’s service to the franchise has been moved up from April to the second week of February. A statue in his likeness, sculpted by the same artist who carved Michael Jordan’s image, will be placed outside the United Center in the same vicinity as His Airness.

    Conspicuously absent from the Hall of Fame as a contributor, Kerr was a better-than-average center (13.8 points, 11. 2 rebounds) for 12 seasons with Syracuse, Philadelphia and Baltimore. His biggest achievement in my eyes, though, was recognizing the greatness of Julius Erving and George Gervin as GM of the ABA Virginia Squires long before anyone else.”

Reading Around on January 23rd

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Some additional reading January 23rd from 09:12 to 09:14:

  • The Allmusic Blog » Binge Listening: Solage – “The best known of Solage’s works is the rondeau for three voices, Fumeux fume par fumée, a staple of music history courses and a favorite among the Allmusic classical editors. This intensely chromatic and modally meandering piece may be about dreaming, smoke, or drug use — no one is quite sure what to make of it! But it is one of the oddest examples of early music extant”

  • David Bowie, 1973-76 – “Geoff MacCormack toured with Bowie during his glam-rock heyday, and has these (rather wonderful) snaps to prove it”

Bookmarks for January 22nd

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Some additional reading January 22nd from 14:36 to 16:45:

  • Report From the Field – Just wanted to let you guys know that there was an all-hands meeting with the new Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, at 11am today. The bullet points are:

    “Ethical misconduct and criminal acts by Bush political appoints spoiled image of department.”

    No fracking kidding, Salazar! The Bush Department of the Interior horrible, horrible, horrible.

  • Wired 9.12: Take The AQ Test – “Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre have created the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, as a measure of the extent of autistic traits in adults. In the first major trial using the test, the average score in the control group was 16.4. Eighty percent of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher. The test is not a means for making a diagnosis, however, and many who score above 32 and even meet the diagnostic criteria for mild autism or Asperger’s report no difficulty functioning in their everyday lives”

    I didn’t score 32, but did score higher than I want to admit. Introverts-of-the-universe, unite!

Bookmarks for January 22nd

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Some additional reading January 22nd from 00:43 to 10:09:

  • Obama Will Get His Blackberry – Marc Ambinder – “President Barack Obama is going to get his blackberry.On Monday, a government agency that the Obama administration — but that is probably the National Security Agency — added to a standard blackberry a super-encryption package…. and Obama WILL be able to use it … still for routine and personal messages.”

  • Obama Staff Arrives to White House Stuck in Dark Ages of Technology – washingtonpost.com – “One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.”

Bookmarks for January 20th through January 21st

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A few interesting links for January 20th through January 21st:

  • THE MOON AND WHISTLIN’ ALEX MOORE – “Yesterday (January 20th) – a wonderful day, as pure achievement for black Americans, however much disappointment is in store over the next four or eight years. Among the many joy-inducing, moving spectacles I never thought to see in my lifetime was that of Aretha Franklin singing it her way (and in so splendid a hat), and the elderly civil rights activist Joseph Lowery not only delivering the benediction but including in it quotations from Big Bill Broonzy, which put a grin on the faces of all the good-hearted people on the podium, not least from Michelle and Barack Obama. I can’t imagine how amazed Blind Willie McTell would have been.”

  • A Tiny Revolution: “Black, Brown, and White” – “You heard the uplifting words of Rev. Joseph Lowery:

    Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.
    The reverend seems to be a fan of Big Bill Broonzy. So am I.”

  • Text of Rev. Lowery’s inauguration benediction – “Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around … when yellow will be mellow … when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.”

  • McCain: Obama’s newest advisor? – ” it’s quite savvy of Obama to seek out his support. He’s essentially buying McCain stock at a low point and will presumably leverage that purchase when that stock inevitably rises.”

