infobong.com

One of the things I've managed to avoid in Austin until now is a poetry reading. I'm meeting a friend at a downtown coffeeshop. I can't say that I'm enjoying it, but it is a little interesting to watch. It seems a little like group therapy only performed in public. I don't think there's anyone in the audience that doesn't fashion themselves a poet, and the vibe is mutually supportive. These folks are sharing personal things with each other, and everyone claps. Fortunately, I can ignore it here in the back of the coffeeshop.

Via Atrios, here's a good application of blogs to track current events. The topical blog Reconstruction Watch posts on the federal government efforts to rebuild New Orleans. It's tone is critical of the Bush Adminstration. I've seen a few more topical blogs like these emerge in the past few weeks, and they seem like a great idea, ad hoc media for a well-defined topic, rather than writing on an Indymedia site or a more general-purpose blog. It would be interesting if, like some IMCs, they attempted to produce a print product for affected audiences.

This reminds me, however, that I should monitor the New Orleans IMC for oppositional reconstruction news. The Austin IMC recently had an interesting feature on Common Ground, a collective aiding evacuees return to the 9th Ward.

Talking Points Memo has posted a portion of yesterday's White House press briefing that almost seems like self-parody. I suppose the average citizen doesn't read the news in this detail, but this makes it easy to see why polls says more people approve of the media than the Bush administration.

A reporter has asked a question about Bush's suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act which requires government construction contractors to pay workers the prevailing wages in the region. By suspending the law, contractors can pay desperate, displaced people rock-bottom wages, which would, in turn, drive down wages in private construction.

If it's not already obvious, I think the Gulf Coast wage cut is pretty loathsome behavior by the administration. The news coverage of Hurricane Katrina exposed the vast poverty in New Orleans to much of the country, yet the president insists on driving wages down, pushing more people toward poverty. Regardless of the president's ideological agenda, this seems politically tone-deaf, like much of the administration response to Katrina.

Over at Slate.com, Ari Kelman has a short piece that provides historical background about New Orleans and its efforts to control the influx of water into the city. The main thing I take away from the story is the discrepancy between New Orleans' physical position that make it an ideal site for trade and the landscape that make it a difficult city to sustain. He says, "Geographers refer to this as the difference between a city's "situation"—the advantages its location offers relative to other cities—and its "site"—the actual real estate it occupies."

I took a class with Kelman when were both at OU. It was a summer American studies class emphasizing film, and the main thing I remember is his breathlessly positive comments on an essay I wrote about Buster Keaton's The General. It's still fun to see old prof's names pop up like this.

Nigel has a great post that contends "Some people are so forcefully not writing about what's going on in New Orleans that it hurts." bOINGbOING has been doing an admirable job of sharing information about the tragedy. At first, they did their usual pointers to techie widgets, but they've shifted to more serious blogging as the situation worsened.

bOINGbOING relays an email message about the situation on the ground in New Orleans. The text criticizes the handling of the evacuation by federal and local authorities:

I broke down in tears reading this in the coffeeshop - does anyone know if this can be verified? I'm so ashamed to live in a country where such a policy is even conceivable, and where much of the media represents those left behind as criminals looking for a quick score.

I should have mentioned this in my previous post, but Cindy Sheehan will be speaking in Austin tomorrow Wednesday, August 31. She'll be at the new city hall at 5:30. If you couldn't make it up to Camp Casey, but wanted to show your support, here's your chance.

Gold Star Families for Peace funded much of the Camp Casey goings-on, from the bus I took from Austin to the water provided on site to participants. I don't imagine that my readers have much extra cash, but donating to the group will help them on their bus tour to DC and continue their anti-war efforts.

I think I will take a charter bus to Crawford Saturday, to support Cindy Sheehan and participate in the anti-war rally near the Bush compound. The bus leaves from the LBJ library parking, which is a convenient walk from my place. I'd encourage any Austin readers to join me, and contact me so we can coordinate.

If you don't think you can go up to Crawford this weekend, I'll point out a few upcoming events in Austin. On Sunday, September 11, Austin Against War is sponsoring a peace march from Gillis Park at South First and Oltorf to the new City Hall. This seems like a great way to counter the message of that day's "Freedom Walk" in DC, which is organized by the Department of Defense. (BTW, check out this great post discussing the way Americans use "Freedom.") Additionally there will be rally October 1 to promote the demilitarization of schools and get military recruiters off campus.

Here's an interesting NYTimes report on a speech given by Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, where he laments some of the decisions he has made as a justice:

The right, particularly the Christian right, likes to whine about "judicial activists," who rule in favor of free-speech and against the public establishment of religion. Sometimes I wonder if rightists frankly lack the ability or inclination to understand nuance, but, often it seems like a disingenuous attempt at attacking the legitimacy of the constitution. Regardless, I think this was a brave effort by Stevens to explain that often the principles of the law push the justices into making unpopular decisions.

Here's an interesting IndyMedia story from a couple of weeks ago. Czech police used water cannons to break up a "freetekno" party called "Czechtekk 2005" in a rural part of the country. The article could use a couple of grafs giving a little background on the Czechtekk parties which have been held for the past twelve years. I'm guessing Czechtekk is an outdoor electronic music festival comparable to Burning Man in the states. I did originally assume that 'Czechtekk 2005" would be an activist Linux user convention, which only proves how completely unhip I am.

The party took place on rented land in a rural area. According to the article, police legitimated their actions by stating that the rental contract was invalid and began stopping cars headed to the party. The article suggests that the contract was valid, and the police wanted to break up the party from the start.

It's interesting how this story hinges on land rights. Land rights have come up in the Cindy Sheehan story in a similar way. Local residents have tried to ban parking along the highway to Bush's ranch, and I'm sure that their reasons have as much to do with Sheehan's beliefs as they do with the traffic she brings. Although the hearing has been scheduled after Sheehan and Bush plan to leave Crawford, Camp Casey is moving to a private patch of land. The owner, Fred Mattage supports Sheehan's project, but, interestingly, he's a distant cousin of the man who fired a gun near the protester, claiming he was getting ready for "dove season."

I'm sure Texas and the Czech Republic have different attitudes toward land rights. I would expect Texas property owners to have a stronger inclination to enforce property rights, so it's a little surprising the lengths to with the Czech police went to kick people off of property. The folks in Crawford are complaining about events on publicly-owned roadsides, but their claims are couched in a property-owner's entitlement.

Oklahoma recently passed a law blocking employers from banning guns on their premises. The state legislature thought workers should have the right to bring their weapons on private property. The law is being challenged in court by corporate interests who assert that their constitutional property rights allow them to decide their own gun policy. The NRA, which is defending the law, is framing the issue in terms of the second amendment.

I'm no fan of guns, and I'm frankly a little embarrassed that this is happening in my own state, but it raises some interesting issues. This post at "TPM Cafe House of Labor" points out that this assertion of property rights threatens "proposed local laws to require companies to allow the public and/or union organizers onto their property."

What I find more interesting is what this means for worker's rights generally. The WSJ article says, " in a surprise search, Weyerhaeuser Co. sent gun-sniffing dogs into the parking lot of its paper mill here. Mr. Bastible and 11 other workers were fired after guns were found in their vehicles." If Oklahoma passed a law specifically allowing guns in company parking lots, presumably that means employers are free to search you and your car at anytime? I'm guessing that if guns can be banned, employers could ban all kinds of media-making equipment like cameras or computers.* I don't expect anyone would try to take up this issue on First Amendment grounds, but random searches of employee vehicles seems like an unnecessary intrusion into workers affairs. It's too bad this issue has come up in the context of the Second Amendment.

*Look who hasn't taken a media law class.

I just saw the pictures today, but, boy howdy, those newborn pandas are phenomenally cute. I like how they're all pink and fuzzy with their eyes nearly invisible. Apparently, Pandas have a hard time breeding in captivity, so my congratulations go out to the zoo professionals (and the pandas) in China and Washington.

What do you call a professional that works in a zoological garden? "Zoologist" seems to refer to any biologist that specializes in animals, while "Zookeeper" sounds like a working-class job, and I assume that the people responsible for caring for these pandas have advanced degrees.

If I were more clever, I'd draw some comparison between the bomber in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and this proposal from the US to abolish leap-seconds, so I'll just say if we base our clocks on the rotation of the earth, the terrorists will have already won. Who needs the sun? We must protect our proud American traditions, like the 24-hour day.

Yikes, New York police will begin random searches of bags on subways, busses, and commuter trains. This seems like a substantial curtailing of civil liberites, since, once searches are in place, police won't simply be looking for explosives. Fortunately, the article notes "officials said they would take pains to avoid racial and ethnic profiling."

The article notes that New York is the first city to be taking these steps. London, which has been the target of recent bomb attacks, does not systematically search bags, so these steps seem more as attempt to give law enforcement more power, rather than avert attacks in the city.

New York police commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at the announcement, "It's a safety issue. People don't consider any measures that you take for safety to be an inconvenience. This is New York City." I suspect that Kelly maybe not be describing the attitudes of New Yorkers accurately, but it's interesting how he invokes civic pride to suggest that ideal New Yorkers acquiesce to random searches. It seems like a quasi-nationalism, asking people to be loyal to the city.

Street Tech points to the Wikipedia entry on today's transit bombings in London. It's already a very long entry by Wikipedia standards, and has seen thousands of edits. I'm guessing Wikipedia uses Greenwich Mean Time, and the first entry on the topic was posted at 9:18 this morning, so users would have been editing as the story first unfolded.

It's clear that a lot of data is being uploaded to be revised later, but it does give me an appreciation for the ways news organizations are able to collect and present data in a way that give readers an instant impression of what happened in a complex event. I understand why users would want to add to an entry, but isn't this a better case for WikiNews? Is it possible users are moving to fast, trying to create a definitive account before all the facts are in?

A post at Political Animal quotes my former boss Frank Wang. OK, he was the CEO of Saxon Publishers while I was a lowly part-time proofreader. Although the greatest responsibility I had was writing the answers in the back of the Algebra II textbook, I did come into contact with him from time to time.

Drum cites Mr. Wang to describe "the Math Wars," or a battle between educators who advocate a more heuristic approach to teaching math and conservative groups led by parents who advocate a "back-to-basics" approach that emphasizes drilling and rote memorization. (I've already blogged about Saxon here.) Philosophically, I tend to agree with the new math folks - I mean, how are kids ever going to understand Derrida if they don't learn set theory in grade school? - but my major objection to back-to-basics math education is more pragmatic. The Saxon method is boring, and more apt to turn students off to math than to give them mathematical competence.

The spirit has moved me, and I'm finally posting something on the ol' infobong. David Corn and Jeff Goldberg has a great story in The Nation that reveals that former g-man Mark Felt was put in charge of finding and stopping Deep Throat, while he was plying Woodward and Bernstein with information. As you might imagine, this assignment was instrumental in keeping his role a secret. I was born after Watergate, and what I know about it is largely the stuff of popular memory, but, considering the reputed paranoia of the Nixon administration, I find it surprising they didn't have people spying on the spies.

Barry Gewn has an interesting piece titled "Forget the Founding Fathers" in The New York Times that aims to provide an overview of approaches to American history. Despite its flaws, I found this piece kind of valuable; the only history class I took as an undergrad was "history of rock," so I've never really been exposed to the various discussions about histories of the US. However in some places, the essay seems to contradict itself. Gewen contends that multicultural approaches to American history lost favor when, "Battered by political correctness, basking in Reaganesque optimism and victory in the cold war, the country in the 1980's and 90's was ready for a reaffirmation of its fundamental values." However, he doesn't enumerate what US "fundamental values" are or point to any evidence that there are values shared by the population through the sweep of history. Presumably, the fundamental values he alludes to are the values of the white power elite, which only re-enforces the argument of the multiculturalists.

It shouldn't be surprising that a piece in the Times is sympathetic to a neoliberal point of view, however. Critiquing Richard Hofstadter, he writes, "Though the book appeared in the late 1940's, at the onset of one of the greatest economic booms in American history, Hofstadter was still complaining about ''bigness and corporate monopoly,' misguidedly declaring that ''competition and opportunity have gone into decline.'" I suppose one could make a convincing argument that the corporate capitalism of the 1950s and 1960s where more competitive and provided more social mobility than the oligopolies of today, but Gewen seems unwilling to acknowledge critiques of corporate power.

The article is ostensibly about the "Founding Fathers," and one area I hoped it would touch on was ignored. I hoped it would discuss how the framers of the US Constitution function in popular memory today. The Christian Right often deploy popular understandings of the framers in order to situate their political goals within imagined traditions. I frankly don't understand how the right can ingenuously claim that the framers intended to establish a "Christian nation" unconcerned with individual liberties, when the framers were largely deists and certainly classical liberals. The establishment clause of the First Amendment seems proof enough that the framers were suspicious of religious influence on the state.

A New York Times story says that jokes are dead. The article contends that they've vanished both from professional comedy and from daily life. I'm probably too young to remember when jokes were shared in the workplace, but, reading the article, I thought, "I told a joke on Friday."

I was drinking beers with some folks from the J-School, listening to a staff member reminisce about her youth in Austin. I said, "Hey Lou, have you heard that joke 'How many Austinites does it take to screw in a light bulb?'"
Lou said, "No. How many does it take?"
"Three, one to screw in the light bulb, and two to talk about how the old one was so much better."
Perhaps that wasn't canonical joke-telling, but I was well-received. The article also mentions "Bob Newhart's imaginary telephone monologues," which I thought of not too long ago. One day when I was teaching my "Intro to Digital Media" class, I began an impromptu telephone monologue to explain the latency and overall poor experience of using Voice-over-IP services circa 2001. As the class rolled with laughter, I wondered, "Have these kids ever heard Bob Newhart's old skits?"

I only know of Newhart's old skits from other kid's dad's comedy records and Dr. Demento. By the early 90s, when I was in high school, comedy records were a dead, if not dying, media genre. The story mentions the Internet, but I suspect other changes in media may have led to the death of jokes. In the eighties, it seemed like many cable channels used stand-up comedians to fill up their day, which may have diminished the impact of retelling jokes

I probably should have stopped watching this when I saw the stars-n-bars in the third shot, but Killfloor points to a video segment of a "wiener dog" race in Buda, TX, which is just south of Austin. Although the woman who says "You can kiss the wench for a dollar or you can kiss the wiener dog for a dollar," is pretty frightening, but not nearly as frightening as the fact that they parade the confederate battle flag in parades down in Buda. Also, is the name "Dachshund" not in the vocabulary of Budans?

Of course, I attend graduate school at a university where statues of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis still stand on the main mall. Yay Texas!

Although Urban Outfitters began as a funky surplus store near the University of Pennsylvania in the sixties, it's now known as an early co-opter of youth trends. I suppose young college kids with an independent spirit might see it as a one-stop-shop for hip clothes and decor, but I doubt anyone in my circles would regard it as alternative. Regardless, the store engages in some pretty icky business practices like the "Voting is for Old People" T-shirt that appeared in 2004 and now a series of relocation deals.

According to Philadelphia City Paper, Urban Outfitters is moving their call center from downtown Philly to a rural area of South Carolina, in order to take advantage of cheaper labor and a 15-year tax abatement granted by the state. The story notes that the company already had plans to move it's headquarters from the Rittenhouse Square area - which is probably the most expensive area of the city - to the old Navy Yard, a deal which certainly came with enticements from the city. Although the company is keeping it's headquarters in Philly, it seems like a stab in the back to take many of its entry-level jobs out of the city.

It's already on BoingBoing, but this little bit of technical "wizardry" bears repeating. When the Department of Defense finally released photographs of flag-draped coffins after an FOIA request, they famously redacted names and blacked-out faces purportedly for privacy reasons. However, a user with a modicum of technical knowledge discovered that you can recover the redacted personnel names simply by opening the military-issue pdf files in Acrobat and pasting the text into Word.

