Gulfstream

http://www.movableblog.com/archives/mt_license_debate0624.php (I’m sort of glad in a way that Movable Type is finally getting some licensing grief. The software itself is excellent, but it has always irked me that it wasn’t GPL’ed. I use a lot of GPL’ed software, but I use a lot of commercial, non-GPL’ed software too: my problem with Movable Type is not that it’s not Free Software, but that it’s not Free Software despite relying on a large amount of software that is—software (like Perl and its libraries, MySQL, and Linux) that represent many orders of magnitude more work than that which went into Movable Type. Has Movable Type or TypePad contributed to The Perl Foundation? Pledged to?) 09:02

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/a/2003/
06/22/CM254728.DTL The really messy politics surrounding lesbian female-to-male transsexuals: “Having lived through the fiery feminist years, when challenging male power was central to a particular agenda, some lesbians have gone so far as to say they feel betrayed by those ‘transitioning’—the street parlance for crossing genders. Twenty years ago life as a butch lesbian seemed the obvious path for a masculine-identified gay female. Now, young lesbians immediately enter a community in which the option to change genders is readily available—an option that some say they might be taking up too lightly, injecting their bodies with testosterone and having radical breast-reduction surgery before they’ve had time to explore who they might be as adults.” 08:48

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/
LAC/20030621/FCIRAQ/TPComment/TopStories Twenty questions/answers: the situation in Iraq now. (I wish more papers would run stories like this—updates, backgrounders, and so on.) 23:43

http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/watch/canard.htm Media Watch says Phillip Adams didn’t plagiarise. What Adams wrote (Weekend Australian Magazine, May 31, 2003):

“Jacques amused himself, and others, with automata that played the flute and the organ. And then there was his immensely successful copper duck. History records that the creature would peck away at food, apparently swallow it through a flexible neck and then, voila! excrete it onto a silver dish. First displayed in 1739, the duck was the toast of Paris. ‘Without the shitting duck,’ said Voltaire, ‘there would be nothing to remind us of the glory of France.’”

What Schuessler wrote (New York Review of Books, Feb 13, 2003):

“While he entertained audiences with automata that played the flute and the organ, his most celebrated invention was a copper duck that realistically ‘gulped’ food through a flexible neck and then excreted it on a silver platter. First displayed in 1739, the duck caused a sensation. ‘Without the shitting duck,’ Voltaire quipped, ‘there would be nothing to remind us of the glory of France.’”

“Didn’t make the grade”? Huh? (Parallels spotted by Professor Bunyip.) 16:35

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:pm.gov.au "in every sense of the word&
quot; (Mich, from a fridaysixpm discussion I can’t manage to link to…) 16:21

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7629-2003Jun17.html Anne Applebaum’s exerience: people are much more aware of, and respectful of, differences of (political) opinion in Washington than in New York. “… young people move nowadays not only to find interesting high-tech jobs but in order to live somewhere they find politically and culturally congenial. They look not only for neighborhoods with decent coffee bars, in other words, but for neighborhoods with appealing political attitudes. Increasingly, this country is segregated not by race or class but by politics.” 14:17

http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/article_display.jsp?vnu_
content_id=1919550 Artists getting toey about sales of singles (instead of albums) at the iTunes Music Store, etc. (As time goes on, I think it’ll get harder and harder for digital music/P2P enthusiasts to maintain the view that artists’ and listeners’ interests are perfectly, seamlessly, aligned, and that record companies and the RIAA are nothing but a malevolent force.) 10:06

http://ea.nytimes.com/cgi-bin/email?REFURI=http://www.nytimes.com/
2002/07/03/dining/03SECR.html Turns out that the “E-Mail This Article” feature of NY Times stories works with articles older than a week (that you otherwise have to pay for). So, if you get a page which links to for-fee Times articles, run this nytimes emailer bookmarklet on the original page, then select the link again. (The bookmarklet converts links to pages to links to “Email This Article” pages, which you can then use to get the article sent to you.)

(Also, if you select the “Send abstract and link to full coverage” option, you might get a link that works forever.)

