Gulfstream

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/
02/21/AR2006022101861.html Reporter goes shopping with fashion-conscious skater Johnny Weir in Turin, helps him buy his 103rd pair of sunglasses and a whole lot of other gear. 19:44

http://www.newsoftheweird.com/wayne.html Big list of killers with the middle name Wayne. 19:29

http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2006/02/monday_
musing_d.html Are mercenaries ever a justifiable response to a humanitarian crisis? 21:49

http://www.granta.com/extracts/2615 How to write about Africa: “Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa.” 19:57

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAGr3mVVUwE The iPod, with packaging designed by Microsoft. 16:06

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4754570.stm Problems encountered by Australians wishing to wage Jihad: “Thomas, 32, also said that although he loved Islam, his love of beer had made his conversion a dilemma.” 13:25

http://www.apple.com/itunes/1billion/ Um, is it not really weird that the purchaser of the 1 billionth song on iTunes gets (as well as Apple goodies) a scholarship at Julliard established in their name? I don’t see how this would drive many purchases, but if the only point of it is a PR exercise for Apple (to demonstrate support for young musicians?), why not give it in Apple’s name? 09:41

http://videos.antville.org/stories/1318248/ Video of Cat Power’s “Living Proof,” directed by the very strange Harmony Korine. 17:04

http://cbs4.com/topstories/local_story_033170755.html It’s seemingly very difficult to get hold of police complaint forms in South Florida. (Great transcripts.) 16:31

http://www.slate.com/id/2136960/ Dahlia Lithwick: should pharmacists be able to refuse to dispense the morning after pill on moral grounds? Should doctors be able to refuse to participate in executions for the same reason? 16:19

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QwKmFGIb-M Compilation of Macworld keynote bloopers. See Steve Jobs try to work a digital camera! 19:36

http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2006/02/gladwell_
v_gopn.html Malcolm Gladwell (in his new blog!) retracts almost everything he said in favour of the American healthcare system in a 2000 debate on the relative merits of the Canadian and American systems: “I now agree with virtually everything Adam said and disagree with virtually everything I said.” This is nice, because I avoided posting this because I thought Gladwell didn’t make a very good case. (In particular, his argument that young men don’t need healthcare. “I have never bought the argument that the American system is all that bad for poor men. I think it’s fine for poor men. Remember, men don't need health care until they’re middle-aged. If you look at the population of people in America who are uninsured, they’re all young. There aren't old people on that list. And it is not a bad thing for a 25-year-old male not to have health insurance.”) 08:17

http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/olympics/bal-te.to.ipod17feb17,
0,3066620.story Snowboarders love their iPods, listening even when they’re competing in the Olympics. 00:33

http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/004396.html 07:46

http://stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3578626a4560,00.html Update on Thomas Hendry, the New Zealander who scored an honorary mention in the 1999 Darwin Awards for winning a bar competition by stapling his penis to a white crucifix, pouring lighter fluid over it, and setting it on fire. He’s now living in Melbourne, runs a goth nightclub, and still has the crucifix. (Australia has very strict quarantine controls; he had to pay customs $30 to fumigate it.) 07:36

http://idlewords.com/2006/02/heist.htm Nice account of a bank heist in Buenos Aires: the bank was surrounded by over 100 police officers, but robbers got away with cash and safe-deposit boxes through a previously dug tunnel; no shots were fired, and it turned out that their guns were props. (more) 07:05

http://www.amny.com/news/local/am-mustache-story0216,0,7900113.story In NYC, moustaches are proliferating (are they?): “Two years ago, mustaches on young men drew stares. These days, few men ride the L train without one.” 06:51

http://www.ifoce.com/feature.php?action=detail&sn=23 “Competitive Eaters Seek to Weigh Hasselhoff’s Head.” 00:47