Juan Cole has a post describing a political tactic called a "GoogleSmear," where right-wing commentators use the Google search engine as a means of authenticating data. It strikes me as a little funny to think that the reliance on Google and the Internet more generally is one of the issues librarians and teachers frequently complain about when working with students new to research, yet political types with vast social capital can promote this fallacy.

In one form, the GoogleSmear makes the argument that if information is not indexed by Google, it is a lie. Cole describes the experience of UC-Irvine history professor Mark Levine, where " a radio talk show host called him a liar because he referred to an incident that the host could not find on Google." Cole himself is frequently the target of right-wing attacks, where his credibility is attacked on the basis of his job; the reasoning seems to go, "Professors, who spend much of their lives collecting and analyzing information about a topic, have no credibility on that topic because they're professors."

Cole also describes a second instantiation of the GoogleSmear, where right-wing commentators:

Considering the way that Google is increasingly used as an arbiter of political debates or as an infallible source of information, it would be nice to develop some kind of campaign to educate the public on how Google works and what are appropriate and inappropriate uses of the tool. I suspect some librarian has a page somewhere describing what we know about Google, but, given Google's lack of transparency and alleged bias, it seems like we need a more broad-based effort to debunk myths about the search engine.

In light of the number of folks I've shown the latest version of "Get Your War On," which deals with the Terry Schiavo case, I should probably post it here. I think my favorite quote is "Glassy-eyed, no cognitive ability, persistent vegitative state, poor Terry Schiavo - the unwitting personification of the Christian right. Except she's not a disgusting hypocrite."

I don't follow right-wing political blogs too closely, but I happened on a post by Michelle Malkin which uses an image of blonde woman police officer escorting a black suspect to raise questions about the role of women in law enforcement. One of her readers writes, "I wonder when or if anyone will have the guts to point out that it's not in the public's best interest to have a woman, escorting a penitentiary trained man-criminal, even with help!" Granted, the suspect is Brian Nichols, who is being charged with going on a killing spree in an Atlanta courtroom, but the readers seem to be more concerned about the big, black man overpowering the pretty blonde lady.

I suppose there's a segment of the right which lacks an appreciation for subtlety or an awareness of just how racist and sexist their discourse really is. But this is clearly a shot staged for media, a "perp walk," where there's little chance for the unexpected. I wonder why these commentators on the right would even bother to comment on the photo, since it makes them look so foolish.

Via TalkLeft, here's a NYTimes story that relates how the U.S. House has approved a resolution critical of the Third Circuit Court's decision allowing divisions within universities to bar millitary recruiting without the threat of losing funding in other departments. The right has an increasingly antagonistic attitude toward the judicial branch of our government - using loaded language like "activist judges" - but it seems like legislative projects like this and anti-marriage proposals which attempt to circumvent the court seem to be a more radical attitude toward our legal system. The Third Circuit's decision, mind you, was based on a Supreme Court decision allowing the Boy Scouts to ban gays, so its clear that the supporters of this resolution have little regard for our courts or internal consistency.

This is perhaps ubiquitous computing at its best. An art installation allows users to text a phone number and play video games on the windows of the French national library. I can't imagine something like this happening in the states.

One of the classes I'm taking this semester is RTF 386C "Media/History/Collective Memory" which deals, in part, with the ways that historical events are memorialized through media texts. For the term paper, I'm planning to write about the Oklahoma City National Memorial as a mediated and discursive practice. Apart from the fact I was a freshman at OU when the bombing occurred, I find it interesting how it uses a bombing by ultra-nationalist right-wingers as a launchpad for ultra-nationalist right-wing propaganda. Come on people, didn't they teach you the concept of irony in high school? You're just making Oklahomans look ignorant.

Anyway, The Guardian has a story about Joseph Beuys that deals largely with how he used his art to memorialize the past. The author says, "Beuys showed Germany and Europe a way to live without forgetting, and to remember without false piety." We're not reading about his work in class, but it would certainly relate to the issues we're discussing.

UCLA studio art professors Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins have quit in protest over the university's inaction over a grad student performance that employed a gun, reports the LA Times. I'm sure there's more to the story, since their action seems a little drastic, particularly when you consider an action that brought Burden fame in the 1970s.

Burden says that the element of surprise is what distinguishes his work from the piece that frightened audiences. I've worked with a professor that encourages surprise performances intended to shock and frighten audiences, so this makes me wonder about the implications of work like this.

Allright, I'm awaking from my blog-slumber (blogernation?) for a relatively content-free post. I love Neal Pollack's response to all the attention given to celebrity responses to the tsunami. He writes, "You know, I’d like to see someone throw a telethon to benefit the women and children we haven’t killed yet in Iraq."

I also agree with his criticism of "not one damn dime day" protesting the younger Bush's re-inaugaration. I don't think a general boycott will accomplish much, but I do think marches do succeed in making dissent visible and re-enforcing community ties. In Austin, there will be an anti-Bush march forming at 4pm Thursday at the state capitol building. I'll be there.

A friend sent me a link to this AP story describing a recently-published linguistics paper which analyzes the use of the word, "dude." According to the story, Scott Kiesling at Pitt is "contending it is much more than a catchall for lazy, inarticulate surfers, skaters, slackers and teenagers," but instead is situated in heteronormative male social bonds. Dudes use "dude" to express intimacy with other dudes. Whatever, I think I use "dude," much as I use "like" or the participle of another four-letter word: as a placeholder when I'm gathering my thoughts. I haven't read it, but you can download the paper as a .pdf here.

I just ran across something on see art make art that really makes me wish I live in New York (or even Philly, for that matter). Scratch Code is an exhibition of computational art from the 1950s through the 1970s by conceptual artists, filmmakers, and people who had access to a plotter. Its even at a gallery devoted to computer art. I worked with AMODA for about a year, but their emphasis is largely on putting on revenue-generating parties with critically acclaimed electronic music acts, rather than exposing local computer artists.

On the other hand, galleries are often not the best place for computer art. I went to The Whitney's Bitstreams show a few back and felt a little unsatisfying. Futzing around with computers in the rarified environment of a museum with other patrons waiting was not the best way to appreciate the works. Their Artport might be a better project, allowing patrons to check out digital works on their own machines. Ideally, users would be able to look at computer art in an environment that allows them to linger on a project for as long as it took them to appreciate the work, yet pulls them out of their normal surroundings.

A survey of 500 art critics recently named Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" the most influential work of twentieth-century art. The work, which I've had the pleasure of viewing at the Philadelphia Museum's Duchamp collection, consists of a urinal turned on its side and signed "R. Mutt." Even more exciting is #6 on the countdown, my hero Joseph Beuys' "I like America and America Likes Me," which Prentiss and Adina derided at the last Austin Blogger meetup. Come on, how can you go wrong with a felt blanket and a coyote?

Jenny blogged me to it, but I also applaud the Third Circuit's decision to allow law schools to block military recruiting on campus. Its odd that I read this story last night and today I received two recruiting messages from the Army. First, I got an email from a Sergeant Charles R. Hood inviting me to join the Green Berets, where I'd get to enjoy fun activities like "SCUBA diving, Parachuting, and Foreign Languages," all under intense enemy fire, I'm sure. Sergeant Chuck even said "this opportunity is normally reserved for soldiers who have served for a period of 2 to 3 years, but at this time, it is available you with out any special prerequisites." Gosh, if they only threw in deconstruction and reception studies, I'd sign up right away. Chuck was nice enough to give me his phone number, (877) 524-0211, and when I get a chance tomorrow, I'll give him a ring and ask him to quit spamming me. I thought soldiers were of good moral character, so why are they spamming?

Then when I got home from school, I had a message on my machine, inviting me to be an army of one. They even had a little background music as the canned announcer extolled the virtues of dying in Iraq for a war no one believes in. Why don't the get rid of "don't ask; don't tell" before they whining about being unable to recruit enough troops?

UpdateI guess I should read bOINGbOING more frequently, cause they're already on the story. UT students have also been receiving phone spam, and apparently when one student called a recruiter to complain, the serviceman threatened the student with violence. Go Army!

Good gravy, is Ashlee Simson's snafu on Saturday night a national scandal? I had presumed that all the pop tarts lip-synched. Maybe this year's hot Halloween costume will be Ashlee Simpson, hoarse and adorned with a pull cord in the back.

I brought up this quote in Historiography class today, so I reckon I should post it on the blog.

I guess the comments on this blog suggest that the remark is taken out of context, but, boy howdy, is that a creepy thing to say.

The New York Times has another story today about Philadelphia's plans to light the City of Brotherly Love with free Wi-Fi goodness. As a former Philly resident, this plan strikes me as incredibly goofy; most of the people in Philly are so poor, even a crappy $600 notebook is beyond their means. Unless John Street is going to be handing out laptops at The Gallery, the only people using this service will be tourists and Penn students. That sounds callous, I know. There are indeed structural issues in Philadelphia that reinforce the digital divide. West Philly, where I lived lagged the suburbs by two years getting DSL service from Verizon, and cable modem was unavailable until the local minority-owned cable operator was acquired by AOL-Time Warner. In 2001, Baltimore Avenue, which ran by my house was completely torn up to replace the trolley tracks. At the time, I quipped that the city should install fiber-optic trunks in the street while it was dug out, but, alas, that did not happen.

The Times is usually pretty fastidious about getting names right, but the article refers to "Love Park," which is what locals call the public space Northwest of City Hall, but the proper name of the joint is "JFK Plaza." Which leads me to the Infobong.com Trivia Question of the Day! What was President Kennedy's blood type? Click "yeah... and it don't stop" for the answer. President Kennedy's blood type was B-Negative. We watched the CBS and NBC breaking news coverage of his assassination at my screening today.

Good gravy, I feel like I'm newsblogging up a storm tonight, but Salon.com has a crazy story on Tom Coburn, the Republican candidate for the Oklahoma Senate seat, the same guy who supports capital punishment for doctors who perform abortions.

I hope Oklahomans can distinguish between the evil of liberalism and the evil of sterilizing a poor young woman without her consent. The Sooner State elected a Democrat Brad Henry for governor over former Seattle Seahawk and Republican Steve Largent in 2002, so maybe they exercise some caution when they pick their ultra-right politicians.

Lordy. The mental health industry exists to help people. But I don't have a lot of faith in it when I read stuff like this, or consider the current emphasis of medication over talk therapy - they seem more interested in just drugging people rather than help them solve their problems. The article doesn't mention this, so I may be mistaken, but my understanding is that the FDA doesn't require clinical trials of antidepresants for teenagers before allowing doctors to prescribe them to minors - drug companies only need to demonstrate that Prozac, et al, are regarded as safe for adults in the general population, so, inductively, the drugs are safe for teens.

I noticed this morning that The Media Foundation is taking orders for its antibrand "Black Spot Sneaker." I'm really tempted to grab a pair in order to give myself a much-needed dose of cultural cachet. I tend to disagree with Prentiss' assertion that $60 is a lot to spend on sneakers. Unless you're biomechanically perfect, running shoes start around $90, and I'll bet that the all-hemp Adidas I wore in college cost about $50-60, so a well-made pair of hemp sneakers is going to cost some money, whether or not they're made in unionized factory in Portugal or not.

But what does keep me from ordering a pair Black Spots is the fact that I don't really need another pair of sneakers. I bought a pair of Puma Californias - the greatest sneaker ever made - back in March, and it'll be years before I need to buy new shoes. It doesn't make sense to consume simply to contest the social role of consumption.

Hate creator Peter Bagge asks "who needs in Modern Art Museums?" on the libertarian site Reason Online. Of course, my politics are far from libertarian, and I happen to enjoy a lot of contemporary art, so its difficult for me to formulate a satisfying answer. I do think nurturing the arts keeps our culture healthy - the NEA protests in the nineties really opened my eyes to how nasty the Religious right is - didn't Serrano perform a public good by forcing those bigots out into the open? And we fund research scientists and humanities scholars in universities because we think they expand our understanding of the world around us; don't shock artists also help us understand the topics and concepts that small but powerful minoriites want to exclude from public debate?

BTW, I don't know if this gets NEA funding, but I like it.

If there were cargo cults among the Pennsylvania Dutch, they would produce artifacts like these.

The New York Times has a story about what it terms "street art," the illicit application of wheatpaste posters and painted murals in public spaces. The story mention " a curatorial Web site for street art around the world," The Wooster Collective. I tracked it down after reading the story, and I'm like, "Oh Yeah!" All my synapses are firing at once looking at the images of physical urban space used in meaning-making. And they even have an RSS feed!

BTW, I really dig this picture, which I ran across a few weeks back when I was working at a 3D animation camp. I had it up on screen of a computer near the door. A young student walked in, and shouted, "Ew!" like it scared him or something. I went back and looked at the pictures on the Wooster Collective, and I think part of the reasons the images seem so arresting is that many of the shots are pretty contrasty and don't have a lot of depth-of-field (well, they're taking pictures of walls, duh). Combined with the two layers of the image, the street art and its context, the viewer has a lot of information to process in order to make sense of it.

Always providing timely advice for the ruling class, Forbes is running a feature that many exec can surely use, "The Best Place to Go to Prison." If I wasn't so opposed to the use of prison labor in the private sector, I'd suggest Lay and his pals stock Wal-Marts on the graveyard shift or perhaps man a register at a West Philly Burger King.

I've been meaning to blog about PunkVoter.com for some time, but I wasn't sure what to say about it. So just read this rad story in The Nation about the Web site.

I guess I do have a few remarks about PunkVoter.com. I'm sure Jourgensen, et al, are targeting an audience less Web-literate than I, but two design decisions keep me from visiting the site more often. The site lacks an RSS or Atom feed, so I can't check it in my newsreader, and, for some reason, I can't scroll the site using my "PgUp" and "PgDn" buttons. Bummer, dude.

These smug, judgemental suburbanites make me sick. Britton Stein says of liberals and leftists, "They don't give Bush the respect he deserves. Not only because he's president, but because he's a helluva good man." Um, Bush is such a good man that he attacks Kerry's war record, but dodges releasing his own military records? He's such a good man he misrepresents data in order to go war? Such a good man he wants to cut overtime protections for low-wage workers like firefighters and nurses?

Here's what the Bush adminstration doesn't want you to see.

Goodness gracious, its a skateboarding dog! Just don't take him to Love Park, whatever you do.

Despite the rumors about Rick Perry and the sinister machinations of Tom Delay, it appears Texas doesn't have a monopoly on creepy-wacky politics.

Noting how the face of Marxist martyr Che Guevara has popped on all kinds of consumables, The Christian Science Monitor asks, "How did an avowed Marxist become, literally, the poster boy for conspicuous capitalist consumption?" It makes for an interesting news story, I suppose, but it seems like a given in "Cultural Studies" that capitalism has a knack for co-opting subversive ideas and commodifying them. (witness major-label wankstas Rage Against the Machine) Maybe reporter Elizabeth Armstrong slept in on that day in college. Of course, when we live in an era when Urban Outfitters can pass off shirts like these as "hep," Che's face on a Vuitton handbag is all the more striking.

I reckon that its worth mentioning that the editorial board of The Baylor Lariat the student newspaper at the world's largest Baptist school, has come out in favor of gay marriage by a 5-2 vote. How is it that Baylor students are more liberal than the Democratic presidential condenders on this issue? I wonder how they feel about shellfish - do they know God hates shrimp?

Observers on the left have criticized the Bush administration for labeling people who oppose its policies, such as anti-war protestors and environmental activists, as "terrorists." But the Bushites discursive peculiarity took a surreal turn today when Education Secretary Rod Paige called teachers' union the National Education Association a "terrorist organization." Damn, its bad enough that terrorists can be your next-door neighbor or electrical engineers, but now those wild-and-crazy schoolteachers are tantamount to Osama Bin Laden.

This Guardian story has been blogged in plenty of other places, but its worth posting here, just to make damn sure everybody sees it. Bush is not only ignoring the scientific community and the Environmental Protection Agency in his denial of global warming, but it appears the "wartime president" is ignoring the Pentagon as well. A leaked Pentagon report contends global warming is real and presents a greater threat to global stability than Bush' beloved terrorists. Between this dissing of the Pentagon and Bush' attempt to cut combat pay to soldiers in Iraq, it seems inconceivable that any military person would support this former National Guardsman, but apparently there are servicepeople out there that still do.

