Gulfstream

http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?020902fa_fact Managing traffic in New York. Sam Schwartz, who was NY’s traffic commissioner through most of the nineteen-eighties, took his job seriously:

Schwartz ticketed Mayor Koch’s car for illegal parking while they were having lunch together, revoked the parking spot of the archbishop of New York, which was next to St. Patrick’s Cathedral (it caused backups on Fifth Avenue and East Fiftieth Street), and had a TV-news van towed while the crew was interviewing him. But his finest hour was his assault on illegally parked cars with diplomatic plates. Not only did Schwartz ticket these cars; he began towing them, which caused an uproar in the diplomatic community. A special session of more than a hundred delegates to the U.N. was convened to meet with the traffic commissioner. The Russians cited the Geneva Convention, which they claimed guaranteed the right to free parking. The French said it was possible that the entire U.N. might move to Vienna if the diplomats didn’t get their parking privileges back. But Schwartz was unmoved, and kept up his assault until, a week or so later, the United States State Department informed him that American diplomats in Norway and Togo had lost their parking privileges, and that to avert an international crisis Schwartz should consider refocussing his energies. “What I’ve learned from experience,” he told me, “is that in New York people will go a long way to keep their parking privileges.”

(Schwarz also created the “Don’t Even Think of Parking Here” and “Don’t Block the Box” signs.) 12:12

http://newyorker.com/talk/content/?020902ta_talk_surowiecki The Bush Administration’s corporate credentials? It’s stacked with lots of savvy CEOs, sure, but they’re big government capitalists: almost all were at companies whose success depended on “regulatory approval, government largesse, or cartel-like machinations.” 17:35

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/26830.html Seemingly decent, honest (non-breathless) OS X 10.2 review. (Compare: David Pogue.) 13:57

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2002/08/22/magazine/25test.slideshow_
1.html ”Smoking and venting.” Sean Coffey, 70, factory worker: “The Irish built this damned city—the subways, the sewers. The only thing we have is bars. I work all day for $8 an hour, and if I can’t come to a bar and smoke. …” 16:57

http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/news_and_history/html/
the_dawn_of_dilbert.html The cover letter and strips that made up Scott Adams’s Dilbert proposal. The rejection letters are much more polite (and complimentary) than I had imagined—but I suppose this is only smart … who’s to say they won’t end up, 15 years hence, on the website of the successful cartoonist you rejected? (One suggested that he improve his drawings and write in capital letters, two changes which are, I suppose, amongst the most obvious differences between then and now.) 15:23

http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/pdfs/OTGuide.pdf Hullo font geeks! Adobe’s OpenType User Guide describes some of the features of the new OpenType format (which was developed with Microsoft). Microsoft’s pages have some wild examples of the things you can do (and need to do) to properly set Indic and Arabic scripts. And the freetype project has some screenshots of Arabic text set with an oblique baseline on each word. Us Romans have typography easy! 13:57

http://timblair.blogspot.com/2002_08_18_timblair_archive.html#80620290 “Ali Bakhtiyari, the refugee accused of having fraudulently obtained a temporary protection visa, has admitted to the The Age that he spent two years in the Pakistani city of Quetta before paying people smugglers thousands of dollars to get him to Australia. …” (The Age)

I don’t think it very good form (or a good tactical move) to make much of Ali Bakhtiyari’s lies. (Blair probably shouldn’t have paid much attention to him in the first place.) Bakhtiyari may have lied, but others, without doubt, didn’t, haven’t and aren’t: Blair would get more mileage from his point on the political spectrum by sticking to its traditional strongholds of principles, consistency, fairness, the rule of law, etc. 09:58

http://nationalpost.com/artslife/story.html?id={B62669DB-
290B-427A-AB1B-4D888F4F3DB5} “A strange transformation is afoot in the consumer landscape of food products. The meat has found its way out of the refrigerator.” 09:48

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s250347.htm What it’s like to have sex in a metal tube with an MRI machine looking on. (The account is “charmingly though imperfectly translated.”) 12:02

http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?020819fa_fact Calvin Trillin tracks down a fondly-remembered legend: when poured into black glasses, you can’t tell the difference between red and white wine. 11:33

http://media.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,7541,776983,00.html Sub-editor attacks a Giles Coren review, changing (in the familiar pangram) the lazy dog to a lazy dog, rendering his “All 26 letters of the alphabet in a 35-letter sentence” remark incorrect. This is his complaint. (Not quite sure why he used the instead of a but anyway…)

The type samples at fonts.com incorporate some nice pangrams:

We took a breezy excursion and gathered jonquils from the river slopes.

Sweet marjoram grew in luxuriant profusion by the window that overlooked the Aztec city.

Jaded zombies acted quickly, but kept driving their oxen forward.

10:23

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/26714.html Problems with IE’s SSL implementation, etc. You can count on Slashdot to jump up and down about any security problem that Microsoft pooh-poohs—but I think this one is fairly serious.