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=58174 Kinda interesting discussion about why Pooh (and other children’s book characters) is popular amongst gay men. (Funny how Google Answers results don’t come up very often in Google searches.) 22:34

http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2005/index.html Nobel Prize for literature citations still incomprehensible. Last year’s winner: Harold Pinter, “who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.” 21:40

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4716208.stm A link—or at least a correlation—between not taking risks and getting Parkinson’s? “The study found patients with Parkinson’s disease had smoked less, drank less alcohol and caffeine. They also scored lower on sensation-seeking and risk taking behaviour, and higher on anxiety and depression than the comparison group.” 10:49

http://www-ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/index1.html What’s the deal with these pictures and characterisations of scientists, supposed produced by 7th graders before and after visiting Fermilab? They’re clearly fake in some way: what 7th grader says “in turn”? Or uses “truly” like this: “A scientist, truly, is a normal, happy, nice person.” 17:09

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/magazine/12apples.html “For years, suspicion has been growing in the orchards of the Wenatchee Valley in Washington State and in the food industry at large that fruit, nature's original hand-held convenience food, is simply too poorly designed for today's busy eater.” Excellent piece, touches on many issues. 10:11

http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/exeter/02142006/news/
87812.htm “Sullivan replied that he thought it meant ‘stubborn,’ but the word is a vulgar slang referring to a woman’s body part in tight clothing.” 07:11

http://smh.com.au/flash/mcgeough/sniper.html Somewhat chilling insurgent propaganda video of a sniper operating in Iraq. 15:43

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/14/why_publishing_shoul.html “There’s no substantial business today in charging companies money for the privilege of indexing one’s book …” I do so enjoy Cory Doctorow’s earnest rants. If you fancy yourself as a pundit on this sort of stuff, shouldn’t you know that “charging companies money for the privilege of indexing one’s book” almost exactly describes the relationship between the magazine business and Nexis? (Nexis is an (enormously expensive) full-text search engine for magazine content.) And that to some extent, this arrangement is even blessed by the courts and authors, given that they agreed to the Copyright Class Action Settlement? Is this not relevant? (I don’t know whether this should happen; I’m merely noting that it does.)

(Also, I just discovered that LexisNexis now offer a cheaper-than-Nexis service called LexisNexis AlaCarte!. The main difference is that the database is smaller (3.8 billion articles instead of 6 billion), and that you pay per article ($3 or so); searches are free. It’s not great—the New Yorker archives only go back to 1999, for example—but it’s at least affordable.) 15:33

http://www.slate.com/id/2136147/ “For Europeans, scolding the Bush administration for everything from Guantanamo to the Iraq War to secret CIA prisons has become a full-time job. But when it comes to the American scandal over President Bush’s warrantless wiretaps, there’s been a curious reaction from the other side of the Atlantic: silence. Where is the European outrage? … The three worst offenders are not countries you would suspect of playing fast and loose with civil liberties: Britain, Italy, and the Netherlands.” 13:46

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/45144 “Abusive Obsessive-Compulsive Has To Punch Wife Exactly 20 Times.” 13:26

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/02/13/nyregion/20060213_
SNOW_GRAPHIC.html Nice multi-variate NY snow-accumulation graphic. 05:34

http://www.avclub.com/content/node/45150 Interview with Dan Savage.

You joke about people getting your advice and then killing themselves, but do you have any actual anxiety about the effect your column may have on people?

No. I feel like I’m a compassionate guy, but I also feel if somebody’s grip on life or sanity is so tenuous that a joke in an advice column that usually is nothing but jokes pushes them over the edge, then if not me, it would have been a leaf blowing past them that did it, or something else. You almost have to feel that way, doing this. And also, I’m not a big anti-suicide guy. I don’t regard suicide necessarily as this huge unspeakable act of selfishness or tragedy. Some people take themselves out for completely legit reasons. Hopefully they’ll get help, hopefully they’ll think about it, but if they want to check out, I feel like they have a right to do that.