First there was Streetmattress.com, and now there's this site filled with photos of abandoned bikes in New York City. I'm particularly intrigued by the Swiss Miss. I'll admit to sort of abandoning a bike. After I bought a rad aluminum mountain bike, I left a junky hybrid locked up in front of OU's Bizzell Library for many months. I eventually recovered the bike and sold it to a friend of mine. I don't think I would get away with that at UT since I see warning notices attached to bikes. The UTPD tells owners that the bike has been locked in the same place for too long and informs the rider the bike will be impounded after a certain amount of time.

UT and the College Licensing Company are pursuing dealers of those loverly crimson-and-cream hats with inverted Longhorns logos for trademark infringement, reports The Oklahoma Daily. This isn't terribly surprising considering, the Athletic Department went after UT student groups who used the steer motif in club materials. (According to Athletics, its a symbol for the sports teams, while the interlocking UT is the general university symbol.) But what is surprising is UT authorizes two logos, the upside-down "horns" hand signal and the word "Texas" printed upside down. OU gets the proceeds from licensing these symbols. One question remains, however. If "The University" considers the "horns-down" signal a legitimate use of its iconography, why was there such a furor over Arkansas Coach Houston Nutt's use of "horns-down" after the Cotton Bowl? Maybe its because Longhorn fans are ignorant?

This may be old news to readers, but I just ran across Adbusters' Black Spot Sneaker project, which attempts to mass produce sneakers in a unionized factory in South Korea. The project simultaneously supports social justice and attacks the image-laden marketing campaigns of Nike and other shoe vendors.

The catch is Adbusters needs 5,000 people to pre-order a pair at $60 before they can place an order. Right now they have 1,074 pre-orders, so its your job, dear reader, to place an order and recruit 3,925 of your closest friends to place an order too. I'm going to place one soon, so you're already down to 3,924.

The Museum of Modern Art is working to redesign its "MoMA" logo to make it easier to print with desktop publishing application, The New York Times reports. The redesign has not been welcomed by all; typography geeks have declared the new logo - which uses the exact same font - as "soulless" and downright "hideous."

Here's a story from The Chronicle of Higher Education that describes a new research center in my hometown, The Tulsa Center for Gay and Lesbian History. Although I'm not gay, Tulsa seems to have a fairly visible gay community (Compared to Austin or OKC, rather than, say, New York or San Francisco.) So I'm inclined to think the story's lead engages in a little hixploitation, overstating intolerant attitudes for rhetorical effect. Regardless, this seems to be a positive development both for Tulsa and for queer studies. I'm sure there are plenty of scholars and activists outside T-Town interested in queer life outside the cultural hubs.

The New York Times Fashion section has a story on "rejuveniles," adults with a penchant for culture aimed at children. Citing trends like fashionable sneakers, the widespread Hello Kitty Fetish, and bubblegum music, the story suggests a new trend in infantile lifestyles is emerging. This doesn't strike me as news: I think of the pacifiers and glow-sticks sported at raves a decade ago, or the rise of twee-pop among indie rockers a few years back. I thought, perhaps, that these tastes may have been sufficiently underground to escape the Gray Lady's notice, but I then thought of the 70's rerun craze documented in Reality Bites, and decided this is not news.

Its an interesting read, nonetheless. I went home to Oklahoma the week before last, and my mom inquired about the "Birdhouse" folder I was using, and it explained that its a skateboard company owned by Tony Hawk, who the article name checks. I've participated in other aspects of rejuvenalia cited in the story. I ride my bicycle as transportation nearly every day; when I hung out in Norman last weekend, I played a game of kickball with an adult-proportioned rubber ball; and, of course, I'm addicted to my threadbare pair of Puma sneakers.

The New York Times has a story on Flash-Mob projects in Berlin, where groups of people co-ordinate via email and SMS to "spontaneously" meet in a single location. It strikes me as a little odd that the Gray Lady would choose to cover the events in Berlin, since Flash-Mobs began in New York.

If you live in Austin, and you want to get in on the Flash-Mob action, join this Yahoo! Group listserv to receive instructions for a Flash-Mob later this month.

One little axe I have to grind with the Flash-Mob project is the way it purports to be apolitical; as a good postwhateverist, I see ideology embedded in nearly human endeavor, so I think that claim is disingenuous. Technology is core to a Flash-Mob project; in one sense its a way for persons with consumer devices to find new way to use them, but it also seems to be a celebration of technology and consumer culture. The NYTimes story describes a Berlin Flash-Mob where participants spoke nonsense into there cell-phones, making some statement about the use of technology.

The Sixers might trade Keith Van Horn for my favorite basketball player, Latrell Sprewell! OK, I have other favorite players now - Vlade Divac, as well as Mavericks Steve Nash and Eduardo Najera - but Sprewell was the first player I really got into. I liked the Knicks in the wake of their trip to the 1999 Finals, but the team had a swift decline culminating in Coach Van Gundy's quick resignation and their trading Camby to the Nuggets. Having lived in Philly, I could definitely become a Sixers fan if the king of cornrows and Allen Iverson are on the same team. Too bad Larry Brown is already gone. The story suggests Sprewell might wind up somewhere else, in one of those Byzantine multi-player trades. He could wind up playing for my favorite team right now, the Dallas Mavericks, which would be awesome.

This New York Times story about a kitten held by MTA transit police made me think I should get myself a kitty for company. My lease forbids pets, however, and although I had outside cats as a kid, I think I'm mildly allergic to the critters. In Philly I lived in a large rowhome with my roommates' funk-nasty cats, and I felt sick all the time. Now that I'm away from the cats (and other city grime) I feel much healthier, so I suspect that having an indoor cat is not in the cards for me. Maybe I'll bring my aquarium down from Tulsa, and get a cute, cuddly fish.

The Washington Post profiles Anthony "The Moo" Moussa, creator of the esteemed njguido.com, a site devoted to the macho side of the Garden State. (from Kottke.org)

In the past few months, pro-war types attacked peace demonstrators suggesting that they couldn't "support the troops" and oppose the war. Now it looks like its G.W. Bush who doesn't support the troops. First, he proposes veterans' benefits to pay for his tax break for the rich. Now, he's trying to trim imminent-danger pay from $225 to $150 while there are troops overseas fighting a war he started. An editorial in Army house organ, Army Times, takes Bush to task for his stinginess toward the armed services.

I frankly don't understand how the pro-war types could be so profoundly lacking in nuance to understand the difference between supporting the war and supporting troops. Jay-Z could summarize his position in a few lines in a rap cut, it shouldn't be that hard to grok.

It wouldn't surprise me if these folks are just cravenly disingenuous. There seems to be a pround lack of moral clarity in people who will support a president who lied to start a war but demanded Clinton be impeached for a personal indiscretion.

Hopefully today's Boondocks comic is an indication of what's to come in the next presidential election. I'm a little bemused about all the recent news reports that suggest Bush misrepresented evidence about WMDs to drag us into war. I thought that all along, so I wonder why papers like The Washington Post were hawkish before the war, but second-guess the president now.

In These Times is a title I read on occasion, but I should read more often. On one of my rare visits to their site today, I ran across this piece by Slavoj Žižek discussing the ways the Matrix movies invite philosophical interpretation. Like others, he suggests that "the matrix" might be read as the sum of the social and political institutions that determine our perceptions of the real, but, as always, his assertions are unmistakably clear:

Of course, the first movie invites these post-structuralist/postmodern readings in the scene where Neo pulls Baudrillard's Simulation and Simulacra off of the shelf. One thing I found interesting about this story, though, is Žižek alludes to his "Lacanian friends." Up to this point, I had considered Žižek as a follower of Lacan, and he uses Lacanian ideas in this piece, so perhaps this is his way of saying his ideas are distinct from Lacan's.

Although there is a ring of truth to labeling President Bus a "Professional Fascist" on a newscast, I find it difficult to believe that it was a mistake, as New Zealand TV3 spokesperson Roger Beaumont asserts. (Doesn't Roger Beaumont sound like a name for a movie test-pilot, or, more obviously, a cowboy?) Clearly the perpetrator needs to be found and hailed as a champion of the truth.

In class this semester, we read portions of Henry Jenkins' seminal text on fan-art, Textual Poachers, which led me to see the derivative works in a whole new light. One of the, um, oddest collections of fan-art I've found is Ulrich Haarbürste's collection of stories about wrapping rock-and-roll icon Roy Orbison in cling-wrap. Tonight, I checked up on the site, and Ulrich has added two more new entries. Here's an excerpt from Story 4:

I continue to be amazed by the way Ulrich's imagination can create new situations for wrapping Mr. Orbison: Story 5 features Ulrich standing in for the conceptual artist Christo.

In related news, The Washington Post reports copyright holders are beginning to crack down on fan fiction authors. Hopefully, Ulrich will remain free to write about his Saran Wrap fantasies.

A while ago on Jared's Headspace, Average Joe asked, "when did liberals start referring to themselves as 'progressives'? You couldn't find more gratuitous self- pleasuring if you handed out jars of Vaseline in prison." I was a little surprised by this remark since I learned about the Progressive movement in high school history, but I tried to I tried to outline its emergence during the height of the Industrial Revolution in the US.

But the text of this Bill Moyers speech does the job of explaining the history of the Progressive movement and more. It offers reasons why the principles of Progressivism are even more relevant today in the face increasing corporate control of daily life and unabashed power plays by the wealthy and callous.

David was parodying high-profile persons of blog, so he may be interested in Neal Pollack's post today. (Note the sweet Sex Pistols-inspired redesign) He rips on self-important bloggers like Andrew Sullivan as usual, but Pollack outdoes himself today, asserting:

OK, I've never liked the San Antonio Spurs. I wasn't even aware of the team until the media frenzy over the macho high-school jocks in Northern California known as "The Spur Posse." During my last year at OU, I finally developed an active interest in basketball. I excitedly followed Latrell Sprewell and my Knicks through the playoffs, only to lose to the Spurs in the championship series. Now that I live in the Lone Star State, I profess my fandom for OU alum Eduardo Najera and the Dallas Mavericks, which were unceremoniously knocked out of the playoffs this year by the Spurs, so I've been rooting for the New Jersey Nets for the past few weeks.

But tonight, I was a little glad to see the Spurs win the championship. Knowing David Robinson was retiring might have softened me up a little, but one moment warmed my heart. At the end of the fourth quarter, it was pretty clear the Nets were going to lose, but after a rebound, New Jersey's Jason Kidd deliberately fouled his buddy Tim Duncan, so Jersey could get the ball with time after Duncan shot his free throws. Knowing Kidd was playing his heart out, the San Antonio player gave his pal a warm pat on the back and headed for the line. Watching this, I felt warm and fuzzy all over.

After the game ended and the Spurs were on the court to collect their trophies, I noticed something a little odd. Spurs chairman Peter Holt was on the court with an usual fashion statement: he paired a conservative business suit with a "dinner-plate" cowboy-style belt buckle. (see image) I guess it is Texas and everything, but that just looks weird. Yeah, I still don't know what to think of them Spurs.

After I added Prentiss as a friend last Friday, I had about 30,000 people in my Friendster network. I haven't added any new people as friends in a week, yet now my Friendster network is 44214 people, a jump of nearly 50%. I'm sure the number of people on Friendster is growing rapidly, considering the outages this week, but I also suspect that the number of links between nodes is increasing as well, so my personal network may be growing at a faster rate than the number of users.

If you use Friendster for any amount of time, you'll see personalities like God, Lone Star, and Xanax, and know there are plenty of impostors on the service. Although I'm fairly confident lesser lights like Anton Newcombe and Casey Spooner are who they say they are, the Village Voice has an item about friendsters impersonating New York celebs like Moby and Jay-Z. Naw, really?

While my dad was working in Phoenix last summer, he spotted a Rent-A-Tire outlet. On the phone, he expressed bewilderment at why anyone would want to rent tires. I explained certain tires - like the Yokohamas immortalized in "Bling Bling" - are status symbols in hip-hop and other subcultures, and persons with limited financial means might be inclined to finance some flashy rims and tires.

Just the other day, I drove past Austin's Rent-A-Tire and noticed an Expedition with a sweet set of spinner rims and wondered if the proud owner had just leased them. I spoke to my dad on the phone this morning and he was all, "Did you know there are truck rims that keep spinning after the car stops?"

"Oh yeah, spinners and choppers."

"Did you know they cost over $14,000 for a set?"

That I didn't know. He pointed me to this Time magazine article on specialty rims that notes a limited edition set of wheels can cost $14,400, but I'm sure there are less-expensive spinners out there.

I've finally broken down and started using the enormously fun and wildly addictive Friendster.com, which connects you to your friends' friends through relative links. It reminds me quite a bit of Everything2. While Everything2 shows user-defined relationships between ideas, Friendster shows relationships between people.

Prentiss has a thread about Friendster going on over at his blog, and points to a Village Voice story about the uses and gratifications of Friendster and comments on its exploding size.

One thing about Friendster I find quite interesting is how many semi-famous people are in my "personal network," as Friendster calls it. When I only had three friends on the service, I wanted to see who else was a Brian Jonestown Massacre fan, so I clicked on the band on my profile, to pull up the other fans. The first person in the results was none other than Anton Newcombe the creative force behind BJM. Casey Spooner from Fischerspooner is also in my network, along with many "A-List" bloggers and EFF big-shots.

The Chicago Tribune reports American youth are maturing at a slowing pace, with adolesecent behavior extending far beyond the college years. "What tends to define this group, researchers say, is a lot of dating, hanging out, having multiple partners and using drugs and alcohol. It's a time of instability and excitement--and, yes, of being less mature," the Tribune reports. Some of their metrics include marriage and home-ownership, milestones I couldn't even dream of right now.

The post teens had better watch that dating and those multiple partners, tho. This Flash animation documents Sen. Rick Santorum's coming Department of Sexual Security, devoted to the war on deviance.

The Washington Post reviews the latest issue of Modern Drunkard magazine, devoted to irreverent discussions of the tippling life. It includes a review of 40 oz. malt liquor, something I could have used in my undergraduate days of Bull Ice. Here's an excerpt on the lost art of staggering:

A Fort Lauderdale police officer pepper-sprayed a 12-year-old girl yesterday when stopping her from jay-walking. According to the WKMG site, the 5'1", 134 lb girl became angry at the officer and physically threatened him. "I had to choose between a physical fight and using the pepper spray," the officer told the TV news.

Buried at the end of the article, is an interesting tidbit of information, "Deputies seeking to stop accidents along busy Federal Highway have been ticketing Olsen Middle School students for the past several weeks." Now, this just seems like blaming the victim: why did they build a middle school along a busy highway and why is there no crosswalk or pedestrian overpass for the kids to use?

British newspaper The Guardian has an essay up by American novelist Thomas Pynchon about George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Pynchon notes the many correspondences between the world Orwell portrays and the information-driven, hyper-nationalistic times we live in, but suggests the ending of the novel is not quite as bleak as many make it out to be. According to Pynchon, the novel's coda, a faux critical essay called "The Principles of Newspeak", suggests that the regime has ended and language is no longer inverted by the powers that be.

Oh, its good to know Pynchon is still around. The last paper I wrote as an English major was about the appropriation of detective fiction in Pynchon's The of Lot 49 and City of Glass by Paul Auster. I'm planning to spend my summer reading fiction, and it seems that Nineteen Eighty-Four would be a great place to start.

Today I marched in the "Showdown in Texas" demonstration intended to highlight the role the defense industry plays in Texas' politics and the its economy. The highlight for me may have been when the march stopped in front of the local Fox Television office, and we chanted "Lies! Lies!" Creepily, there were men in fatigues watching the march atop some of the high-rise buildings along Congress avenue. I wondered aloud if we had a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act in our midst. Due to another commitment, I was unfortunately unable to participate in the "Caravan to Crawford," taking demonstrators to a protest outside Bush' ranch. Apparently at least four protestors were arrested at the action there.