It it is strange, though, that neither the online retailers nor credit-card companies ever seem to be too concerned by these sorts of security problems either—especially strange in the case of credit-card companies, who would seem to have the most to loose. American Express, for example, offers an Online Fraud Protection Guarantee: “Use the American Express Card online, and you won’t be responsible for any unauthorized charges. Period.” If it really is a problem, why isn’t Amex worried? 12:17

http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,54333,00.html Ellen Feiss fan sites. 18:01

http://slate.msn.com/?id=2069345 Anne Applebaum reviews Christopher Hitchen’s review of Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread. She writes: (a) that the “the horror of Soviet camp guards lay not in their sadism but in their total indifference to prisoners’ fate”; (b) that “totalitarianism … was the product of institutions, of bureaucracies, and above all individual choices and decisions of millions of people” (i.e. individual Russians—and not just Stalin—were responsible); and (c) Amis’s decision to criticise Hitchens in particular is peculiar as well as unfortunate since Hitchens, a Trotskyite, well knew the horrors of Stalinism. 21:09

http://newyorker.com/archive/content/?020819fr_archive01 Review from 1945: frozen dinners. Lots of (unnecessary?) flourishes. (e.g. “This is all the doing of a New York inventor named William L. Maxson, who has been a grandfather for five months, closely resembles Henry VIII, and is left-handed.”)

(This is by Lillian Ross, who is still writing for the magazine. The latest issue has a “Talk of the Town” piece about “Camp Broadway,” a summer camp for aspiring actors.) 14:24

http://www.nature.com/nsu/020805/020805-10.html Unwarranted hype? Scientists at Polaroid “reinvent” the principles of photography. Certainly it is surprising how little the technology has progressed over the last 200 years (and the last 100 years in particular). Then: black and white, have to sit still. Now: colour, don’t need quite so much light. 14:40

http://www.cis.org.au/Policy/winter02/polwin02-1.htm Forceful Francis Fukuyama defence of the West and, I suppose, Occidentalism: “Much as people would like to believe that ideas live or die as a result of their inner moral rectitude, power matters a great deal. German fascism didn’t collapse because of its internal moral contradictions; it died because Germany was bombed to rubble and occupied by Allied armies.” Fukuyama also delivered a John Bonython Lecture. 11:03

http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/?020812on_onlineonly02 What scares M. Night Shyamalan: “Freddie Krueger with the blood—that doesn’t really scare me. What scares me is something like this: if I had a photo of my wife on my desk, and it was face down, and I put it up and I walked out of the room and I came back and it was face down again. That’s scary.” 17:36

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/36/features-ehrenreich.php Romanticising the hobo. (Not that I mind.) 12:58

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/annanicole1.html Account of the Anna Nicole Smith/J. Howard Marshall courtship, an extract from Judge David Carter’s decision. (Starts half-way down.) “But education is no guarantor of integrity and a discredited profession does not mean a person lacks truthfulness. While Vickie [Smith] certainly drew a more noble image of herself than the facts bear out, her testimony on the statements made by J. Howard are credible.” 12:00

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15630 Good & fair review of Stiglitz’s Globalization and Its Discontents that ends in a call for a similarly lucid and well-informed book that defends the IMF’s policies. (See also #859.) 01:11

http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,54154,00.html Professor Koch has an Apple logo tattooed onto his right arm. (What Dalrymple (my favourite conservative) thinks : “The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man’s existence.”) 14:30

http://salon.com/tech/feature/2002/07/29/organic/ Interesting: more and more people are buying organic food than ever before. But consumers appear to only care about the “organicness” of the food they buy—they buy organic food produced by large-scale agri-businesses, not just small-scale farmers, and they buy food produced by energy-intensive means. 12:46

http://www.nationalpost.com/artslife/story.html?id={7C3E5A47-
1FD8-4436-BD69-E239C2F3A8D6} Dr Ivo Pitanguy, one of the world’s best plastic surgeons, thinks plastic surgery is a democratic right: “Plastic surgery can be important for self-esteem for anyone and should be available. This is true democracy at work.”

I don’t think the state should pay, but I don’t see anything in principle wrong with (cosmetic) plastic surgery. There’s no substantive moral difference between changes brought about by plastic surgery and changes brought about by, say, waking at 5.00 each morning to go to the gym, eating well, or getting better clothes. Appearance matters, and plastic surgery is a not illegitimate way to effect change.

(Still need to account for: (a) the stigma associated with plastic surgery and (b) the usual failure to acknowledge that one has had plastic surgery—note toupee similar.) 15:47

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB1028069195715597440,
00.html Sony Ericsson is pushing their new phone via guerilla (or undercover) marketing, in which actors pose as members of the public. A NY Times article on the same topic quotes an official from the FTC: “If testimonial is affiliated with you in some way, you have to disclose that.” This sounds about right. Guerilla marketing isn’t quite product placement. 13:33

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/30/science/30ESCH.html Mathematician fills in blank spot in Escher print. (original, filled in.) 13:27