http://www.dooce.com/mtarchives/02_09_2003.html “I’ve Got This Great Idea for a Bold New Ad.” She’s talking about a Levi’s ad (find “buffalos”) … which actually I like. 12:36
Archives
This month: 30 entries.
http://nerve.com/dispatches/hong/booking/ Strange “dating” system in L.A.’s Korean clubs: “This is how it works: at a guy’s request, a waiter approaches a girl’s booth. He might ask politely if she’d like to be booked. More likely, he’ll grab her by the arm, drag her to a table and force her to sit down. Boy offers Girl a shot of Crown Royal and small talk ensues. But before Boy can offer another drink, Girl blurts, ‘I should get back to my friends’ and leaves. Boy shrugs it off, knowing that another struggling girl will be delivered to his table within minutes.” 11:28
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110003123 Australian P.M. John Howard in the WSJ: “The cost of doing nothing is infinitely greater than the cost of acting.” (You need to register; fake details will do.) A clumsy, not a very powerful piece—for some reason he seems to think that the idea he most strongly needs to defend is that this time a Cold War-style containment policy won’t do—but it’s not too bad, and is at least useful as a clear and for-the-record account of his beliefs. 10:58
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57528-2003Feb11.html “I tell Burrows that if he is willing to submit to an interview, I am willing to review his book at length in The Washington Post. The only catch, I said, is that I am going to say that it is, in my professional judgment, the worst novel ever published in the English language.” 17:17
http://tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030303;s=trb030303 “The unhappy truth is that, if the Bush administration wins the war but betrays the peace, the political consequences for the president will be small.” 15:42
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/82feb/8202diamond1.htm “Have You Ever Tried To Sell A Diamond?”—how the De Beers cartel created our love for diamonds. (An article in the March 2002 National Geographic discusses “conflict diamonds” (not very revealing extract); Salon summarises the issues.) 00:06
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/5190378.htm Clare Kimmerle is 79 and has worked at the same McDonald’s for nearly 33 years. 00:00
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/2787401.stm Nauru loses contact with the outside world and now no-one even knows who the president is?
Update. Because this story is weirding me out big time, I called the Nauru Consulate-General to find out what was happening. Apparently it really is impossible to call Nauru at the moment, but the woman couldn’t tell me how long this has been going on for, when it will be possible to call Nauru, or what the exact political situation was. Apparently her boss knows more, but she wasn’t in, though she is expected some time this afternoon…
A Fijian website is carrying recent Nauru news about the island’s airline.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/02/
21/COUNT.TMP Using aerial photographs to produce estimates puts number of
people at S.F. peace rally at 65,000, not the 200,000 claimed.
(Also, why are police estimates generally thought to be
underestimates? Why are they biased?) 12:30
http://brain-terminal.com/articles/video/peace-protest.html Some guy interviews protestors at a peace rally. (View for some of the reasons for my post below—in relation to which, I got a complaint: “Your lack of comments drove me craaaazy today!” I’ll add comments soon!) 12:22
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/19/opinion/19FRIE.html “Tell people the truth. Saddam does not threaten us today. He can be deterred. Taking him out is a war of choice—but it’s a legitimate choice. It’s because he is undermining the U.N., it’s because if left alone he will seek weapons that will threaten all his neighbors, it’s because you believe the people of Iraq deserve to be liberated from his tyranny, and it’s because you intend to help Iraqis create a progressive state that could stimulate reform in the Arab/Muslim world, so that this region won’t keep churning out angry young people who are attracted to radical Islam and are the real weapons of mass destruction.”
I didn’t attend any peace rally last weekend because, well, I don’t think I support the same sort of peace that the peace movement seems to want: the temporary and cheap peace wrought by appeasement, lack of courage, an unwillingness do very much about other people’s problems, and so forth. (Pastor Niemöller’s “First they came for the Jews…” is an argument for preëmptive action as much as it is an argument for the spirited defence of persecuted minorities.)
(Actually, I’m not sure if I completely agree with Friedman on the need for war but I think I am closer to war than no war. Christopher Hitchens has more on France’s deceit.) 12:10
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/profiles/rank/jedi.asp Heh: 0.7% of English and Welsh (is there a name for England plus Wales?) give “Jedi” as their religion on census, census takers strike back with: “Whatever its motive, the Jedi campaign may have worked in favour of the Census exercise. Census agencies worldwide report difficulties encouraging those in their late teens and twenties to complete their forms.” 10:13
http://slate.msn.com/id/2078867/ Cypriot politics quite interesting at the moment. (Greek side recently elected anti-reunification president.) 10:00
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/magazine/16DILLER.html Profile of architects Diller + Scorfido. (Of the previously linked Blur Building.) They’re including a wall cut from MOMA (the site of Duchamp’s urinal) in their Whitney retrospective. 11:29
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/PEstory/
TGAM/20030207/MAPITC/Business/business/businessColumnistsHeadline_
temp/7/7/8/ Marketing news: pros and cons (mostly cons) of
Ford’s effort to make the name of every Ford car an F-word. 09:16
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/lomo/ BBC Lomo documentary to air 19th February. Site has some very odd videos of random people describing Lomos: “Gnome,” “Biscuits.”
