Gulfstream

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/10685881.html “You ruined my poo.” 22:22

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/28/business/media/28SLAT.html Slate is now making money. (Also discussion of how being an arm of Microsoft helps, general analysis of the economics of web publishing.)

(I’ve always liked Slate, and was a subscriber during its “dalliance with subscriptions.”) 17:31

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2984655.stm Conceptual artists accuse each other of plagiarism, etc. 21:28

http://www.nomediakings.org/mytrip.htm Gentle narrated walk-through of Grand Theft Auto’s Liberty City. 23:36

http://slate.msn.com/id/2081904/ If gay sex should be legal because it harms no-one, why not incest? (Followup.) 23:12

http://slate.msn.com/id/2081635/ Wow! 8 Mile DVD has featurette “showing Eminem is a series of spontaneous, real-life rap battles” against extras from the final battle sequence. 12:10

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,423053,00.html Wal-Mart’s way of doing business. Apparently Wal-Mart is good for manufacturers: their profits are up, and a survey declared Wal-Mart “the best retailer with which to do business.” Apparently Wal-Mart is good for consumers: low inflation is in part due to Wal-Mart’s low prices, and the company accounts for one-eighth of the growth in US productivity between 1995 and 1999. 10:40

http://www.matadorrecords.com/mpeg/cat_power/he_war.mp3 00:00

http://slate.msn.com/id/2081640/ I didn’t realise this: it’s in fact not okay for the US government to prefer US companies when spending to US tax-payers’ money (e.g. in rebuilding Iraq) because WTO rules “forbid governments to discriminate against the companies of fellow members when they are looking to spend some money.” 10:12

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/just_fun/games/mapgame.html Interactive North African/Middle Eastern geography test. 22:35

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15642 Roger Ebert interview covering Michael Moore, “progressive” movies, politics…

(I almost always find Ebert interesting (and by “interesting” I don’t mean “provocative”). He’s also the source of one of my favourite thoughts that one can contemplate: what would you most like to see again (or do again, or hear again) for the very first time? Another favourite (from Hanif Kureishi): when the phone rings, who would you most like it to be? And who would you least like it to be? … a third (this one not a question): that out hundreds of millions of potential partners, you seriously consider maybe 1,000. (Herbert Simon.) You can love someone very much, and do much to be with them, and find it inconceivable that you could love anyone else—and yet they were chosen from a set of 1,000 out of a million.) 22:25

http://volokh.blogspot.com/2003_04_13_volokh_archive.html#200147168 Why are vibrators more socially acceptable than the male equivalent (whatever that would be)? (I love it when people get all intellectual and thoughtful about sex!) 17:09

http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/
2003/04/13/nhonda13.xml About Honda’s “cog” ad. (Not fake; it took months to develop and test, and 606 takes over four days.) 13:05

http://www.michaelspecter.com/ny/2003/2003_02_03_vaccine.html New Yorker article on the ethics and economics of AIDS research. This is blurbed as being on whether it’s appropriate to subject AIDS research to the same constraints that govern other medical research, but it actually covers a lot of subjects (and doesn’t actually cover the ethical issue in much depth).

“In 2001, less than two per cent of the twenty billion dollars spent on aids prevention, treatment, and research across the world was devoted to the search for a vaccine.” (Apparently there’s not much incentive to find a vaccine because the ideal vaccine is cheap, and administered once. Also, finding a vaccine looks to be very hard.) 15:21

http://www.epicurious.com/run/recipe/view?id=105591 11:54

http://www.livejournal.com/users/billyfleetwood/31726.html 12:56

http://slate.msn.com/id/2081213/ Bush’s subtle discrimination: calling the Iraqis “good and gifted” marks them as special—Americans don’t get such “compliments.” (There’s a great Chris Rock rant about how white people’s idea of a compliment to Colin Powell is that “he speaks so well.”) 10:32

http://rebekah.org/apologia.shtml rja is back! 21:36

http://slate.msn.com/id/2081309/ On the Marines having second thoughts about draping an American flag from the head of Saddam’s statue: Fred Kaplan speculates that someone back at Centcom watching the toppling on CNN told them to remove it, which would make it a demonstration of both what shouldn’t happen, and what can and should—provided the coalition is pressured enough. (The comments, at the bottom, are interesting too.) 18:58

http://slate.msn.com/id/2081326/ Hitchens gloats: “The next mass mobilization called by International ANSWER and the stop-the-war coalition is only a few days away. I already have my calendar ringed for the date.” 18:57

http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/goldstein/cl-et-gold8apr08.story Only 4% of Hollywood’s directors are female. 16:16

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/04/08/1049567654614.html Why are there still anti-war protests going on? Protests made sense before the war started in that they revealed, to the decision-makers, that a large number of people opposed war. But now that it’s started, it’s not going to stop before Saddam is gone. (And as Marc Cooper writes, “To call off the tanks at this juncture, thereby saving Saddam’s skin, would be a double betrayal of the Iraqi people.”) How do protests, right now, serve the Iraqi people? For protesters to vent their spleen whilst bombs fall is a great extravagance.

What the anti-war protesters should do is not plant banners on warships, but work to ensure Bush, etc. sticks to his promises. Cooper again puts this well: “The responsibilities of the peace movement are far too weighty to be squandered in sputtering and ultimately politically irrelevant feel-good acts of blocking traffic or ripping down fences at military bases. … The peace movement should take an active role in debating and trying to shape the post-Saddam outcome by fighting, first of all, for a thorough roll-up of the Ba’ath regime, for indictment and prosecution of Hussein and his gang, for the fullest democracy possible, respect for the Shiahs and Kurds, for a postwar government that respects human rights. That formula includes an authentic U.S. and international commitment to fund reconstruction and development. And let’s not forget the Bush-Blair promise to finally get serious about the Palestinians.”