Happy May Day everyone! The Guardian has pictures of May Day celebrations from around the world. And don't forget the Quakers' Showdown in Texas this weekend to call attention to all those yucky millitary bases and defense contractors in the Lone Star State. I'll be at the tower at 11am Saturday to participate in the Books Not Bombs march.

Over on The Nation's Website is a wide-ranging feature aptly titled, "Rolling Back the 20th Century," which integrates many of the Bush regime's initiatives from school vouchers to ending dividend taxes, into an overall framework of dismantling many of the inroads made by progressives in the last century.

The article touches on one of the facets of the conservative movement that's befuddled me, the alliance between seemingly heartless business types and people of faith. The article notes, "the right has created the political mechanics that allow these disparate elements to pull together. Greider says, "Cosmopolitan corporate executives hold their noses and go along with Christian activists trying to stamp out "decadent" liberal culture."

I'm reminded of a passage in H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights, which details the high school football culture in Odessa, Texas. In one passage, Bissinger details how George H.W. Bush visits the West Texas community on a campaign stop, greeted by overwhelming support. The author then notes the irony that Bush and Reagan actions did more to dismantle the oil industry in the town than anyone else. I heartily recommend Friday Night Lights: I read when I lived in Philly, and I remember sitting on the train crying and angry, as it reminded me of the football hegemony at Jenks High School.

Anyway, Naomi Klein has an article in The Guardian that, in part, presents a future I'd like to see. The No Logo author describes how seamstresses in Argentina seized control of their plant and kept it running after the owners couldn't pay their bills and subsquently abandoned the operations.

"In Texas, laws exist against sodomy but not bestiality. So legally you can have sex with your dog, but not with a gay partner," The Philadelphia Daily News attempting to explain the context of Senator Rick Santorum's homophobic remarks.

Climbing up the charts at Blogdex, is a Washington Post story that relates a benefit for inner-city children hosted by Fox News Channel talk-show host Bill O'Reilly. After a performance by the Best Men, a lip-sync group composed of young men, O'Reilly quipped, "Does anyone know where the Best Men are? I hope they're not in the parking lot stealing our hubcaps."

bOINGbBOING reports that GM Canada has apologized for the "Freaks and Weirdos" ad suggesting riders should funk up the environment and drive a Sunfire rather than endure the bus. A pdf of the apology letter is here.

On KOOP the other day, a show interviewed UT's Robert Jensen about how the U.S. staged the toppling of Saddam's statue . Although I was in class much of the day, Jensen said the cable networks had their cameras trained on the statue long before it was clear the statue would fall, suggesting the event was concocted for propaganda purposes. Information Clearing House has an interesting analysis of photos taken of the event, showing U.S. vehicles were used to pull the statue down and only a small number of Iraqis were actually present cheering. Here's Ward Sutton's comic send-up of the event.

Mother Jones has a Q&A with clip artiste extraordinaire David Rees, creator of "Get Your War On" and "Get Your Enr On." This story is over a week old, I know; I wish I had the time to keep up with coursework and read all the media I love. I also sadly missed Rees when he spoke at a benefit in Austin last fall.

Meine Schwester insists Germans are not funny, but, after taking five years of coursework, I still think German is funny as all get out. If you need proof, check out Google's auto-translation of this page.

OK, I know automated translation almost always results in something funny, but I just imagine a Pizza commericial claiming, "wir füllen Käse in den Plätzen an, die Sie nie ungefähr träumten" or watching "der landwirtschaftlichen Funktionskategorienamerikaner" on "Die Herzöge von Hazzard" and I have to laugh.

Clip art or no clip art, David Rees moves fast. The latest "Get Your War On" is up and it raises questions about the future of Iraq. Here's hoping they see democracy.

OK, this is has to be the most elitist thing I've read, since, well, iZac's suggestion they should use private thugs security services to quell critics of the adminstration. My irony detector is going off, (it doesn't help that it's on a Harvard server) but its entirely possible he's playing devil's advocate.

For one of my courses we read a chapter, "Breakages Unlimited," from Brian Winston's book, Misunderstanding Media, which I think offers a great framework for thinking about technological change through the lens of culture. In the chapter, he looks at the introduction of technology into culture from economic, industrial, and scientific perspectives, positing that the revolutionary rhetoric surrounding communications technology has existed for ages. However, the uptake of a technology, he says, follows four stages, accompanied by three intervening periods of transformation. To put this in context, the model would suggest that the vaunted "Internet revolution" closely follows the adoption patterns of the telephone, the motion picture, or any number of new technologies.

The phase I found most interesting was the third period of transformation, "the law of supression of radical potential." As products reach consumers, instituitional forces, like the government, entrenched industries, and other forces limit the potential of a technology for social change. In his words, "general social constraints operate to limit the potential of a device to radically disrupt existing social formations."

When I learned of this, I immediately thought of the attempts by the entertainment industry to limit the ability for networked personal computers to share intellectual property. In the model, the MPAA and RIAA see the potential for computer to distribute culture like movies and music without them and seek to supress the radical potential of these machines. A perhaps more powerful example is the Chinese government's attempts to control Internet content through a nationwide firewall. If the Navy's success in constraining peer-to-peer radio use in the early 20th century or the relatively toothless VCRs we have today are a guide, much of the potential of the Internet may never be realized.

On the topic of file-sharing, Slashdot has a discussion today about the RIAA's lawsuit against a Michigan Tech student accused of piracy. The university president issued a release condemming the actions of the RIAA: although Michigan Tech pledged to cooperate with the RIAA in shutting down file-sharing on campus, the RIAA sued the student individually.

Meine Schwester Julia, who is studying in Berlin, sent me this NPR article, writing, "Dude, I walk by this everyday!"

According to this comic strip, literacy advocate and former teacher Laura Bush is asking Americans to "please read to a dead Iraqi child." I'm glad to see Ward Sutton's Schlock -N- Roll is now available at the Village Voice Web site. I remember reading it in the pages of Philadelphia City Paper and wanting to blog it, but it wasn't online anywhere. Here's another comic by Sutton depicting Rumsfeld's uses and gratifications of "shock and awe."

And since I'm pointing to comics online, this amusing Ted Rall joint ran in today's Daily Texan. Is it just me, or does the term "embed" evoke ingrown toenails or wisdom teeth that need to be pulled?

I'll admit that I'm not an avid reader of The Onion, but I never really picked up on a political tone to their satire. However, since Bush began saber-rattling, the paper's coverage of "Operation Piss Off the Planet" has become overtly critical of the adminstration. This point/counter-point from last week beatifully summarized the right's responses to the anti-war movement for all its knee-jerk silliness and ad hominem attacks. Now this guest editorial lampoons our nation's attitudes toward civil liberties:

I guess The Onion always sneered at middle-class ideology, but it seems particularly strident (and understandably so) these days.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has issued a report on Internet use and the War on Iraq. Some of their conclusions like,

reflect my impatience with quantitative methods, but, interestingly, a section is devoted to blogging during wartime, where they concede "the overall number of blog users is so small that it is not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who uses blogs."

No not that E. According to this chat transcript, my second favorite comic strip (after The Boondocks) Pearls Before Swine began life as an online comic strip, then later picked up by a synidicate. I wonder if this will be trend in the future, where syndicates pick up successful online strips. Maybe someday we'll see Diesel Sweeties tucked away in the pages of The Daily Oklahoman.

I thought this comic from the other day was particularly amusing, but I wondered why it was set at an anti-globalization protest, rather than, say, an anti-war action. In the transcript artist Stephan Pastis says that the synidicate is re-running the greatest hits from Pearls online-only days, so maybe this is an older strip.

Here's a slowly-paced Flash presentation that uses photographs to document changing international attitudes toward the US between 9/11 and the present.

According to my page stats, a US Department of Justice computer accessed this blog today after querying Google with the name of an Iranian-American friend of mine, who happens to be involved with progressive causes. I want to think that our pal at the DOJ was simply interested in Kasra's musical pursuits and little else. But these are different times. Earlier this week, Intel engineer Maher Mofied 'Mike' Hawash, a naturalized citizen, was arrested without charges by the FBI. The Feds cited his contribution of money to a charity linked to terror groups as grounds to hold him as a material witness.

Earlier this week, NBC fired war correspondent Peter Arnett for appearing on Iraqi state TV, and noting American forces were unprepared for Iraqi resistance. UT journalism prof Robert Jensen has an editorial up on Newsday criticizing Arnett and discussing some of the lessons learned from this incident.

Robert Jensen on the bullhorn durng the Guadalupe Street sit-in.

Course descriptions for next fall are up on the Web, and I'm mulling over what I want to take. I'll probably enroll in three hours of thesis research, a Radio-TV-Film seminar, and a course outside the department for my minor. I'm super thrilled with my classes this semester, but there are some interesting course titles for next term. RTF 387F Global Vs. Regional Media; RTF 384C Media Economics; and RTF 386C Youth, Media, and Cultural Studies all sound awesome. I'd like to take a class with RTF's Mary Kearney, who's teaching RTF 386C Feminist and Queer Film Theory in the fall, but despite holding a degree in film, I don't find film all that interesting.

I'm also intrigued by this course in the English department, Literacy in the Digital Era, which I may take, but I would also like to take a course that lets me get my hands dirty and work with technology. I'm thinking of emailing the art department, and see what courses I could take over there.

What do you readers out there in Cyberspace think I should take? If you were an RTF student, what would you take?

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on affirmative action:

The operative word here seems to be "visibly" - as in a glance at a person of color tells Scalia and his pals they don't belong in a presitigious institution. Yuck. The social unconciousness of these people who want to dismantle affirmative action only prove racism still runs rampant in America.

I think this picture proves why we should be spending our precious tax dollars on education instead of the war on Iraq.

At first, this New York Times story, which describes how anti-war groups are toning down the civil disobedience, seemed to indicate mainstream outlets are moving away from portraying peace and justice activists as traffic-blocking freaks toward representing us concerned citizens making a statement of conscience. But this Washington Post piece echoes the earlier Broadcasting and Cable piece, which quotes consultants who say covering the opposition is bad for business, so the battle for responsible journalism is far from won.

People write into the papers griping about how civil disobedience actions slow down traffic and - often - commerce. In this case, stopping traffic seems to be an apt metaphor for the impact the war has on our economy. The war is already costing billions of dollars and creating an atmosphere of economic uncertainty that will only continue to drag down our economy as long as we stay in Iraq. The subsquent occupation and rebuilding of the nation will suck resources from the country, enriching the likes of Haliburton, but hurting the common man. If these people are genuinely worried about slowing down the nation's work, they should join us out in the street or simply think about what President Bush is doing to address the economic issues at home.

The Boondocks is probably my favorite comic strip these days (followed closely by Pearls Before Swine.) The comic features a Huey, an elementary school Black Panther; his brother Riley, who aspires to the thug life of rappers; and Huey's best friend from round-the-way, Caesar. Huey frequently goes on tears about politics and American culture that are beyond the sophistication of most grade-school students. In interviews, creator Aaron McGruder has said that Huey is a character and not a mouthpiece for MacGruder's opinions. However today's strip, which says

is signed by the artist, suggesting that statements like the Most Embarrassing Black People Awards (a parody of the Image Awards) and the diatribes against Vivica Fox probably reflect McGruder's own ideas.

A story in trade magazine Broadcasting and Cable suggests, "Covering war protesters may be bad for business." Apparently, Joe Six-Pack prefers Nintendo-like footage of Tomahawk missles to people making a statement of conscience - and that's good journalism.

I wanted to seque into some snide remark about my sick crush on NBC White House Correspondent Campbell Brown, but it just ain't happening.

Bill Moyers has an essay on the way pro war types have hijacked the flag for their anti-democratic goals:

The online comic Diesel Sweeties has what has to be the best flag shirt ever, which, in many ways, represents why I continue to voice my opposition to the war on Iraq. My sister is studying in Berlin, a hotbed of anti-war sentiment, and I'm mulling over whether to get one of these shirts for her.

Readers have been writing into The Austin American-Statesman and UT-Austin's Daily Texan arguing that, now that now the the war has begun, activists are hurting the soldiers in Iraq by voicing their opposition. The protests did not spring up after the bombs were falling: in fact, the anti-war movement was larger than the movement at the height of the Vietnam conflict before the bombs started falling. If it is the case that protests hurt soldiers on the battlefield, these people should hold President Bush responsible for starting a war much of the country doesn't believe in.

The New York Stock Exchange has barred Al-Jazeera journalists from broadcasting from the trading floor. While NYSE explains this is due to limited space, it comes after the network broadcast images of American POWs held by Iraq, so many infer this is in retaliation. The Bush adminstration has derided Al Jazeera as a distribution system for propaganda, but, if they can't get to sources within the West (and what's a better symbol for the West than NYSE?) they can only portray the views of their audience.

I just found an activist site, clearchannelsucks.org, that catalogs this misdeeds of our fine nation's largest radio broadcaster.

Through bOINGbOING, I learned of an absolutely disgusting ad GM is running in Vancouver. The destination bar of a bus reads "Creep and Weirdos" and the copy underneath reads, "Luckily there's an affordable alternative," and launches into its shill for the Chevy Cavalier. (Indymedia story)

Paul Krugman's Tuesday NYTimes column discusses the plight of the endangered prairie chicken Dixie Chicks, and corporate radio's attempts to turn their anti-Bush remarks into promotional material. Here's an excerpt:

In the comments of an earlier post, Prentiss suggested interested Austinites demonstrate at Clear Channel's regional office on South Congress, in reaction to their iron-fisted playlists and conservative politics.

International post-rock megastars Godspeed You! Black Emperor were detained at a gas station in rural Oklahoma last week. Suspecting the band were terrorists, station employees called the cops, who brought in the FBI to question the Canadian sensation. While some may see this as an opportunity to bash my home state, I'm sure there are rural places in Pennsylvania and Texas that would behave in similar way. Shoot, there are places in the Philadelphia suburbs that would call the FBI on the Kranky recording stars - just out of spite. I sadly missed them at the Texas Union, but I noticed Southeast PA is notably absent from their tour schedule.

Local paper Austin American-Statesman has 50 photos of yesterday's demonstrations in a slide show online. While the cops were complicit in our blocking the Drag yesterday afternoon, they later pepper-sprayed the crowd on the Congress Ave. bridge after I left last night.

This is not what democracy looks like. Fortunately Jon was able to participate in today's action on the Drag.

I've literally been protesting on my feet since noon today, so I'm pretty zonked. I posted an account of the UT-Austin protest today in the comments on Prentiss' site, so you can just read it there.

It's heartening to see this Philadelphia Inquirer headline, "Missing Bill of Rights is found." After the efforts of John "Let the Eagles Soar" Ashcroft and John "Total Information Awareness" Poindexter, I thought the "faded, handwritten relic" was lost forever.

On a similar note, I've been following The Progressive magazine's McCarthyism Watch for a while now, and - unfortunately - editor Matthew Rothschild has had a bumper crop of repression to report on in the past few days.

This afternoon I had the pleasure of meeting UT journalism professor Robert Jensen at a discussion on digital copyright he organized for the College of Communications. While we discussed the DCMA and file-sharing, I got the most out of Bob's discussion of his story "Confronting Our Fears So We Can Confront The Empire" which I read in the wee hours of the morning. He says that even his conservative Republican father in North Dakota is so freaked out about the war that his dad is in denial, claiming Bush the younger is simply bluffing. With 20,000 infantry members amassed at the Iraqi border, its too late to think that.

As I was walking to my bus stop after the meeting, a sweater on a construction worker caught my eye. The Mexican-American man was wearing a white sweater with the words "Jenks Trojans" knitted in maroon letters. Its strange enough to see people wearing OU stuff in Austin, so I was pretty surprised to see my high school represented on the UT-Austin campus. I imagine the man picked up at a thrift store.