Several photos of the same thing, taken with Lomo and Coolpix, to facilitate comparison.
(The photos that appear at the top of this page are all Lomos.) 13:32
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030210/030210-4.html Doing dishes by hand vs. the dishwasher: more energy, more water, and not as clean. (How is “energy” calculated?) 10:59
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030210/030210-7.html “Over the next two and a half years, Güntürkün recorded 124 scientifically valid kisses in public places across the United States, Germany and Turkey.” Hooray for scientifically valid kisses! (People kiss to the right, apparently.) 10:17
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/ “You Can’t Beat Off with Nuclear Arms” 13:47
http://slate.msn.com/id/2078503/ Chirac’s preuves indiscutables: undisputed proof or indisputed proof?
Dump of translation-related stuff:
- A few months ago news organisations reported that North Korea had admitted, in a radio broadcast, that the country posessed nuclear weapons. South Korea said that the broadcast was unclear, that a syllable was missing, and that North Korea merely said that it was “entitled” to nuclear weapons. I suppose they were wrong about that.
- In a foreword to the 5th “definitive” edition (and 5th translation!) of The Joke, Milan Kundera describes his rising exasperation with the unexpectedly grueling process. (Amazon’s review: “Translators, writers, readers, all can be offended by the authorial gracelessness, publishing astigmatism, and general waste of paper this amounts to. Buy someone’s first novel instead.”—I found his earnestness charming.)
- Translating Ulysses into Chinese.
(Timothy Noah’s I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-A-Hawk “confession” is also good.) 11:47
http://slate.msn.com/id/2078497/ Hajj scaling problems: “The most hazardous part of the hajj is the stoning of the pillars at Mina, which is where Tuesday’s catastrophe took place. The ceremony, in which Muslims symbolically rebuke the devil by throwing 21 pebbles at three pillars, has changed little over the past 14 centuries. What has changed is the number of participants.at least 2 million people a year now partake, according to unofficial estimates. That’s thought to be a fourfold increase over the number of pilgrims who made the trip in 1970. The pillars, of course, have remained the same size, making access more difficult.” 10:19
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2003/02/item20030213003922_1.htm Shane Warne’s mother gave him a diuretic… (1) When you’re being tended to by some of the best sports doctors in the country, why take a tablet from your mum? (2) What is Warne’s mother doing with a diuretic anyway? Panadol I could understand. (3) He should know to not take anything without running it by his doctor first! Surely! I am suspicious. 09:53
http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/2003-02-03-reebok_
x.htm Reebok to parody Nike “streaker”
ad.
(Which is fake, apparently.) Has anyone seen this? [Update: Terry
Tate, Streaker Tackle.] 10:59
http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?020923fa_fact What’s happened to Free Willy’s Keiko: he’s in Iceland, and being taught how to behave like a wild killer whale. (This seems to be an unseemly amount of money to spend on single whale.) 00:34
http://newyorker.com/talk/content/?020923ta_talk_macintyre Quintessential “Talk of the Town”: the sculptor of “Crouching Man” is now a ninety-three-year-old retired farmer. 00:34
http://www.harpers.org/harpers-index/listing.php3 Percentage of the $1.1 trillion in Iraqi oil contracts that are held by French or Russian companies: 69. “Curiously free of the usual conspicuous liberal bias” the Smarter Harper’s Index remarks. 00:30
http://slate.msn.com/id/2078104/ Was the Space Shuttle useful? Columbia’s main contribution to human knowledge: “By the end of this year, we will know more than we ever did before about how to collect, catalog, and analyze the debris of a space-flight disaster.”
Some human space flight advocacy: (1) “What can a man do on Mars that a robot cannot?” / “PLANT A FUCKING FLAG ON THE PLANET.”; (2) John F. Kennedy, 1962: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…”
(But I think putting humans into space is too expensive. Can’t we wait 50 years for cheaper and better technology?) 04:56
http://slate.msn.com/id/2078242/ “What’s so controversial about Picasso’s Guernica?” 04:56
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/magazine/02WWLN.html “But diversity, or rather, affirmative- action- as- diversity, is not good for all. In addition to the longstanding problem of disadvantaging some in order to advantage others, the diversity rationale also insultingly assumes that black students bring a black ‘point of view,’ Asians an Asian one and so on, thus reifying the very barriers of race and ethnicity that affirmative action is meant to erase. And why should racial and ethnic ‘points of view’ outweigh those forged by class or culture? Why, as a professor recently suggested to me, shouldn’t the presence of the R.O.T.C. on campus be seen as a means to ensure representation of a ‘military’ point of view otherwise absent from elite universities?” 04:19