factoids
**Rudy Giuliani, according to FEC filings, is worth as much as $70 million.
**Note that when news broke this summer that Giuliani had resigned from the blue ribbon Iraq Study Group, it was because he was too busy collecting six-figure checks for his guest speaking gigs, the ones that sprouted up in the wake of the 9-11 attacks and the ones that earned him nearly $11 million in 2006; $1.7 million in just one month.
Size of english language Wikipedia if you printed it out.
Digital high-definition television via PlayStation 3 (for Europe)
boy king
Burner -- The netroots is flexing its muscle in an on-line fundraiser for Darcy Burner. In just a few days, her Actblue total has gone from a few thousand dollars to $96k, with thousands of contributors. I got in early with the largest contribution I've ever made to a political campaign (by far) based on her willingness to say that Dems need to show a little spine.
Kleiner Kerl spiel Gitarre
Susan Sarandon on the technology behind the Wachowski brother's next film - Speed Racer:
They're using some high def thing that comes with guards and it's beyond anything I've ever…. I saw 10 minutes before I left, they did a special thing for me cause they're just wrapping and having a party tonight, they were still working after I left. They're doing something where they're layering film so that the front and the back are in focus like a cartoon and they're also doing two dimensional and three dimensional stuff and mixing and everything is very, very saturated with some new kind of film, so they actually have to treat the actors in some way so we can hold our own with the background. So it's every color that wasn't in The Matrix is seriously in this film.
spaced
I've been opposed to a Hilary Clinton candidacy for a long time. I don't think she's very electable, and even if elected, I don't think her foreign policy will differ much from the neocons (although her domestic policy and judicial nominations would be a lot better, so of course I'd vote for her if she's the Democratic nominee. But then again, I'd vote for a yellow dog if it was the Democratic nominee so this isn't saying too much.)
Anyway, I've been meeting some people lately who are slightly more to the right politically than I am used to meeting. And I'm struck by how much they *hate* her. I mean, I knew this, but I'm still struck by actually seeing the emotion. They really loathe her. And it's making me come around a bit on Hilary's campaign. It might not be very mature of me, but these people will - how to put it politely? - crap their pants if she gets elected president. And it's harder and harder for me not to hope just a little bit for that spectacle.
Plus she's going to be the nominee so I've got to find something good in there. Clinton vs. Romney; you heard it here 1,453,876th
Anyway, I've been meeting some people lately who are slightly more to the right politically than I am used to meeting. And I'm struck by how much they *hate* her. I mean, I knew this, but I'm still struck by actually seeing the emotion. They really loathe her. And it's making me come around a bit on Hilary's campaign. It might not be very mature of me, but these people will - how to put it politely? - crap their pants if she gets elected president. And it's harder and harder for me not to hope just a little bit for that spectacle.
Plus she's going to be the nominee so I've got to find something good in there. Clinton vs. Romney; you heard it here 1,453,876th
Another NYC panorama pic, this time from the annoyingly named Top of the Rock.
Grace Paley, Writer and Activist, Dies
they reprint some of the dialog from her stories. a very natural style.
they reprint some of the dialog from her stories. a very natural style.
To read Ms. Paley’s fiction is to be awash in the shouts and murmurs of secular Yiddishkeit, with its wild onrushing joy and twilight melancholy. For her, cadence and character went hand in hand: her stories are marked by their minute attention to language, with its tonal rise and fall, hairpin rhetorical reversals and capacity for delicious hyperbolic understatement. Her stories, many of which are written in the first person and seem to start in mid-conversation, beg to be read aloud.
sad irony alert:
More than 50 pit bulls seized from Michael Vick’s property must be claimed by today, or they could be euthanized.
Federal prosecutors filed court documents last month to condemn 53 pit bulls seized in April as part of the investigation into dogfighting on Vick’s property. No one has claimed any of the dogs, which are being held at several unspecified shelters in eastern Virginia.
Federal prosecutors declined to comment Wednesday on the seized dogs. Typically, when confiscated property goes unclaimed, the government asks the court to have the items declared forfeited. In this case, U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson will make the final decision on the dogs’ fate.
“There’s no dispute over who owns the dogs,” said Daphna Nachminovitch, a spokeswoman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “Obviously this is not going to be a process where someone steps forward and says, ‘This is my dog, can I have her back, please?’ ”
Although Hudson, who also is handling Vick’s criminal case, will determine what becomes of the pit bulls, Nachminovitch said it’s likely that they will be euthanized because they’re not adoptable as pets.
“These dogs are a ticking time bomb,” she said. “Rehabilitating fighting dogs is not in the cards. It’s widely accepted that euthanasia is the most humane thing for them.”
The First Films of Samuel Fuller
bacon chocolate candy bar
Monoscope.com. Maybe up Bill's alley?
mobile home anyone?
(from erin)