Update: If all your pages go through an XSL style sheet at some stage, you can add this xsl:template to your code to add an “(email this)” link after every existing NY Times link (example):

<xsl:template match="a">
  <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
  <xsl:if test="starts-with(@href, 'http://www.nytimes.com/')">
    <xsl:text> (</xsl:text>
    <a href="http://ea.nytimes.com/cgi-bin/email?REFURI={@href}">
      email this
    </a>
    <xsl:text>) </xsl:text>
  </xsl:if>
</xsl:template>

(Go XSL!) 23:51

http://www.rotten.com/library/sex/masturbation/inventions/
sex-dolls/ Graphic proof: fully-inflated sex dolls look ridiculous. 21:50

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/22PABST.html In the end, they get us all: “The Marketing of No Marketing.” “[Naomi] Klein’s view is that [a grass-roots backlash against the incursion of brands into public life] would feed a new wave of activists who targeted corporations. Stewart’s view is that [No Logo] contains ‘many good marketing ideas.’ He says it ‘really articulated the feelings, the coming feelings, of the consumer out there: eventually people are gonna get sick of all this stuff’—all this marketing—‘and say enough is enough.’” 21:03

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m2298/3_17/62052928/print.jhtml Tremendous history of music in the Twentieth Century—the technical, economic, legal and social—and how each aspect influenced the others. (Very long.) 01:21

http://slate.msn.com/id/2084602/ Two parts to this Kinsley piece: (1) an argument that it doesn’t really matter whether or not Iraq had WMDs that I didn’t really understand; and (2) more on the futility of polls—among other examples of out-and-out ignorance, about one in three people believe that WMDs have been discovered. (Kinsley is particularly good on the inexplicable reluctance of people to answer “don’t know”—although I would expect that most people would request some thinking time if government policy did in fact depend on their response.) 00:47

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,974193,00.html Iraq’s National Museum is not missing very many items at all. “… I conclude two things from all this. The first is the credulousness of many western academics and others who cannot conceive that a plausible and intelligent fellow-professional might have been an apparatchiks of a fascist regime and a propagandist for his own past. The second is that—these days—you cannot say anything too bad about the Yanks and not be believed.” 00:38

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/30/open-mikulan.php Fun “L.A.’s Sexiest” heat report. Heidi Fleiss (a judge): “Some beautiful people are not sexy … George Clooney is not sexy. Benicio del Toro is very sexy. Taschen books are sexy. Sexy is when you stand next to someone and you want to say, ‘Get away from me before I rape you.’” 11:22

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/15/nyregion/15GREG.html A strange hobby: Greg Packer shows up to various events, seeks out journalists, gets quoted on just about anything.

[Update: AP tells its reporters to “find other people to quote.”] 00:02

http://www.copyright.iupui.edu/permfaq.htm#cov How to record a cover song: “you issue the copyright owner a notice of intention to obtain a compulsory mechanical licence” then pay them 8¢, or 1.55¢ per minute (whichever is greater) per copy. (You don’t need the copyright owner’s permission.)

(I suppose this also means that 10¢ is about the least you’re ever going to pay for a track from an on-line music retailer.) 17:14

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/stafftop10/top10_030613.shtml “Top 10 Pictures of Thom Yorke Looking Pretentious.” (Yorke: “We operate like the U.N. I’m America.”) 12:29

http://www.adultswim.com/webcam/gal_mov/sg_kid/ Star Wars kid parody—?! (adm: “parody on so many levels, I get confused just thinking about it.”) 11:47

http://slate.msn.com/id/2084315/ Michael Kinsley’s gotten a bit wilder since he stopped having to be a cautious, responsible editor, but this is a good article on liberties, freedoms, etc., and how they must be vigilantly defended against incipient threats (such as the Patriot Act). (Ooh, preëmption!) Some good lines: (1) “These violations [immigration violations by non-citizens], by the way, suggest a greater love of freedom than most American citizens have ever had to demonstrate.” (2) “The American Civil Liberties Union is alarmed, but the ACLU’s function, which I admire and support, is to be alarmed before I am, like the canary down the mineshaft.” 11:37

http://slate.msn.com/id/2083992/ Style Wars: “a 1983 documentary about the world of NYC graffiti.” 10:22

http://www.annoy.com/features/doc.html?DocumentID=100495 Fascinating: Tucker Max writes about his sexcapades with Miss Vermont (Katy Johnson), judge issues temporary injunction ordering Max to remove all references to Johnson from his site on the grounds (I think this is right—the article rambles a bit) that he disclosed embarrassing private facts and/or is making commercial use of Johnson’s image without her consent. (For the most part, Johnson doesn’t dispute the facts.)

