teaser for the upcoming edition of Scientific American:

There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.

In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

in the hanging guardin

Mnftiu takes on the insanity surrounding Terri Schiavo.

REVIEWS OF NEW FOOD

mondovino the website

the best piece i ever read in index magazine was a reprint of a dialog between burroughs and terry southern. they are both sitting at a table riflng through a "mixed bag" of pills that terry brought. a great discussion that included bills observations on some of the pills from the baggie and southern providing some details on the writing credits for the film easy rider. unfortunately that meeting is not included in the index magazine interview archive.

In a perfect world, Jonathan Nossiter's documentary Mondovino would impel as many tourists to Burgundy as those following Miles and Jack's sodden strides through Santa Barbara wine country in Sideways. But where Alexander Payne's Oscar-winner appeases, Mondovino agitates—it's a radical film from a radical filmmaker, a spear at the heart of wine and film industries alike, and a tour de force of investigative journalism. (It opens at Film Forum March 23; see J. Hoberman's review.) Over four years and eight countries, the trained sommelier Nossiter—whose previous films include the Sundance prizewinner Sunday and the anti-globalist tract Signs & Wonders—dipped his tipsy-cam into the zany demimonde of winemakers, critics, and their dogs. The result isn't just a film: Mondovino, which praises cosmopolitanism over globalism, is a way of life.



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New York wine importer Neal Rosenthal, one of the most eloquent and passionate "terroirists" in Jonathan Nossiter's Mondovino, describes the wine industry's ongoing battle between small local producers and globalized big money as one between "the resistance and the collaborators." Rosenthal, who met Nossiter when the filmmaker-sommelier was consulting on the wine list for Balthazar several years ago, has been mounting his own resistance for nearly three decades now, searching the vineyards of France and Italy for artisanal makers who share his appreciation of wine as an agricultural product. "We work directly with people who grow their own grapes," he says. "There's an old saying that 90 percent of the wine is made in the vineyard. I look for wines that express their own terroir—the sense of a place—and the particularities of a vintage. And I'm not afraid to have different wines every year—that's nature."

Bill, where is the thread on the shipping container space with the big nature photos that Roberta slammed?

Bobby Short (1924-2005)

regressionists

from bruno:

My OED lists popinjay as

i) first refering to the parrot (probably from "jay")
(c 1320, from French),

ii) then to representation of a parrot in tapestry or
signage (1420) and later a target shaped like a parrot
used in archery practice (1548);

iii) approbatively for a person in fine clothes (1310)

iv) lastly pejoratively for a person showing "vanity
conceit...and mechanical repetition of another's words"
(1528).

The earliest citation for sense iv) is William Tindale
in Obedience of the Christian Man: "The priest ought to
christen them in the English tongue and not play the
popinjay with a Credo save ye."

I would guess the echo of "Pope" (i.e. priest parrots
the words of the popish church?) is intentional in
Tindale, but the word had been around for two
centuries...

William Tindale, first translator of the Bible into
English, (also an ancestor of [a certain person we know --tm]) was arrested in Antwerp as a heretic and burned
at the stake by the Holy Roman Imperial authorities in
1536.

The Onion's Irish Heritage timeline.

ANWAR drilling vote results

yo la tengo streaming live video cover song requests on wfmu right now for a couple of hours.
hosts tom scharpling and gaylord fields - go to main page and click wm stream

Babu:

The third surprise was that the menu came without prices. Instead, guests were invited to eat, enjoy, and then, at the end of the meal, pay what they thought it was worth. “I’d rather work out the kinks in the kitchen first,” Payal Saha, the restaurant’s owner, explained the other day, sitting at a corner table of Babu, which was about a quarter full of couples quietly eating and mentally calculating the value of their experience.

Now if only I could pay what I wanted at Babbo...

google bombing wikipedia and other pathetic ways of fighting back

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 different federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.

fatbirder

The Church report said that "none of the pictured abuses at Abu Ghraib bear any resemblance to approved policies at any level, in any theater." Admiral Church and his investigators must have missed the pictures of prisoners in hoods, forced into stress positions and threatened by dogs. All of those techniques were approved at one time or another by military officials, including Mr. Rumsfeld. Of course, no known Pentagon policy orders the sexual humiliation of prisoners. But that has happened so pervasively that it clearly was not just the perverted antics of one night shift in one cellblock at Abu Ghraib.

infantilisimists

extreme ornithology: Mark Obmascik investigates the world of extreme bird watchers--enthusiasts who compete in the 365-day birdwatching marathon--in his new book The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession.

skeptic's annotated bible

a pretty amazing short "film" by michal levy.
(15 min. to load over my dial-up)

There is a new works on paper show - Brice Marden, Al Taylor and Terry Winters at Nolan/Eckman. March 5 - April 9 2005. Their website is here. 560 B'way, worth a look-see, in my humble opinion.

are bloggers reporters ?


crackdown on blogging?