This is the first year I can remember when everyone wasn't talking about NCAA brackets once they came out. I guess that might have to do with the war on Iraq, but we can all use a little levity in times like these.

On this site, designer Adrian Holovaty offers a comparison critique of various interactive basketball brackets, finally offering his own as an example. On a similar note, NPR aired an interview with a high school math teacher who calculated the probability of a #16 seed beating a #1 seed in the first round. Although this has not happened since the tournament expanded to 64 teams, he says the chances are slightly better than 2% it will happen.

Finally, in what might be the kiss of death for my boys, The New York Times' Joe Drape predicts the Oklahoma Sooners will run the table and win the championship this year.

The Christian Science Monitor has an image of slain activist Rachel Corrie moments before an Israeli solider ran her down with a bulldozer. In the picture, it looks like she's not standing the path of the construction equipment cum death machine. Here's a Reuters photo from moments afterward. Finally, here's a shot of Corrie from last summer's Burning Man, which shows she was quite an attractive young woman. My heart goes out to her friends and family.

Its nice to know that the largest recipient of US foreign aid puts our cash to good use. Today an Israeli soldier ran an American student over with a Bulldozer and then back right over her again killing her. Rachel Corrie, who attended Olympia's Evergreen State University was in was in Rafah to raise her voice against Israel's Apartheid-like treatment of the Palestinians. This comes on the heels of the death of a pregnant woman killed by the Israeli army as they blew up her house. While I don't condone killing civilians in suicide attacks, the Israeli army kills far more civilians in their incursions into the West Bank and Gaza than Hamas kills in its terrorist attacks.

Whoo-hoo! The Sooners have won the Big XII championship tournament for the third straight year. And they join Kentucky, Arizona, and UT-Austin as #1 seeds in the NCAA championship. I doubt any readers actually watch OU basketball, but these games where OU leads by twenty or more points, then ends in a nail-biter need to stop. That last loss to UT was really, really bad.

Top-selling country act Dixie Tits Chicks has come under fire from fans and the Nashville establishment after member Natalie Maines told a London crowd, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." Although I am not a native Texan, I can certainly echo that sentiment. In reaction, one Nashville station has stopped spinning the Austin-based band, and Maines later backpedaled and amended the remark, noting her frustration with US foreign policy.

Like others around the world, I joined an anti-war protest at the Texas Capitol and took plenty of pictures. I haven't had them processed yet, but there are pics from previous anti-war demonstrations in downtown Austin here and here.

Finally, cracker-rappers the Beastie Boys have released a protest song "In a World Gone Mad" online in mp3 format. While I appreciate the artists taking a stand, the song itself is kind of weak with lyrics like, "Don't get me wrong: I love America/But that's no reason to get hysterica." Yeah. A quote from Mike D on the site says, "It didn't make sense to us to wait until the entire record was finished to release this song." While I'm sure they wanted to be timely, I wonder if they're also trying to promote themselves during national discussion.

One of the many highlights of Monday's Lost Film Festival, was the filmstip-style short "Little Brother Gets Busted." It treats police brutality, mandatory minimums, and many more of the issues facing law enforcement today. (r)(tm)@rk has it online here in nearly every format imaginable. If you like satire - or just need a chuckle - check it out.

Other highlights of the evening included Timothy 'Speed' Levitch performing Weezer's "El Scorcho" and a clip from the Guerrilla News Network. I was also able to meet musician Ben Jacobs, aka Max Tundra, who performed at the AMODA showcase. I asked the Londoner if this was his first time in Texas. He said it was his first time in the States. After visiting Austin during SXSW week and catching a film festival at an anarchist collective, he saw quite a slice of this great nation of ours.

Devoted m4dbl0g readers may remember my Zote vignette from a few months back. Both my neighbor and I were sort of mystified by the Mexican laundry soap, which had no directions in either English or Spanish.

Yesterday, a mysterious Mr. Zote added a comment to the entry, explaining the uses of Zote. I sent him an email thanking him for making him the premier English-language Zote resource online. He emailed me back to day, giving even more info:

Hi Chris!

I actually work at the factory where the Zote soap is manufactured. (www.lacorona.com.mx)
To understand the existance of this soap, we need to understand it origin. This soap was used in the past (no washing machines yet) in México, when people used to go to the river and wash their clothes. They simple rub the clothes on a rugged surface (like a rock), and hand wash the clothes. Then consumers started to use a machine called "palangana" that is like the Belly of a turtle (rugged) to wash in home. That´s why no instructions are needed (at least in Mexico) Nowadays, with more washing machines around this technique trends to desapear, but consumers are still finding a way to keep using the Zote soap. We are developing a new Liquid Zote (like a liquid detergent) that you can pour directly to the machine.
Since there are a lot of Mexicans in the USA (Texas), they are demanding this product and that´s the reason you can find it on the shelves in Wal-Mart and other stores.
It is funny, but there are some many alternate uses for this bar, like Mosquito repelent, hair treatment,fishing bite, fabric softener, YOU NAME IT!!
With a 36,000,000 million bars sold last year you can bet we´ll have Zote bar soap for a while.
If you need more information, I´ll be glad to help you!

EDUARDO RUEDA GONZALEZ
INTERNATIONAL SALES
FABRICA DE JABON LA CORONA

I know this seems banal, but I think this a demonstration of the power of the Internet. I posed a question on my site, asking for information that was unavailable in English, and a domain expert found my site and provided the relevant information. He even gave me a little bit of Mexican folklore to further my understanding of Zote's role in the culture. Thank you Mr. Zote!

Editor and Publisher, a trade magazine for, well, Editors and Publishers, has a list of questions they wished reporters asked Bush at his "press conference" last week, instead of the softballs he fielded.

I'm surprised to see a business-oriented magazine be so critical of the administration, if not the press.

But what I found more interesting was the banner on the site that advertises canned art and reporting for outlets needing war-related content. Its a house ad for E&P's parent, which puts them in a position where they criticize soft reporting while making money selling stock reporting to media outlets.

Granted I study media in grad school, but it seems like media - or media-creation devices - are playing a huge role in political action. This story about the NYPD's rough handling of photojournalists during the F15 rally suggests "Some cops viewed anyone with a camera as a target for verbal or physical aggression." I wonder if the plummeting costs of sophisticated digital cameras and increasing ease of desktop publishing has lead more activists to carry cameras to rallys. Certainly the Indymedia project has encouraged activists to publish their own accounts of political action. If both activists and ordained journalists are carrying cameras, maybe cops are scared of all media. Or maybe they're trying to supress the media.

At the Lost Film Fest tonight, we watched footage of demonstrators trampled by police horses, indiscriminately pepper-sprayed, and otherwise beaten at F15 in New York. If our troops are protecting our freedom, they should send them to New York, cause democracy's in danger there.

The troops might be at protests, but nurturing democracy seems to be the last thing on their mind. Here are some downright creepy pictures from F15 in DC where military personnel are shown using cameras. The caption refers to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 which prohibits soldiers from engaging in civilian surveillance and other law enforcement. State-controlled National Guard units are excepted. DC's not a state, so there maybe different rules there. Regardless, this image of a soldier fighting with a camera reflect the importance of the role of media creation today.

While some observers suspect our president's motivation for the war on Iraq lies in wanting to correct mistakes in his father's adminstration, even George Herbert Walker Bush is questioning's W's judgement. In a talk at Tufts University - which is the only school I know of that offers a degree in Peace and Justice Studies - Bush the Elder said unilateral action in Iraq might be bad news. The London Times story says, "Mr Bush Sr even came close to conceding that opponents of his son's case against President Saddam Hussein, who he himself is on record as loathing, have legitimate cause for concern."

Here's some rare good news. A Federal Appeals court has said language in the Children's Online Protection Act is unconstitutional, since community standards cannot be applied to the diverse and far-flung audience of the Internet. The Third Circuit in Philly said the language requiring porn site operators to cordon kids off from porn was an undue burden. Too bad they couldn't get rid of the language establishing young kids as a legitimate market.

Oh great. On Sunday, hackers broke into a UT database and stole as many as 59,000 Social Securitynumbers. According to this Houston Chronicle story, UT did not plan to disclose this exploit, until the Austin American-Statesman came calling.

In other campus news, I participated in the die-in pictured in this AAS photo. Before collapsing on the main mall, I snapped a few pictures (which I haven't processed) and it was a fairly strange site to see 100 or so people sprawled out on the pavement. As I lay motionless, I suddenly feared that some frat-boy would come along and kick the crap out of me, but I quickly remembered there was hella media there, so it would worth being kicked just to make hawks - and frat boys - look bad.

A consistent strain I hear in lectures at UT is how capitalism allows anti-establishment messages to reach "the marketplace of ideas" if swag carrying these messages make money for businesses. The classic example of this phenomenon, of course, is major-label anarcho-rockers Rage Against the Machine. But here's an example of the capitalist system breaking down. A lawyer purchased a T-Shirt bearing the message "Give Peace a Chance" at a New York State mall, donned the T-Shirt, and was subsequently arrested for tresspassing for refusing to remove the shirt.

If your political leanings run toward killing brown babies, capitalism has you covered. The Village Voice reports you can celebrate the resurrection by buying Easter baskets that feature blonde plastic soldiers brandishing a "machine gun, rifle, hand grenade, large knife, pistol, and round of ammunition." One of the baskets sold at Walgreens feature "Super Wrriors," which I suspect is a capitalistic co-optation of the Riot Grrrl movement.

Finally, I wonder if "commode" is the root word for "commodity". Hmmm.

Updae (3/6):Speaking of commodes, New York-based site The Morning News has a photo-essay that features nothing but toilets in Austin. While I don't want to quibble with the photographer's creative vision, two of more notable bathrooms in Austin are excluded. At a recent blogger Meetup, I said, "I've seen subway stations with bathrooms cleaner than Mojo's." And the urinals in the ground floor of UT's Garrison Hall, are raised off the floor with a stone step thingy that gives you no indication of whether you should step up or stand back.

Good gravy, my pal Quentin's Blue Fish Companion party has hit the big time. The next party in August will feature a film festival with fairly substantial prizes. Here's the entry form for what I'm sure will be Norman, Oklahoma's hottest film festival. Its been years since I've been able to go to a Blue Fish Companion, but there's a slightly terrifying picture of me on this page.

Families of the Great White fire victims are filing wrongful death lawsuits against a number of actors in the tragedy. According to this AP wire story, families are suing "club owners Michael and Jeffrey Derderian, members of the band Great White, the band's management company Manic Music Inc., West Warwick Fire Inspector Denis Larocque and American Foam Corp., the company that sold the club highly flammable foam to use for soundproofing." Sounds like they're suing everyone imaginable - except the manufacturers of the fireworks. Why not the people who make the stuff that initially torched the place?

When I first read about this event, I initially thought of Philadelphia's Licensing and Inspections, the unit of the municipal government dedicated to inspecting buildings and enforcing codes. L&I was notoriously corrupt, approving nearly everything for a bribe, yet selectively enforcing code when they wanted to harrass activists. I wondered if this community had a similarly corrupt inspections office, considering Rhode Island is reknown as one of the last strongholds of organized crime in the US. If this the case, I think the blame lies with a community too corrupt or apathetic to clean up their local government.

I just went to a talk by Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman at UT. While I tend to agree with Stallman's ideas about sharing information for the greater good of society, his inflexibility about his ideals lead me at times to label him a "wacko" or a "zealot."

I briefly ran an email newsletter about Linux in large organizations that was an off-shoot of the already-defunct Enterprise Linux magazine. When Microsoft published its .NET specification to the ECMA, FSF announced it would launch the "Dot-GNU" project for an interoperable runtime in Free Software. I called FSF for an interview for a story, and basically got a tongue-lashing from their PR guy, giving me static about how my publication should be called, Enterprise GNU/Linux, rather than Enterprise Linux. I explained that I didn't name the book, and the distinction would be lost on my editor. Brad explained that he wouldn't find me a spokesperson unless I used their nomenclature, which, at the time, seemed very disrespectful to me in my role as a writer/editor. Its surprised me a little that they would rather quibble over nomenclature than publicize their project, but that they the choice they made.

I was looking forward to today's talk, but Stallman, basically rehashed stuff I've heard over and over again: the social good of Free Software, the evils of proprietary software, and the difference between Free Software and open source software. After he spent a good 20-25 ninutes bitching about people who say just "Linux" and not "GNU/Linux," I decided that Stallman was not going to cover any new ground and was wasting my time. Stallman did have an interesting example at one point, but it was so drowned out in the irritating, repetitive stuff that I forgot what it was.

The phrase "under God," is still unconstitutional in "The Pledge of Allegiance," according to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals who let stand the earlier ruling against the religious language. Having grown up praying at football games and other school events, I'm always pleased happy to see right-wingers stymied in their attempts to hijack public schools for their own agendas.

The original ruling came out this summer, while I was still working among the bigots at Boucher Communications. One woman working there was pretty disgusted when the news came out, and I asked, "That's a good thing, right? What's wrong with taking religion out?"
"But that's what our country was founded on!"
I was all, "Yeah, well, our country was founded on slavery, too, but that doesn't mean we keep it around."

Yesterday, I was getting groceries at Sun Harvest, White Folks' Wild Oats' low-rent Texas chain. Behind me in the checkout line was a young woman who was buying only a box of cucumber-avocado facial bisque or whatever, but suddenly saw Mojo Bars were on sale and grabbed a half-dozen. Afraid that she might be in for an unwelcome - and expensive - surprise, I asked, "Oh, have you tried those Mojo bars?"
Her eyes lit up as she said, "Yeah! Have you?"
"Um, yeah, they're, um, different."
"Oh yeah, they're so good."
"If you say so," I thought to myself.

One of the things I picked up at Sun Harvest was a box of SPORTea(r), which Tulsa's late, lamented Gold Coast Coffee Roasters used to serve. Remembering its refreshing citrus-y flavor, I thought it might be a tasty alternative to coffee. (I'm drinking way too much coffee these days.) After my third cup o' java today, I decided I should bust out the SPORTea(r). I was surprised to find the tea wrapped in a brown zip bag, which reminded me of the plastic photographic paper is wrapped in, so I assumed it was to keep out sunlight and keep the tea fresh. The box says its "a special amber colored, resealable SUPER-FRESH(tm) bag," which is "designed to keep the delicate botanicals and Vitamin C stable and fresh." I suppose brown beer bottles are a better analogy to the SUPER-FRESH(tm), but, nonetheless, the folks at SPORTea(r) are serious about freshness.

I was mildly amused when I first spotted the Sigmund Freud action figure at Austin's BookPeople, but I'm not a particularly Freudian (or Lacanian) thinker. Today, however I found a true hero wrought-in-plastic, the Michel Foucault action figure, which had me laughing spastically.

The same organization is responsible for the Theory Trading Cards, which seemed (to me, anyway) a takeoff on the old "Kid A in Alphabet Land" Lacanian trading cards. While the trading cards are amusing, the Foucault action figure is hilarious.

Update(mere minutes later):Dammit, unlike the Freud action figure the Foucault and Giddens action figures "exist only as binary bits and bobs in cyberspace." Bummer.

And here are similarly virtual Lego minifigs that look like Foucault and Judith Butler, among others. It says Butler's minifig "comes complete with Prof. Butler's Gender Workshop(tm), featuring a range of Lego hairpieces and body parts." I think that would better suit a Donna Haraway playset, but, hey, I didn't make the page.

Evhead is back. (Already.)
A suggestion blogs could have saved Columbia.

I saw the headline "U.S. tells firms to pull unapproved cough medicine" and thought to myself, "Oh, they're finally banning DXM." DXM is a mildly psychoactive ingredient used in relatively small doses in most cough syrups.

Oddly enough, the ingredient the FDA is banning, Guaifenesin, is something Robo-trippers avoid. To get enough DXM to trip, you need to drink an entire bottle of Robutussin (hence the name Robo-tripping) but Guaifenesin will make you vomit, so you have to get the syrup without it. Although the FDA is pulling Guaifenesin because it's a suspected carcinogen, they're making it easier for kids to trip on cough syrup.