Is he serving a legitimate public interest? “If Ms. Johnson is selling young girls books promoting abstinence and sobriety and creating and publishing ‘character education’ cartoons, her choice to give drunken blowjobs in a guy’s kitchen, or fuck someone she’s just met in her SUV allows for, if nothing else, an informative contextualization.” I love this legal tactic (from Johnson’s Affidavit): “I fear that more will continue to read these stories, including my father, and associate me with TUCKER MAX and his adult audience.” Max can’t write about you because otherwise your father will find out?!

[“Free speech or privacy?”—IHT report. “Santucci [Johnson’s lawyer] did not respond to an e-mail message asking whether his issuing a news release was at odds with his request to seal the court file.”] 23:31

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030602fa_fact “In Japan, ‘Ringu’ made $6.6 million; ‘The Ring’ made $8.3 million there in its first two weeks.” How’s that for cultural imperialism? (Movie producer Roy Lee hawks Asian movies to Hollywood studios.) 23:52

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/08/magazine/08OIL.html Goody or baddie? Dathar Khashab may have been a member of the Baath party, but, as director general of an oil refinery, he also knows how it works. 23:25

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10052-2003Jun3.html Three teenagers who teach FBI agents how to IM like 13-year-old girls receive a letter of commendation from the FBI: “One agent kept insisting that he was right when he answered on a quiz that Justin Timberlake was more popular than Destiny’s Child. Another was miffed when the girls told the class that Led Zeppelin was just not cool. Some kept wondering why ‘l2m’ in instant messaging couldn’t be ‘love to meet,’ instead of ‘listen to music.’” 13:47

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030530.html I was wondering about this: “passive-aggressive” pretty much means nothing more precise than “pain in the ass.” 00:07

http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=185 Pew Center survey of world opinion (chaired by Madeleine Albright!) finds that the U.N. is thought to be less relevant now that before the war, and that people thought more favourably of the U.S. a year ago than they do today. (Though in all cases support for the U.S. has grown over the last three months.) Some results that were surprising/interesting:

• In many Muslim countries Bin Laden rates highly as a “world leader” considered to “do the right thing regarding world affairs.” (In the Palestinian Authority, 71% of respondents think this of Bin Laden, compared to 69% for Arafat and 32% for Chirac.) King Abdallah has the most support (in Muslim countries); Chirac would seem to be second.
• Lots of countries are disappointed by the lack of Iraqi military resistance. In Morocco, 93% are disappointed, but 58% of South Koreans are disappointed, as are 50% of Brazilians (?!).
• Only 15% of Russians feel they have free elections.
• In most parts of the world “the impact of international financial organizations such as the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organization is seen as much more positive than negative.” (“Overwhelmingly” so in Africa.) A majority of Filipinos believe that anti-globalisation protestors have had a positive influence on their country; this is not true anywhere else.
• Americans have a more favourable view of ethnic and racial minorities than Western Europeans. “African Americans and Hispanics are viewed much more positively in the U.S. than are Turks in Germany, North Africans in France, and Albanians in Italy.”
• In Canada and Europe, a majority believe that it is possible to be moral without believe in God. In the United States and the rest of the world, “agreement is nearly universal that personal morality is linked to belief in God.” (On this question, Australia wasn’t polled.)
• Of all the countries surveyed, India had the strongest “nationalistic sentiment”—74% believe that Indian culture is superior to other cultures, 61% believe India must be protected against foreign influence, and 60% believe parts of other countries belong to India. (The four next most “nationalistic” countries were Turkey, Bangladesh, South Africa and Pakistan.)

(Is public opinion good for anything?) 10:26

http://www.corporatemofo.com/stories/051803matrix.htm Matrix theology: “As the Architect reveals, Neo is not the first One, but rather the sixth. Why the sixth? The answer is that Neo’s five previous incarnations represent the Five Books of Moses that make up the Old Testament. Neo (representing Christ, and thus the New Testament) differs from his five predecessors in his capacity to love.” 11:05