William Saletan is more direct: “If you want to minimize the killing, stop resisting the war. Instead, do what you can to make the war transparent and to hold your government accountable for unnecessary deaths. Help the media and human rights organizations monitor the battlefield. Help them get reports and pictures to the people of your country and the world. Build an incentive system that will strengthen your government’s will to spare lives. Its ability will do the rest.” 11:52

http://slate.msn.com/id/2081243/ Timothy Noah solicits advice from PR professionals on behalf of Iraq’s Information Minister. (I’m surprised so many replied actually, but I suppose they know what they’re doing…)

(More of the Minister’s fine work.) 10:30

http://newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?030407crat_atlarge On affirmative action, and college admissions policies: “… This means that colleges like Harvard and Yale can cherry-pick their classes. If Harvard needs an outside linebacker, it can probably choose between an All-Division player with 1450 combined S.A.T. scores and an All-State with 1350. Yale can choose between a legacy [the child of a graduate], a Latina, and a national-science-competition finalist, depending on which hole needs another pigeon, each applicant with two 800s on the S.A.T.s (a credential known as dialling toll-free).” (Harvard apparently rejects twenty-five per cent of its “toll free” candidates.) 15:49

http://www.honda.co.uk/newcars/accord300k.html Wonderful Mousetrap-style ad for the Accord. (Nice work with the music, too.) 15:45

http://www.jlist.com/R/ADULTTOYS/ Japanese Adult toys. Hello Kitty “shoulder massager” only $21.50! 15:39

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5212a1.htm#fig1 How SARS spread from the Metropole Hotel. 11:26

http://slate.msn.com/id/2081102/ McSweeney’s and the short story. McSweeney’s, supposedly an outlet for stories not fitting the mould of the “New Yorker short story” (described by Michael Chabon as a “contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story”), now just as sharply defines a short story genre of its own: the “McSweeney’s short story,” which “substitutes nihilism for epiphany” and rejects “conventional notions of structure, character, or coherence.” (I think another defining (and regrettable) characteristic of the McSweeney’s short story is irrepressible whimsy. A McSweeney’s story can never be too cute, it seems.)

Actually, I’m not very fond of either type of short story. I don’t agree with all of it, but B.R. Meyers’s “A Reader’s Manifesto” goes some way toward explaining my problems with modern fiction.

“More than half a century ago popular storytellers like Christopher Isherwood and Somerset Maugham were ranked among the finest novelists of their time, and were considered no less literary, in their own way, than Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Today any accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to be ‘genre fiction’—at best an excellent ‘read’ or a ‘page turner,’ but never literature with a capital L.” 10:10

http://slate.msn.com/id/2081052/ Classic books sell well—over 100,000 copies a year, which is many times more than the best-sellers of a few years ago. 17:07

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2866581.stm Lt. Col. Tim Collins’s address to the Royal Irish Regiment’s 1st Battalion. c.f. Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech.

(Curiously, there’s several different versions of this speech going around: this one, from the BBC, another at the Weekly Standard, and another at NPR. NPR specifically says that the “sleeping bags” line concludes the speech, but the Weekly Standard puts it at the beginning, and the BBC in the middle…) 15:28

http://slate.msn.com/id/2081008/ How “Shock and Awe” was supposed to work, according to its inventor. (No mitigating circumstance!) 23:35

http://slate.msn.com/id/2080999/ Dahlia Lithwick’s summary of the two University of Michigan affirimative action cases argued before the Supreme Court Court yesterday. “The affirmative action camp is for ‘critical masses’ that look like quotas and for ‘diversity’ that may not bring about diversity. The anti-affirmative action camp is for pretending that other remedies work when it’s clear that you can’t fix race problems by ignoring race.” 23:31

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?030407ta_talk_surowiecki What will happen to Iraq’s debt? James Surowiecki argues that “odious debt” should be forgiven—which I approve of, although I hope this won’t make it too hard for poor countries to secure loans. (Countries with high credit ratings (like the US, for example), already pay far less to “service” their loans than countries with low credit ratings—meaning that it costs the US less to borrow the same amount of money.)

International finance is screwed up. Over the last five years, for example, Mexico paid $6bn to the World Bank, India $1.5bn, Indonesia $4.7bn and Nigeria $1.7bn. (See the “net transfer” tables of the “About the World Bank” chapter from their 2002 Annual Report.) 14:14

http://www.oblivio.com/road/03040101.shtml “The Experience Machine.” A strange little video. Not sure what to make of this—is it cute, cool, indulgent, what? (It’s probably important to note that oblivio.com is a website other websites look up to.) 13:48

http://www.fireland.com/box/000642.html Notes on personal websites: “A very consistent voice cropped up among the new writers: casual, chatty, inoffensive, usually a dash of false self-deprecation, and a kind of subtle condescension—the sound of someone who has been chosen to pass along valuable information to others. This tone of I am interesting, right? was underscored by the guestbooks and comments and karma points and permalinks and trackbacks and referer logs.” 13:47

http://www.yamaha-motor.co.jp/eng/papercraft/sr400/ Really … odd: “In response to increasing requests from our viewers, the ‘Big Single’ is made into Realistic Paper Craft at last. Enjoy the authenticity of the model duplicated in the smallest details possible within the limitations of craft paper.” 12:03

http://mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war22.html “All I have to say is, once this is over, the Iraqi people better be the freest fucking people on the face of the earth. They better be freer than me. They better be so fucking free they can fly.” I’m getting a bad feeling about this war. 00:12