13:59

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4688466.stm Interesting: an Iranian paper is holding a contest for Holocaust cartoons in “retaliation” (BBC’s word) for the cartoons depicting Muhammad. The paper, Hamshahri, says it’s more about probing potential free-speech inconsistencies (which is plausible in theory, at least). Jyllands-Posten has already said it will reprint the cartoons—will the other papers follow suit? (Will it be legal for them to do so? A lot of countries in Europe have specific anti-Nazi laws (governing the sale of memorabilia, at least). Is it legal to deny the Holocaust, say?) 13:49

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/02/06/526010.aspx The IE 7 team have some good ideas on how printing should work. (Has everyone given up on print style sheets by now? I never really did see the point of those: anything interesting you might do will also produce a truly disorienting user experience. If someone wants to print just give ’em another page and let them print that.) 15:21

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/arts/music/01pete.html Pete Doherty: “While he has been stopped or arrested by the police at least 10 times since November, last Friday was the worst day so far. Before dawn, Mr. Doherty was arrested here on suspicion of driving erratically while on drugs. While he was at the police station, he was arrested again, on suspicion of assaulting a fan at a recent concert. Three hours later, wandering erratically down the street, he was arrested a third time, charged with carrying heroin in his jeans.” 23:52

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2025748,00.html Oh I love slippery slopes! If you want to kill yourself by slashing your wrists, should you be given clean blades? Says one advocate: “There is a clear comparison with giving clean needles to reduce HIV.”

(I also like this one: “‘It’s rough if you’re a transsexual—it’s even rougher if you try to explain that you’re a cat in a human body,’ says another Furry fan, who bemoaned the fact that Furries can’t opt to surgically change their species in the way transexuals can change their gender.”) 12:36

http://www.theage.com.au/news/film/more-powerful-than-my-
words/2006/02/03/1138836410496.html?page=fullpage Long Annie Proulx piece on how she felt about her short story “Brokeback Mountain” being made into a film.

On Ang Lee: “I was nervous about meeting Ang Lee, despite his reputation as a brilliant and highly skilled. Would we have anything to say to each other? Were the cultural gaps surmountable? … Later, there were some disagreements. In the written story the motel scene, after a four-year hiatus, stood as central. During their few hours in the Motel Siesta, Jack’s and Ennis’s paths were irrevocably laid out. In the film that Ang Lee already had shaped in his mind, the emotional surge contained in that scene would be better shifted to a later point and melded with the men’s painful last meeting. I didn’t understand this until I saw the film in September 2005 and recognised the power of this timing.”

And on seeing the film for the first time: “Here it was, the point that writers do not like to admit; film can be more powerful than the written word. I realised that if Ang Lee had been born in Barrow or Novosibirsk it would likely have been the same. He understands human feelings and is not afraid to walk into dangerous territory.” 11:23

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/articles/051212fr_
archive01 Not ideal: Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain” apparently used to be at this URL, but it’s (effectively) a 404 now. The problem is that if you do a Google search for site:newyorker.com brokeback mountain it returns this page, because a whole lot of pages use “brokeback mountain” as the link text. (The Google cache page says: These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: brokeback mountain.)

(newyorker.com also isn’t returning a “real” 404 error—it’s returning a page that says the page can’t be found, but the usually-invisible response code indicates that the page loaded okay—which I suspect is compounding the problem by preventing Google from removing the page from its cache.) 10:46

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/archives/2006/
02/03/going_underground.html Where map geeks and music geeks intersect… Map superimposes 20th Century musicians over London’s tube map; musicians at intersections supposedly lie at the intersections of musical styles, too. (Beck gets King’s Cross; the RZA (!) get Bank.) The map is apparently sponsored by London Underground, who are also selling the map; this, according to the introductory notes, is why there’s no station called Massive Attack. (I live at Buddy Holly!) 00:16

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/3615941.html Johnny Dang is Houston’s jeweller-king of ornamental dentistry. 03:09