Contrary to published reports, I woefully forgot to participate in Austin Blog Day yesterday. If its any consolation to Chip and the gang, I was pre-occupied with a paper about, of all things, a ride on the Austin bus. (It was no good, so don't even ask.) I did enjoy reading about everyone else's suggestions, particularly Chip's discussion of the Whip In, one of those completist corner stores that seems to offer every beer they can get their hands on. A while back, some friends and I discussed similar stores in Philly, the Foodery and the Wurst House, but I'm sure the Whip In outdoes both of those, since Pennsylvania's blue laws rival North Texas'.

Austin Blog Day also produced an amusing side project, namely Google-bombing David with "Chicken Molester".

Okay, you gotta love New York Times headlines like this, "Oklahoma, in a League of Its Own, Jars Kansas." And phrases like, "old-fashioned respect as the best team in the most dominant conference in college basketball." And even admissions like, "He's had two A.C.L. surgeries on his knees, and shinsplints, but... Szendrei was the player of the game." And, yes, I'm killing time at school while I wait for my bus.
Update(11:38pm):Oh yeah, I should have posted this earlier since I love this headline too, "Editor: Bush Cited Report That Doesn't Exist." I should also mention that OU has overtaken UT-Austin for third place in the basketball polls this week. Boomer Sooner!

Earlier this week, I was pondering the oft-articulated question, "Are blogs journalism?" and, in order to think about this question I decided to lay out what I know for sure about journalism in order to better understand what it is we think about when we talk about "journalism."

Journalism is what journalists do. Yup, this rumination is gonna take on a rather post-modern character, but it comes with the territory. Our culture designates people as journalists, and what they do in that role is journalism. I don't think this is as obvious as it seems at first.

Journalism is a set of cultural practices. Here we get a little reflexive, but the set of these practices set Journalists apart from say, filmmakers, novelists, or White House press secretaries. We have J-schools to train our youth in this set of practices and discussions of "journalist ethics." Consumers of journalism have certain culturally defined expectaions of the work: in the US we expect journalism to be objective. This notion of "objectivity" is, in part, determined by these practices.

Journalism is practiced within a cultural institution. When a story appears in The New York Times we assume that the information is generally factual, and the reporter made an effort to portray the events as accurately as possible. The fact that The New York Times, CNN, or The Norman Transcript provides this information lends it an aura of credibility for us, the readers. Conversely, reporters for The New York Times or another outlet have a set of institutional norms and practices they must conform to in order to get their material published. These norms are probably more powerful and less transparent than the practices of journalism taught in J-School.

I'm sure there's some work done on the theory of journalism, but I've read none of it. This is hardly intended to be a comprehensive theory of journalism, either, just a way for me to understand how I understand journalism.

So, is blogging journalism? Well, its certainly something some journalists do, and its a cultural practice. However, There are few expectations on behalf of either the producers or consumers that determine the character of the content. Moreover, most blogs lack the institutional sanctioning implicit with journalism.

I suppose that some of the writers suggesting blogging is a new form of journalism could be taking a radical stances, suggesting we reconstruct our notions about what constitutes journalism, but if you're taking a stance that radical, you may as well ask "Is blogging a hamster?"

Anyway, today I read an column on the BBC site that asks, "Is Google Too Powerful?", but also treats the question "Is blogging journalism?"

The author, a technology consultant answers a definitive "no," citing institutional practices that distinguishes blogging from journalism.

Finally, The New York Times has a story about Google's acquisition of Blogger's parent company Pyra.

I'll admit that I was late to learn about the government's advice to cover windows with duct tape and plastic sheeting - I though it was a joke when I read about it on Neal Pollack - but there's something about the duct tape thing that awakens the primal Boy Scout within me. Maybe it's because preparing for war is a little like packing for a camping trip, as this clip from the Today Show suggests. Mr. and Mrs. Tom Ridge stand in a kitchen telling Jamie Gangel how normal citizen should prepare for an attack on the US. The Ridges suggest buying crap like bottled water and granola bars will prepare you for an act of war.

I've already mentioned the man from last Saturday's demonstration that held a sign that read, "Buy More Duct Tape," to simultaneously mock the Bush adminstration's preparedness advice and its emphasis on consumption as an end to economic stimulus. Well, this roundup in the Washington Post indicates that marcher may not have been so far off. According to the story, a GOP contributor makes about 46% of the duct tape sold in the US and has seen "a doubling and tripling" of sales since the advice went out.

This evening I was at the grocery store, and I was a little hungry. The store had Clif's new energy bar, the Mojo Bar on sale for $.99. Being open to new kinds of food, I decided to pick one up for an adventure. "Spicy Salsa Peanut" sounded like the tastiest flavor, but, boy, was I wrong. I couldn't eat any more after two bites; if you can imagine a Baby Ruth coated in cayenne and salt instead of chocolate, you might have a sense of what this sweet, salty, spicy confection tastes like. I'm just glad I didn't get the "Curry Cashew" flavor instead.

it's bursting with foul-ness

And for more news in the two-great-tastes-that-taste-great-together department, here's a quote from a mailing list I'm on, "Man o' Man....I love The Gary Numan/Alien Sex Fiend meets Hawkwind feel they have."

This site is funny, even if it takes a minute. Click the "Bomb" button if you are Donald Rumsfeld.

I've done the numbers and I'm probably better off getting a national cell phone plan than to continue using a landline phone for long distance, so I've been doing some comparison shopping for cell-phones. Now that you can get a T-Mobile Sidekick (or Danger Hiptop, for geek-speakers) for free after rebate, I'm super tempted to get one of these devices, since I would like to also have a mobile device for checking email, since its gonna be a long time before I can get a notebook computer. On the other hand, owning a feature-rich mobile device seems a little too decadent for the m4dd4wg, so I keep delaying a decision. Just now, I found another reason I should delay my purchase: this site suggests color Hiptops are on their way. Anyway, I should probably get a cheap vanilla cell phone and shut up.

My newest source of bloggable links is someone who barely gets online: my mom. In a phone conversation the other day, she said,
"You know that ReadyMade magazine? The woman was on NPR, telling listeners what to do with all their duct tape and plastic sheeting."
"Oh cool!"
"One of her ideas was too funny," my mom said giggling, "she said to make a duct tape wallet. Have you ever heard of such a fool thing?"
"I have a duct tape wallet, mom. In fact, a lot of people come to my site looking for directions."

In case a duct tape wallet is too basic for your skillz, here's an advanced project to use up your duct tape and plastic sheeting: a backyard hovercraft.

And finally, one conspiracy-minded protestor at Saturday's demonstration suggested the war paranoia might be part of Bush' economic stimulus plan. Although I didn't get a picture, he carried around a sign that read, "Buy More Duct Tape," sarcastically suggesting it was the way to boost our flailing economy.

In response to this weekend's protests, President Bush said today, "Evidently some in the world don't view Saddam Hussein as a risk to peace." That's for sure, I think Bush is the risk to world peace.

That's the twist? I had high hopes for the surprise at the end of Joe Millionaire, in fact, my guess was that Sarah was a man - or used to be one. But giving Evan a million bucks at the end of the show sure ain't much of a twist. I tend not to shout at the TV, but I was all, "Buy a house, dumbass!"

That said, the finale put a smile on my face. Evan seems like a genuinely good guy, and I'm glad he went for the sweet girl that kisses horses than that superficial creep Sarah, who reminds me a lot of someone I used to date. OK, I should get back to reading school stuff.

Update(2/18):We spent a substantial amount of time in one of my classes today talking about "Joe Millionaire." I talked for a little while how the show explicitly refers to fairy tales as a way for readers to contextualize the information presented in the show, as well as tacitly referring to shows like, "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire" and "The Bachelor" for humor. I thought that the show set up a discourse on gender and heterosexuality, since Evan is shown in homoerotic poses modeling briefs and compares underwear modeling to an addiction. Moreover, Zora was more comfortable kissing a horse on the mouth than Evan. I wondered if the million dollar reward at the end of the show was rewarding the couple for "proper" heterosexual behavior.

Regardless, this NYTimes story suggests a million dollars was a bargain, for whatever Fox was paying them for. The show is Fox' most watched show of all time, and second only to this year's Super Bowl in overall ratings. Apparently 40 million people tuned in to see the hunky "heavy equipment operator" pick his match.

A new version of Movable Type is out, and the Trotts have also announced a pay version or Movable Type Pro due out this summer. I have more comments at the KMBlog for my Knowledege Management class.

Slashdot says Yamaha has decided to exit the CD-burner business, since its become, in industry lingo, "commotized." In the past, I've posted about how I've coveted a burner with their exclusive "Disc T@2" technology that uses the laser to burn images into the CD. Perhaps now they'll license the technology to everybody and their dog, bringing prices down.

Check out this local news clip about an after-market car mod and write a few sentences about how race and class are portrayed by this media outlet. (Via Metafilter) Woo-woo!

This is linked today on Slashdot, but since this blog is hosted by the University of Texas' department of Radio-TV-Film, its worth posting here. This NYTimes story describes how a Clear Channel subsidiary uses a database of sound bites from Carson Daly to create localized countdown shows for each of the radio market they serve. Engineers assemble a pastiche of soundbites to make it sound as if Daly is reading the countdown for the local audience, when in fact the petri-dish grown personality is as live as the feminine voice on the telephone network you need to start your call with a "one" or a "zero."

I'm particularly amused by this Anonymous Coward post, where the poster defines the word "Simulacrum," which I suppose is a fairly obscure concept for people who don't eat, sleep, and breath post-structuralism, then goes on to say:

Simulacra and Simulations, by Jean Baudrillard, is the book in which Neo hid his diskette. I started reading it and was amazed by the relevance of the concept of the 'simulacrum' to The Matrix.

Yeah, like the movie references the book for no reason in particular.

When I first read about the Columbia disaster, my first reaction was, "They're still flying those things?" I soon remembered the international space station and whatnot, but the Shuttle seems to be Jurassic tech indeed. New Republic editor Gregg Easterbrook apparently agrees it needs to go, arguing in Time that the Shuttle is flashy corporate welfare, rather than commercially or scientifically necessary. Interestingly, the piece which is currently ranked #1 on Blogdex. A cursory glance suggests most of the people linking to the piece believe Easterbrook's contentions have some merit.
What's most interesting to me is Easterbrook first articulated opposition to the Shuttle program wayyy back in 1980, suggesting then it was an impractical handout to defense contractors.

An editorial in the Austin American-Statesman echoes this sentiment. Editorial page editor Arnold García Jr. notes a 1963 verbal gaffe by President John F. Kennedy. Speaking in Houston on the space program, JFK proclaimed, "Next month, when the U.S. fires the world's biggest booster, lifting the heaviest payroll into . . . that is, payload . . ."

As befitting a space rock outlet, DrugMusic.com's dose today is inspired by Columbia's fall from space. Its an interesting mix of solemn tunes like the Carter Family's "May the Circle Be Unbroken" performed by the Spacemen 3, as well as irreverent cuts like Brian Eno's "Baby's on Fire" and Devo's "Space Junk." Since the link will rot, I've pasted the whole playlist below.

David Bowie - ChangesOne - Space Oddity [00:00]
MC5 - Kick Out the Jams - Starship [04:44]
The Asteroid #4 - Introducing... - The Admiral's Address [12:34]
Spacemen 3 - Playing with Fire - May the Circle Be Unbroken [20:55]
Amon Düül II - Wolf City - Surrounded by the Stars [24:29]
Eno - Here Come the Warm Jets - Baby's on Fire [32:00]
Devo - Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! - Space Junk [37:15]
Parliament - Live: P. Funk Earth Tour - Mothership Connection (Star Child) [39:20]
Milk - Suceeding/Receding - Space Shuttle [45:04]
Opal - Happy Nightmare Baby - Rocket Machine [47:30]
Windy & Carl - Portal - Approach/Descend [51:41]
Ride - Nowhere- Dreams Burn Down [56:14]

Kudos to The Lincoln Journal-Star, which announced it would quit using the racist nickname for Washington DC's NFL franchise in its pages. It said it would also stop using racist logos like the one used for Cleveland's baseball team. It surprises me how much racism is still tolerated in business. At least I can support what these people are selling.

UT-Austin's J-School is mulling over a proposal to drop the undergraduate photojournalism program in order to expand a graduate program. They argue that the profession now demands journos have experience working with video and other formats in additon to tradtional still photography. This writer, who teaches in the department, suggests that teaching photojournalism to undergrads was a little unnecessary all along. The basic skills should be learned in the field, he says.
An expansive photojournalism program is pretty attractive to me, since I love photography, but I'm interested in producing a variety of different media.

A friend of mine runs a label that releases music on demand on CD-Rs. This allows him to produce very low volumes of his music, what you might call experimental ambient noise, with a low initial investment. A while back, I saw CafePress had the same idea and its now doing custom publishing for both books and CD-Rs. I doubt this threatens Lurvig Records, which caters to a particular musical taste: The Gerbil Store and these anti-Slashdot thong panties demonstrate Cafe Press is pretty indiscriminate in its taste.

I'm all excited after seeing a poster for Bookhouse Rock, the release party for blogger/humorist Neal Pollack's new book, Beneath the Axis of Evil which critiques the current warmongering in Washington. But what's really important is the "Texas-sized party featuring readings, punk rock music, and booze." I'll bet all them frou-frou elitists in Philadelphia don't release books like this.

Matt Haughey says he found a page in his referrer logs that instructs students to look at sites like Fark and Metafilter to get a sense of American culture. The host, ESC-Pau claims to be a "elite, highly selective institution of higher education." Apparently, France's future leaders will know Americans are preoccupied with Photoshopping cheesecake pix of Britney Spears and flash movies.

Here's an NYTimes story in the local paper that says convicted malicious hacker Kevin Mitnick is free to begin using computers again, starting today. Slashdot is on the ball, with an "ask Kevin" thread posted yesterday. The articles goes on to dicuss how some courts are questioning the fairness of barrig convicts from machines. I've tended to think that its "cruel and unusual" to keep convicts from making a living, which is a result of barring them from computers.

I'm not a huge Ween fan, but considering the the tagline of this blog, this is essential reading. To promote its "Insider" pizza, which features cheese stuffed in places you never dreamed about, Pizza Hut hired musical pranksters Ween to write jingles about the pie. The nice folks at Pizza Hut did not like the results, and Ween's work was in vain. Until now. Dean and Gene have posted a few of the proposed jingles online for your listening pleasure. You should listen to #1 first, but #2 is absolutely hilarious.

BoingBoing has a post today about software that allows you to use a Linux box' Wi-Fi antenna like a Theremin, creating tones based on physical proximity. I'm not a notebook user, so I don't have a Wi-Fi card to try this out.
I wonder how well this works as a musical instrument. A few years back a friend of mine suffered a severe head injury that left him so messed up he was half-blind and having a hard time walking, let alone playing guitar. Since he was desperate to play music, I thought he could download one of the packages that let you imitate a theremin with a mouse, but I suppose that wouldn't be sophisticated enough for him. Its my understanding that a Theremin has a two-handed input; the vertical antenna controls pitch while the horizontal controls volume. With the mouse, these inputs were simulated by the x and y axes, but I wonder if the Wi-Fi theremin uses a similar design. BTW, He's since recovered, seeing and walking as he did before.
Anyway, those who haven't seen Jon Spencer's Theremin antic's should check out the video What's up Matador.

I just pointed a fellow student to this paper, "Blogging Thoughts: personal publication as an online research tool," so I thought it might be a good time to post it here since other reader might be interested. Its been some time since I last read it, so I can't comment too much on it right now. What I got from it was blogs reflect the individual interests of the authors through a number of rhetorical devices, particularly explicit intertextual references.

I guess I find the looming war with Iraq entirely too stupid and depressing to blog about it much, but here's some stuff I'll point out. Tom Tomorrow's comic this week is spot on and hilarious to boot. And my techie pal Loophole has been blogging his thoughts on the war for a coupla days now.

