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midas well
ny observer columnist michael thomas "retires" to life of golfing gardening and blogging.
yellow ruse
nobodys got any dirt on the karen hughes announcement that she would be leaving the administration because her family was homesick. seems highly implausible but stranger things have happened. meanwhile, talking points starts the ari fleischer deathwatch. may it be more successful than those of rumsfeld, o'neill and white.
bad oman
"MUSCAT, April 22 (PNS): The US has decided to spend £90m to build a new airbase in Oman with runways long enough to handle B52 strategic bombers and heavy-lift transport aircraft."
taking a break
"WASHINGTON, April 23 — The Supreme Court ruled today that a government-imposed moratorium on property development, even one that lasts for years, does not automatically amount to a "taking" of private property for which taxpayers must compensate the landowners."
fashion plates
"Since he posted the first installment on Oct. 9 at www.mnftiu.cc, the strip has been a textbook illustration of the viral reach of the Web, spreading by word of e-mail alone, so that in its first two weeks it received five million hits from Web crawlers around the world. "A friend sent it to me," said the gadfly commentator Arianna Huffington, whose taste in language usually runs to more polite combat. She added: "Profanity is often a part of biting political commentary, including what `The Osbournes' is doing right now."
gated community
"In this fairy tale, Gates and his colleagues are knights in shining armor. They rescue technology from hard-hearted titans like IBM, and their own subsequent toughness is necessary to curb the chaos that would result if actual competition existed in the regime that replaced the big-iron brutes. Hence it is Microsoft's due, and right, to rule as sovereign. Without Microsoft's iron-fisted but simultaneously benevolent rule, the entire technology industry would unravel, and along with it just about everything else."
news reels
"But it's the History Channel that must really bother PBS, and not just because the upstart flaunts its illiberal jingoism and paranoia. As its obsession with shocking secrets suggests, the History Channel has much in common with the New York Post—and Oliver Stone. PBS treats making TV shows as if it were noble but tedious missionary work; the History Channel manages to create some comical, intriguing visual rants about "history"—and at the same time attract viewers. If the channel broadcasts downright bunk from time to time, it also curates vast quantities of old—and fascinating—newsreel footage. Sometimes all it takes to make an evocative show is jumpy period film of Antarctic explorers or the angelic-looking Alexei Romanov. With this material available, broadcasting vastly overhyped School of Burns documentaries—wide-angle beauty shots and buttery close-ups of Ivy League professors—begins to seem like a sucker's game."
rush job
douglas rushkoff joins the weblog universe.
inter view
"Pelton's blunt appraisals find their way into his travel books too; they focus on skulls and crossbones rather than sandy beaches. He's the author of "The World's Most Dangerous Places," a compendium of key information about how to get into -- and, more important, how to get out of -- various war zones, drug dens and atrocity-ridden enclaves the world over. The book is devoted to far-flung disaster areas like Sierra Leone and Somalia. Not surprisingly, Afghanistan gets a chapter. Pelton has been going there since 1995 to cover both the Taliban regime and the late Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud's efforts to topple it."
seti sun
"SETI has accomplished this feat of computational drudgery in just three ordinary years — by persuading some 3.5 million people to allow their personal computers to be yoked into a loose-knit skein called SETI@home. While no alien messages have been discovered yet, the project's success in using the Internet to assemble an impromptu grass-roots supercomputer is inspiring other researchers to turn to the masses for problems requiring more computation than they could otherwise afford."