...more recent posts
A group of Catalan artists and an American architect intend to enter the never-realized Gaudí plan in the formal ground zero memorial design competition of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, scheduled to begin this spring.
we joked about something like this back in those irony free days following 9-11. and sly not reviving just one but both of his movie franchises.
Laura Riding would be 102 today
The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious late mediæval text, written in an unknown script in an unknown language or cypher. It reads as if written fluently, not by someone who was painfully calculating each next character, but by someone who understood what he was writing. It looks like a curious herbal or alchemical treatise, full of diagrams of unknown plants, unknown constellations, and elaborate networks of plumbing inhabited by plump, naked, crowned women.
lawrence lessig's brief response to losing the eldred copyright case in the supreme court.
The Butte Pit area is actually like the Hunza Valley, at least for one dog.
bococa mo?
pretty good projo weblog. this post is about unclaimed money from a cd price fixing lawsuit.
real goods : being green starts at home
MB was asking about a protest scheduled at 26 Federal Plaza today. It's going on now, and seems to be tied in to immigrant/alien registration deadlines now looming. It's a small gathering, taking up the sidewalk for about half of the block in front of the building on Broadway. It's well behaved and closely, though not oppressively, policed. Traffic on Broadway continues as usual. Top prop is a multi-person parade snake labeled USA Patriot Act. I didn't catch the Islamic prayers that MB mentioned, and I can't really make out all the speeches, but they have the usual tone: too harsh, too much call and response for my taste. But it's not like they don't have legitimate complaints. The protest is dwarfed by the line of registrants & others with INS business who must wait in the cold before being allowed to enter the building. I've seen these people being treated like cattle for years, and I don't mean like Kobe beef cattle. The Voice has an article on the phenomenon of this line. Read the article, 'cause I doubt you'll see much news coverage of the event.
the stranglers
I'm finding it difficult to hate Bob Barr these days.
Sperm Whale calf beached in Queens. Sad.
technorati 100 v blogstreet 100
Perhaps they could call it Poisonville National Park. Poisonville. That's the name Dashiell Hammett, America's hardboiled Dante, gave to Butte in Red Harvest, his strange nocturnal novel of corruption and corporate filth. "The city wasn't pretty," writes Hammett on the opening page of Red Harvest. "Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks struck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smudge everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters' stacks."
Times Headline today:
U.S. Is Completing Plan to Promote a Democratic Iraq
By DAVID E. SANGER and JAMES DAO
The plan calls for an 18-month occupation, trials of only the most senior Iraqi leaders and a quick takeover of oil fields.
I had been concerned that the Administration didn't have a plan, so this comes as some relief. It was nice of the Times to let us know about this. Also, that everything will be completed so quickly.
Cynthia Cotts, the Voice's press columnist, documents the Times' infatuation with bitterness. If she'd turned nexus on her own paper she might have found the best line, which I think I saw in Musto's column:
Am I bitter? Taste me.
birthday suits from the 60's (six slides per lot)
What will we think of next?
This could have been added to the 1000 monkeys thread, but I thought an old friend deserves her own post. While flipping channels, I ran into Dr. Marilyn Schlitz, who I remember from junior high school. She's now one of the top researchers in parapsychology, which she was defending on Closer to Truth. This shows up on channel 25, which has the PBS stuff that channel 13 turns its nose up at. The show was quite balanced and reasonable, which I suppose translates as too boring for the masses. Then again, rational parapsychology, which mostly rests on tiny statistical deviations, may be a tough sell. Marilyn's best finding to date involved doing double blind experiments alongside a skeptical colleague. She got her usual good results, but he got nothing, proving that the mindset of the scientist (in magic we call that the "operator") affects the result of the experiment. This could cause problems down the road…
Here's a blog from Baghdad. I haven't read too much of it, but it might be interesting. Especially if it can stay on the air.