Through the Austin Chronicle I just learned Tulsa-based Great Plains Airlines now flies to Austin. When I first learned of Great Plains, the concept seemed kind of strange, a airline that specializes in direct flights to mid-sized cities on the Western plains. Like is there that much demand for non-stop flights from Tulsa to Colorado Springs? (Check out their route map.) My dad says no airline now serves Tulsa directly; I remember taking direct flights to Austin and Houston many times as a youth, but apparently now you have to fly through a major hub for even those cities.
To fly to Tulsa on Great Plains with a 21 day reservation costs $69 each way or $138 round trip. I made a hypothetical trip on Southwest, leaving Saturday, February 8 and returning Wednesday, February 12, which cost $79 for non-redeye flights, hubbing through Dallas. I would be paying a $59 premium for flying non-stop. I suppose this is a good deal for business people who value their time more than relatively small amounts of money, but when I'm choosing between spending about $80 in gas for a round trip home, flying Great Plains doesn't make a lot of sense.

In similar news, Texas is so damn big it has its own next-day delivery service. This Austin American-Statesman story profiles Lone Star Overnight which serves only Texas and Oklahoma.

ESPN is running a promo spot that features clips from the Nelly video "Air Force Ones," and ends with the text, "Without Sports, there'd be nothing to wear." I'm sure the nice folks at ESPN see this as a simple extension of our consumer culture, using sports as a way to induce people to buy crap, but, for me, the commercial confirms my suspicion that both the song "Air Force Ones," and its video represent a shifting construction of masculinity in our culture.
In his song "Air Force Ones," Nelly describes the lengths he and his posse go to in order to find the right sneakers for social occasions. While earlier shoe-shopping men might be concerned by how sneakers affect their athletic performance, the performative aspects of their shoes is purely aesthetic. Rather than boast about his physical prowess, in the song Kyjuan brags about his shopping ability when he says, "you couldn't get this color if you had a personal genie."
Through much of late capitalism, the "work" of consumption is generally considered a woman's role, but here consumptive ability is posited as an extension of the rappers' masculinity. As if listeners may be confused about the rappers gender, the chorus "Big Boy" punctuates each line. Moreover, in one moment, a feminine voice, presumably in awe of Kyjuan's shoes, asks, "Where you getting them colors, are you dyeing them?", suggesting the woman lacks the ability to shop as well as Kyjuan.
In addition to the glorification of shopping in "Air Force Ones," one line seems to subvert the macho masculinity of most rap music. In a boastful tone, Murphy Lee says, "I'm tryin to keep it up like a one minute man." As this author is a white graduate student, he is unaware of the reference in this line, but it seems to suggest the brevity of intercourse, a far cry from the classic Ice Cube verse, "my jimmy goes deep, so deep," nonetheless. Finally the video depicts Kyjuan wearing an Oklahoma State University football jersey, inexplicably representing an inferior school to the state's flagship university.
Perhaps this blogger simply had a hard time decoding the cultural symbolism embedded in "Air Force Ones," but it certainly raises questions about the construction of masculinity in twenty-first century consumer culture.

Boing Boing is in mourning today, and for good reason; the Supreme Court ruled today that it would allow Congress to keep rolling back the copyright expirations, so new texts may never enter the public domain. Traditionally, authors had a limited time when they could profit from their work. Thanks to lobbying by the entertainment industry, Congress keeps extending this period, so work that dates to the beginning of the film sound era is still protected.
If you are reading this at a later date, here's a screenshot of BoingBoing's mourning black.

Inspired by Gawker, these folks were discussing creating similar local-interest blogs for Austin and Berkeley, and how they might reflect the different cultures of the cities. I haven't lived in Austin long enough to have my finger on the pulse of the local culture, but I started to imagine what a Tulsa version of Gawker might be like. Here are some posts I thought you might see:

"Tulsa is way hipper than Norman."
"My mom thinks Brian Haas is hot."
"The Jenks-Union rivalry is out of control!"
"Brookside sucks now that the yuppies took over"
"Driving to Southtown sucks"
"Is Tulsa Gypsy as cool as Gold Coast Coffee?"
"I can't believe I lived in Norman for five years"
"Southtown can't be all bad if India Palace is there"
"I saw everyone I know during lunchtime at Wild Oats"
"QT is the greatest convenience store ever"
"OKC is the world's biggest parking lot!"

Its been some years since I've lived in Tulsa so those may be a few years out of date. I'm sure current Tulsans can come up with better posts.

Update (1/16): In his post, Peter mentions the "Thai Temple Brunch," a Sunday fundraiser at a Berkeley Buddhist temple, and I thought I would add that its some of the best Thai food I've ever had and a shot of Robson at the brunch.

Wow, Steve Case has resigned from the chairman post at AOL-Time Warner. I wonder if he got a 1000 free hours on the way out. With the ascension of Richard Parsons, there seemed to be a lot of speculation suggesting AOL-TW would eventually revert back to plain ol' vanilla Time Warner, basically a media megacorp with an ISP. With all the top management coming from the Time Warner side, I suspect that the company is headed in that direction. Update(1/16):Here's some analysis from The New York Times for whoever's interested. It suggests the company may wind up selling AOL in the long run.

This morning's Austin American-Statesman has an LA Times feature about US companies that outsource to sweatshops abroad. The story describes how Levi-Strauss (as in the company that makes jeans) recently closed a plant in Georgia, leaving its only US plant in San Antonio. I remember reading somewhere that Levi's had relatively good labor practices, but now I know better.
Its also interesting the Supreme Court is hearing arguments about whether activists can sue Nike for false advertising when the company suggests its clothes are sweat-free. I love to see this ruling put a damper on all these companies touting their ethics, but, considering how conservative the court is, they may just want to clarify "commerical speech," to allow the megacorps to keep on lying.
And, oh yeah, I picked up a copy of Clamor, which I had blogged earlier. Its not a bad read, although the writing is not terribly polished; I'll probably mail it to Loophole when I get done.

Here is a fan-diddilly-stastic parody of Jason Kottke's critique of the Safari browser. The page asks, "Why are Kottke and Megnut two different weblogs?," when they lack, "interface niceties, customizability, stability, and dog pictures." You can find more earnest criticism of Kottke and Megnut here.

Because it was Slashdotted the other day, I've only just now been able to submit the m4dbl0g to , which enables geographic location of blogs. Looking at these maps, it appears that blogging in Texas' blogging is concentrated in Houston, Austin, and D-FW. Although San Antonio is the ninth-largest city in the US, it is also the second poorest, so the economics of blogging might keep SA from being a blog center. Likewise, blog activity in Oklahoma appears to be centered around Tulsa; although OKC is the largest city in the state, it just flat-out sucks.Update:Just after I posted this, I realized that GeoURL is for all kinds of Web sites, not just blogs, but blogs do seem to dominate the site. And, crap, I didn't notice the map feature until just now. That's pretty much dead on. You can see the UT-Austin campus (look for the stadium) on the left.

I love New York, I really do. But The Gawker seems to represent everything I hated about the East Coast: smug, elitist, mean-spirited. On Monday, it had a post that listed events at an anarchist bookstore in the city, with comments from the editor noting, "Wine tastings are great. Knitting is great. And foam wire hats are exceptionally thrilling. But I must be missing something. I don't get the Anarchist angle." Um, its anarchist because their engaging culture in ways outside consumer capitalism. Like, duh, if you're knitting a scarf yourself you're being more self-sufficient than if you bought one. But she probably knows that and it playing dumb for rhetorical effect. I suppose the editor might be the social-irresponsibility Burberry type, so knitting one herself might be far, far outside her world-view.
Does anyone have a clue why there would be no "permanent link to this entry on Gawker? I saw this joint on Monday, but I waited until it neared the bottom, when I could easily count the number of entries, working from the archived entries' links. (I think that made sense.)

This week's "Straight Dope" column tackles the issue of "133t" speak, or the practice of substituting numbers and symbols in the place of letters. Cecil Adams describes 133t speak in his usual smart-ass style, but, for whatever reason, the humor isn't as funny re-reading it the next day. For the record, at 27, m4dd4wg knows he's way to old to hold any pretentions of being a 133t script kiddie, but only affects the practice as an occasional stylistic flourish.

You may have seen this on the news, but I thought it was worth blogging. Cops in East Tennessee, suspected a vacationing family of carjacking, and when they pulled the Smoaks over, they handcuffed the family and shot their dog in front of them. The Smoaks were understandably distraught. This site has police video showing the Smoaks handcuffed and kneeling and, later, screaming at the cops. The actual shooting was tastefully edited out. The local police force says the officer did not use excessive force in shooting the friendly dog.

If that's not evil enough, here's a story about Austin businesses that weasel out of paying immigrant employees, hoping the workers will be afraid to seek government action. Local non-profits are working to quell their fears and encourage actions against these unscrupulous companies.

Virginia Representative Rick Boucher has introduced a bill that would add exemptions to the DMCA allowing consumers to circumvent piracy controls to access content for personal use, according to this Infoworld story. It would also require CDs with piracy controls to be labeled. This seems like a good idea, since I agree that piracy is as nasty as the Hollywood-industrial complex telling you how to enjoy culture, but I wonder if this will help intellectual property lawyers find work more than it helps audiences. I haven't been browsing as much in the past few days, but I haven't seen much on this legislation either.

Earlier today, I went to the Austin Museum of Art's downtown galleries to check out this show, "At the Edge of Paradise," which is a collaboration between two local artists, Jill Bedgood and Beverly Penn. Bedgood's panels reminded me a little of Eva Hesse, if only for her use of yellow and funky materials. There was one panel with yellow oilcloth and handmade nails (seen in the image on that site) that really evoked Hesse for me. They gave me two $1-off coupons that are good until Feb 2, so if someone in Austin wants them, let me know.
Last week, my mom and I went to Gilcrease to check out the traveling Warhol show. Yeah, I also thought it was funny that there was a show of Warhol at a museum of "art of the American West," but many of the pieces represented Native American figures like Sitting Bull and Geronimo and Cowboy entertainers like John Wayne and Annie Oakley. Purely by coincidence, they also had a show of work by students at my alma mater, Jenks High School, inspired by Warhol. I was quite impressed with some of the work, particularly a photomontage, and my mom, who teaches 8th grade at Jenks, said she had had several students in class, which lent a particular gravity to their work.

Last night, as I was leaving the RTF Grad lounge, I asked two students, "Are y'all watching 'The Bachelorette' tonight?"
Another student laughed, mistakenly thinking I was joking, but a woman in the lounge replied, "Hell, yeah!"
"Yeah, I actually blocked out time to watch it."
"Yeah, I can't wait."
Getting slightly more serious, I explained, "I love all that trash TV because stuff like gender politics is all on the the surface."
"Oh yeah, they totally spoon-feed it to you," she said making a soup-eating motion with her hand.
I don't know if its because I have a particularly perverse sense of humor or any normal, red-blooded RTF grad student would laugh, but I thought it was hilarious at the end when Trista began crying because was worried about hurting the guys feelings.
Anyway, her tears stoked my imagination, and I began to think of how I would look on "The Bachelorette." I could see a conversation along these lines:
"m4dd4wg, what kinds of goals do you have in life?"
"Oh, I just want to subvert the dominant paradigm."
"Come again?"
"Oh, I just wanna rock!"

I was at the grocery store this morning and a magazine at the checkout counter screamed, "Luddism to Linux: Tackling Technologies Tough Questions," which, of course, piqued my interest. Being the cheap grad student that I am, I decided to see if Clamor puts its content online, but, like Punk Planet and other fine publications, they keep the good stuff for paying readers. I'll probably go by BookPeople and grab a copy, but have any of you out there read Clamor? I think I remember the name from when I was more attuned to 'zines. It appears to be a punk/progressive politics rag with the current issue dedicated to technology.

Jon Johansen, the teenage coder which created DeCSS, has been acquitted of hacking charges in Norwegian court. Johansen created DeCSS in order to watch DVDs on his Linux machine, but it raised Hollywood's ire, since it converts the scrambled content on a DVD to vanilla MPEG-2 and could potentially be used to pirate corporate culture. I was watching AOL-Time Warner-owned CNN Headline News tonight, and they framed the story almost exclusively in terms of piracy, calling it a DVD piracy trial, then noted at the end that Johansen was acquitted because prosecutors couldn't prove that DeCSS was intended to pirate movies. I think this is a good step for intellectual freedom, but its too bad we gringos have the DMCA, which outlaws any scrambling circumvention device, including DeCSS.

Here's a cool thing I found (as always) on boingboing . Photographer Thomas Hudson Reeve folds 11x14 sheets of photopaper into small pinhole cameras, which become the prints themselves after processing. The result is a near-panoramic image with no optical distortion. According to his about page the angle of view is about 170 degrees. This is kind of fun in the same way that looking at Holga shots is fun; the light leaks introduce an element of chance, giving the images an other-worldly feel.

Hey everybody, this is my 100th entry! weee! I didn't think I would post this much this fast.

Through Weblogsky I've learned of a fairly frightening event in the online world. Because it found some of the content hosted on artist ISP Thing.net, Verio cut off its upstream connection to the Internet, silencing the target, activist site RTMark, as well as MoMA's P.S.1 contemporary art center and other art venues. The infraction? The Yes Men, who also did Gatt.org, created a parody site at dow.org that highlighted Dow Chemical's reluctance to make amends for the deadly chemical spill in Bhopal, India.
DMCA or no DMCA, this event demonstrates some of the troubling aspects of the political economy online. While utopians in the early nineties suggested that anyone with a Web site could get their message online. Server space and bandwidth costs are hurdles even for those on the right side of the digital divide, but now it seems that the buck stops with your backbone provider. If they or someone who can intimidate your backbone provider doesn't like what you have to say, you get taken down. The powers that be already speak loudest online; now it appears they get to pick who gets to speak at all.

As UT students may know, UT-Austin negotiated a site license with Microsoft Corp., allowing students and faculty to get copies of Windows XP and Office XP for the low, low price of $5. Of course, this is another sneaky way to get innocent college kids hooked on Windows Media and proprietary Office formats, rather than outright altruism. An entry at LawMeme suggests Redmond's non-disclosure agreements with the schools prevents the departments from sharing the terms of the licenses, which may be a breach of Freedom of Information Act guidelines since UT-Austin and others are publicly-funded institutions. I guess it must be the fees that UT pays to Redmond, rather than the users's cost, since the front page for the UT Computer Store says they charge five bones.

The m4dbl0g is sad to note Joe Strummer, singer and guitarist for The Clash, died on Sunday of a heart attack. All y'all film weenies might know him better for his acting gigs in Mystery Train or whatever. Even though they were on a major label and are fairly accessible, I like The Clash quite a bit. My favorite song is probably "Guns of Brixton."

About two weeks ago, Dan Gilmor blogged about the Bush Regime's blocking of the DirectTV-EchoStar merger, and I more-or-less tuned it out. But its another one of those items that resonated with me enough that I roll it over in my head some time later. Gilmor suggests that the administration deliberately blocked it, so his pals at News Corp., owners of the reactionary Fox News Channel could buy it at a bargain-basement price.

Here's a little follow-up to yesterday's post on the arrest of hundreds of Muslims in LA on immigration charges. Through BoingBoing, I found a post by a British blogger in the US who has taken photographs and commented on the torrent of paperwork needed to maintain his visa. He says that his paperwork has been sent back twice by the INS for trivial errors. The instructions are so poor, he says, everyone makes errors, and, presumably, everyone could go to jail for simple mistakes. But Arabs and Persians are the first to be detained. Along with the African-Americans on death row, they're treated to a kind of affirmative action Trent Lott has always believed in.
These are certainly strange times. Its easy to forget the Afghan detainees sitting in cages in Guantanamo Bay with no idea if they'll be tried at all or the US citizens held without being charged with a crime. They might have scotched Operation TIPS, but Total Information Awareness is still going, even if they got rid of the Illuminati logo. And the Homeland Security Bill eliminated whistle-blower protections for employees of the department, so employees speak up when the government does something illegal or immoral, they can legally be fired and harrassed. This is a great little exemption for a department that includes the INS, the Coast Guard, and the Customs Service. I feel very overwhelmed and helpless by all of these changes, which I believe are limiting our freedoms as individuals and giving immense power to people who do not represent the best interests of Americans.