Bookmarks for January 19th through January 20th

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A few interesting links for January 19th through January 20th:

  • Wonkette : Did John Roberts Screw Up The Oath On Purpose? – “The AP, which is now run by a conservative nut who hoped to have a job in the pretend McCain Administration, quickly published a bullshit hit piece by the conservative hack Mark Sherman.

    But at one point early on, Obama paused, as if grasping for the next words. Roberts helped him over the brief awkward moment, repeating a few words to get Obama back on track.

    Ha, yes, very awkward, the way Roberts said the magic words in the WRONG ORDER.”

  • Text – Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address – NYTimes.com – Thanks for the shout-out, President Obama: “For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers.”
  • Change.gov will become Whitehouse.gov | /dev/random – “According to Federal Computer Week, at 12:01PM Tuesday when Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th president, Obama’s change.gov site will become the new whitehouse.gov.”

    Now live, check it out. Mike posted before and after screenshots too.

  • Talking Points Memo | Cheney and Icons – “Vice President Cheney is getting pushed around today in a wheelchair. Thankfully, it’s no serious medical issue. He hurt his back lugging books while moving out of the old digs. But it’s iconic. There’s no escaping the symbolism of the tired and enfeebled old guard hobbling off the stage. On so many fronts the stage setting, the unpredictable coincidences, perhaps just the fates seem to be conspiring to give us a dose of hyper-reality, not just the truth of the moment but a scaffolding of trappings and symbolic exclamation points to make sure we’re paying attention.”

    Could have been injured shredding documents.

  • Thomas Hawk Digital Connection » Blog Archive » Wordle Comparing President Obama’s Inagural Address With President Bush’s Farewell Speech – The wordle above compares the Inaugural Address presented earlier this morning by newly elected President Barack Obama (top) with President George Bush’s Farewell Speech (bottom).
  • Zyzzyx Road – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – Zyzzyx Road (IPA pronunciation: /zʊzɪzɪkʰs/; or phonics: /zuh-zih-zix/) is a 2006 independent thriller film. It stars Leo Grillo, Katherine Heigl, and Tom Sizemore. The screenplay was written by John Penney, who also directed the film.

    The film has gained a degree of notoriety due to its extremely low U.S. box office gross ($30 USD).…Zyzzyx Road was shown once-a-day for six days (February 25, 2006 through March 2, 2006) at Highland Park Village Theater in Dallas, Texas,[3] a movie theater rented by the producers for $1,000.

    Cost around $3,000,000 to make, or $100,000 per US viewer.
    [Did make a total of $350,000 or so over seas]

Bookmarks for January 17th through January 19th

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A few interesting links for January 17th through January 19th:

  • MARK BRYAN Dick Cheney – Ode to Dick Cheney: print available (click this link)
    Come you masters of war
    You that build all the guns
    You that build the death planes
    You that build the big bombs
    You that hide behind walls
    You that hide behind desks
    I just want you to know
    I can see through your masks

  • macosxhints.com – Adjust ‘locked’ volume levels when using optical audo – “When you use optical audio on your Mac, OS X locks the volume level to the highest setting, forcing you to adjust the volume level with your receiver. This “feature” is both annoying and unneeded. To get around this lock, you can simply install a free utility called Soundflower”

Reading Around on January 30th

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Some additional reading January 30th from 08:30 to 08:30:

Bookmarks for January 11th through January 14th

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A few interesting links for January 11th through January 14th:

Bookmarks for January 8th through January 11th

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A few interesting links for January 8th through January 11th:

  • The unlonesome death of William Zantzinger – “William D. Zantzinger, whose attack on a black barmaid in 1963 made him the subject of one of Bob Dylan’s most enduring folk songs, died Jan. 3 at the age of 69, under far better circumstances than the woman who suffered a fatal stroke after suffering blows from his cane.”

  • Four words regarding Burris: Game over, Game on. – “Congressional Quarterly reported this week that of the 180 people appointed to the U.S. Senate since popular election of senators began in 1917, 60 ran for re-election and won, while 56 ran and lost.”