Here's another story that should be front-page news - the world's largest retailer was convicted yesterday of forcing its workers to work overtime off the clock. To keep costs down, Wal-Mart "encourages" its managers to avoid paying overtime, even if it means intimidating workers to perform tasks off the clock, as documented in this New York Times story from the summer.
If you think its a coincidence that Wal-Mart is a darling of Wall Street and it uses abusive labor practices, think again. Analysts and shareholders love its formula of sweatshopped goods and mistreated workers since it keeps costs down and profits high. Workers in Las Vegas are attempting to unionize distribution centers there. In an interesting use of media, local organizers rent time on a local AM station where workers can call in and air their grievances about Wal-Mart management. In my opinion, one of the most interesting shows was an interview with turncoat union-buster Marty Leavitt, who came on the show to explain union-busting tactics to the workers, so they could identify them when management turned up the heat.

In related news, The Austin Chronicle reports Austin-based Whole Foods fired two workers in Madison that were involved in organizing there. A friend of mine worked in the kitchen of a Whole Foods in Berkeley and assured me that not only was Whole Foods not one of "the best companies to work for," but one of the worst jobs he's held.

Neal Pollack writes, "This is a goddamn outrage." All I can do is echo that sentiment. Why is this not the top news in our major papers today? What institution do I call to air my complaint? Last night at the blogger meetup, someone offhandedly said "if we found ourselves living under fascism." I thought to myself, "We don't already?" This only confirms my suspicions that the current regime is an enemy of democracy and a pluralistic society.

My alumni email newsletter asks a seemingly easy question, "Guess what Big 12 school has the most computer power - by far?" UT-Austin, the biggest darn school in America, would be the obvious answer, except I didn't graduate from there. (here? whatever.) Apparently, the Sooners are the Big 12 champs in supercomputing as well. OU teamed with IBM and Aspen systems to build a big-ass Linux supercomputing cluster. At first I assumed this was related to OU's vaunted meteorology school, but my first guess was wrong again; the story suggests it will be used in applications related to medicine.

Here are some video clips from a gag video played at an Enron exec's retirement party in 1997. One clip features George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush, acknowledging the importance of Enron in Dubya's political life, while another features Jeff Skilling joking about hypothetical future value accounting, which "can add a kazillion dollars to the bottom line."

A recent email from Kasra encouraged the members of the Gold Coast diaspora to attend this UAT show on December 28 at Tulsa's The Loft coffeehouse. (As I understand it, UAT is a coalition of Tulsa hip-hop and electronica artists.) According to Google, "The Loft is a 'Christian atmosphere' coffee house and is a ministry to provide a non-alcoholic, non-smoking environment to enjoy live music." (sic) Yet, looking at their event calendar, it appears a lot of hardcore punk bands appear at the venue. I wondered, if this is like the Blue-Green Coalition that united labor and environmental groups to protest the WTO, only, in this case, uniting the religious right and straightedge punks? "Come at 7:30 for food, fellowship, and slam-dancing!" But a look at their booking information suggests they'll let anyone play provided the acts are not "profane and vulgar."
Anyway, The Loft is located at 18th & Boston in a micro-district I've been fond of. Sitting between downtown and the tony Maple Ridge neighborhood, its been home to neat stuff like the SRO nightclup, Deli 2000, and Ross Edwards' salon. In college I dated a gal - an OKC native, no less - who used to drive from Norman to Tulsa to get her hair cut there. One time I went with her for grins. While she was getting her hair done, I discovered the gallery next door had a show of Warhol silkscreens.

Hyper-observant readers may have noticed I've put a little Creative Commons notice in the leftbar of this site, which indicates the material here can be reproduced with attribution. As if anyone would want to reproduce this crap. Anyway, the Creative Commons project launched this week, which attempts to provide something like a Lesser GPL for textual works. This Flash presentation, narrated by Larry Lessig in his Shatneresque style, can explain it better.
The animation suggests that The White Stripes' gimmick is their lack of a bass, which I might argue with since many blues bands from the thirties up through Jon Spencer don't have bass players. Considering the Stripes cover the likes of Son House, I wonder if they're simply working out of that tradition. Yeah, I'm picking nits, but isn't that what blogs are for?

Reading about a local activist that was killed while riding his bike, I've found two interesting bicycling resources. First, BicycleSafe.com offers tips on how not to get hit by gas-guzzlers, and a second site about how the Austin cops pursue cyclists' infractions more than motorists. This is essential reading for cyclists, especially in Austin.
I don't know if y'all saw the news, but Stereolab member Mary Hansen died cycling on Monday. This is sad news for the band and the music world.
Finally, on a lighter note, I was walking to school the other day, and some dude was being all East Coast, trying to weasel out of yielding to pedestrians. I mouthed some choice words at him as I crossed in front of him, and, as he sped away, I noticed a "Give Bikes the Right" bumper sticker on his car. I guess bikes have the right-of-way, but people on foot don't.

Neal Pollack always seems to be dead on - first he makes the right choice of emigrating from Philadelphia to the beautiful ATX, and now he has the scoop on incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who has been rightly criticized for endorsing Strom Thurmond's 1948 pro-segregation presidential platform. Pollack interviewed the Mississippi Senator and got to the core of the politico's beliefs. Pollack is perhaps the greatest journalist since Mark Leyner.
The New York Post has also weighed in on the Lott controversy in an editorial that humorously puts "blogs" in scarequotes. I do disagree that Glenn Reynolds is "the acknowledged king of the bloggers": I would give that title to Cory Doctorow or Jason Kottke.

Like The Homeless Guy, the Treesit Blog provides an interesting view into the life of an activist living on the margins of society. Its author, Remedy, lives atop an ancient redwood to stop logging companies from mowing down the forest. In a sloppy paper that I'm too ashamed of to post, I argued that the blogs like the Homeless Guy, - and this one had I known about it - can raise attention to an issue and increase sympathy since blogs tend to empahsize the subjectivity of their authors, not to mention the fact that they give poor, but literate, activists a low-cost means to get their message out.

I learned of this site through Slashdot, which I'd grown tired of in the past year or so, but I'm again finding it an interesting source of information. I don't know if its because I don't get the torrent of IT press releases I got when I wrote for a computer magazine, or if the stories they post are becoming more relevant to me.

The New York Times is running a set of features today about wireless networking in its "Circuits" section. One story describes new networking standards on the horizon, including Linksys' plans to sell products based on the 802.11g - also known by the marketing-friendly "54G" - which promises 54Mbps throughput. I hardly want to be a knee-jerk Luddite, but why in the Sam Hill would anyone need that much bandwidth for a wireless network? A T1 runs at 1.544 Mbps, so its not like you're gonna get online at that speed. The only practical consumer application I can imagine is pairing a base station with a Pringles can to share your decrambled DVD collection with the rest of the neighborhood. Actually, now that I think about it, that would be kind of nice: grassroots video-on-demand.

Free speech on the Internet may have been dealt a nasty blow yesterday with the decision that Dow Jones, the owners of Barron's an be sued in Australia under the local libel laws. Members of the British commonwealth generally have stricter libel laws than the US, so this leads to a precedent where governments abroad can dictate the content of sites in other countries. I've pasted The Wall Street Journal's response below. As a story in The Austin American-Statesman points out, this may not prevent some organizations from violating content laws in other countries, since, if they have no assets in that country, they have nothing to lose from an unfavorable ruling.

Down (Under) With the Internet

'Some Australian guy went and ruined the Internet. Dang."

So writes Web writer Glenn Reynolds. And he might not be far wrong. Yesterday's ruling by the High Court of Australia that libel suits can be brought wherever damage occurs has chilling implications for free speech, whether the alleged offender be a large news corporation or a one-man operation like Mr. Reynolds's Instapundit.com. In theory, one incautious comment on your family Web site could be enough to land you in a foreign court if it gets read in the wrong place.

The case at hand concerns an article in an October 2000 issue of Barron's that allegedly defamed Australian mining magnate Joseph Gutnick. Dow Jones, publisher of Barron's and this newspaper, contended that the case should be considered in the U.S., the place of publication and the location of the relevant Internet server. But the Aussie court decided we can be sued under the looser libel laws of Mr. Gutnick's home state of Victoria since the article was downloaded there. "What the appellant [Dow Jones] seeks to do, is to impose upon Australian residents for the purposes of this and many other cases, an American legal hegemony in relation to Internet publications," wrote one of the justices in a concurring opinion.

In our view, the judge has it precisely backward. It is His Honor who is exercising "legal hegemony" by saying we should have looked at Australian law.

U.S. libel law, consistent with the speech protections afforded by the First Amendment, makes it fairly difficult to win a libel suit. The burden of proof is on the plaintiff to show the allegedly defamatory statement is false; the statement must be the result of negligence in the case of a private figure, willful falsehood in the case of a public one. That's one reason so many Web sites advocating change in repressive regimes are located in the U.S.

In Britain and the Commonwealth countries, the reverse holds. It is up to the defendant to prove a statement is true, without reference to fault or intent. This Draconian standard has been used in recent years to shutter political publications such as Britain's LM magazine and saddle their editors with crushing personal debts. It has also resulted in a number of absurdities, such as the settlement Michael Jackson won from London's Mirror tabloid after it noted that the singer had been "hideously disfigured" by plastic surgery. How can you "prove" an aesthetic judgment?

We're not suggesting there's any reason to fear a sweeping Internet crackdown in Britain and Australia, which have otherwise strong democratic traditions. But the precedent asserted by the Australian High Court is certainly an invitation to forum shopping on a global scale and against defendants who lack the legal resources of a Dow Jones. It is also an invitation to further misbehavior by nasty regimes. Just this year Zimbabwe became the first country to criminally prosecute and punish a foreign journalist for an article merely downloaded in that country.

Nor are we much reassured by the court's assertion that there is jurisdiction only where a plaintiff has a reputation to defend. For famous people and large corporations, that could be just about anywhere.

We understand that this is an increasingly small world and that there's a certain amount of arbitrariness involved in limiting jurisdiction to place of publication, whether in print or on a Web server. But at least it's a clear rule of law. Requiring anyone who would publish on the Web to check the statutes of 190 different countries is not.

The Australian High Court has failed to sensibly advance the common law to account for the changes created by the Internet. Its precedent -- if affirmed elsewhere -- will prove a damper on free speech.

Updated December 11, 2002 12:06 a.m. EST

Just the other day, I was asking about the ins and outs of releasing LPs. While it didn't really answer my question, I enjoyed this article on Slashdot profiling a Nashville vinyl factory whose business is booming. Since many companies are exiting the record-pressing business, United Record is growing steadily; the story says revenues have increased $1.4 million to $4 million since 1999, when they began pressing LPs. The planets must be in alignment, since today's Foxtrot cartoon tackles a similar theme. BTW, anyone interested in record-pressing from an artist/label's point-of-view should watch the What's Up Matador? video - one segment has a Matador employee walking through the mastering and pressing process.

I'm surprised its taken this long for this issue to be raised in the paper, but The Austin-American Stateman finally ran a story today on the planned Borders bookshop at 6th and Lamar, right across the street from two of Austin's cultural institutions, the BookPeople bookstore and Waterloo Records. When I first learned that was going in the construction site, my reaction was, "Oh, those evil corporate bastards want to put BookPeople out of business," but the article quotes a Borders official as saying, "When locating our stores, it is never our intention to pursue a site with the goal of putting another store out of business." Oh please, Borders and Starbucks business model is all about operating stores at a loss until the local institutions go out of business.

If blogging while marathoning wasn't upsettng enough, here's a tool for people too lazy to use their keyboard or mouse. With the Google Viewer, you can type in your entry and passively peruse your favorite blogs or use it to dish up cheesecake hands free. Once you enter your search terms, it gives you a slideshow of screenshots from matching pages.

If you thought mobile devices, and, for that matter, blogging, was out of control, here's definitive proof. With a T-Mobile Sidekick, a blogger on the Hiptop Nation Weblog, blogged his experience running a marathon, in realtime, with pictures. The folks at Danger should give this guy a sponsorship.

This morning's Austin American-Statesman is running a couple of stories on the opening of Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the latest addtion to Cowtown's downtown art district. Unfortunately, The Statesman's Website has none of the breathtaking shots of the Tadao Ando-designed edifice that ran in the print edition. I'll definitely have to swing by the museum district over the holiday break. When I went to Dallas for OU-Texas weekend, I meant to go see the Mondrian show at the Kimbell, but I wasn't exactly in a disposition for art appreciation that Sunday.

On a side note, I've gotta say that Statesman.com is a pretty weak newspaper Website, considering Austin purports to be a tech capital. Not only did it not have a slide-show of pictures of the museum, but its articles also lack the "Email to A Friend" feature that even the Daily Texan can boast. I finally found some pictures online at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's site, but only after drilling through four menus and, in desperation, doing a site search, which led to this article, ranked fifth in the results.

I was just at the gym watching CNN, and as I strode on the elliptical trainer, CNN was showing live footage of the Space Shuttle Endeavor landing at Kennedy Space Center, including grainy footage taken from Endeavor's cockpit. I was reminded how I watched Space Shuttle launches live as a kid, and the excitment they generated. As I grew older, the networks stopped blocking out airtime for launches - presumably because the Shuttle could no longer generate daytime ratings - but it seems a little sad that we can longer plan on seeing crap fly into or emerge from space on TV. I wonder if the BBC will run any footage of the Beagle 2?

When CNN cut to commercial, they ran that wacky Ricola ad that features the Dandy Warhols' "Big Indian." As a giant, plushy Ricola drop and a Swiss girl in a dirndl enter a subway train, otherwise healthy-looking commuters are suddenly afflicted by a persistent, hacking cough. I wondered what Ricola was trying to say with this ad; are they targeting stoners in Urban Bohemia? Or is this simply another spot in that non-sequiturial European advertising tradition best known for those Mentos commercials?

I'm a bit of a fan of Princeton economics professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, (well, as far as you can be a fan of a professor-columnist, anyway) so I was excited to find this Washington Monthly profile of Krugman, which relates his professional background and attitudes toward his newfound fame. He tells the magazine, "This is not my natural habitat... I should be worrying a lot about Brazil right now." Instead of worrying about Brazil, his Friday column does a great job of explaining why the established telcos and cable operators continue to dominate the market for broadband Internet services and the possible consequences of this situation. On a somewhat related note, Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. deflates the notion of pervasive left-wing bias throughout the corporate-controlled media, from a journalist's point-of-view.

Some readers have wondered what exactly it is I do here in graduate school. To be honest, I do too, but I probably frame the question in more postmodern terms. Anyway, I got the take-home exam questions for RTF 395, a required class for all incoming grad students that exposes us a variety of theoretical approaches to studying media. This semester could be summarized as "Social Science for Lit Majors"; next semester will emphasize more textual approaches to media scholarship. I've pasted the questions below - although you probably won't be familiar with the authors, they may give you a sense of the kinds of topics we discuss here in the department of Radio-TV-Film.

Final Take-Home Exam, RTF 395 December, 2002
Please respond to the following questions as succinctly as possible. Be brilliant and provocative! The exam should be turned into my mailbox in CMA 6.118 by 5:00 pm next Tuesday.

1. One way to characterize many of the theoretical approaches we have considered this semester is in terms of mainstream, American-centric theories (Katz, Lazarsfeld, Merton, cultivation theory, uses and gratifications, media systems dependency theory, agenda setting, technological determinism) as opposed to critical theories (Canclini, Gramsci and hegemony theory, Schiller, Horkheimer and Adorno and the Frankfurt school, Martin-Barbero, Benjamin, Streeter, Garnham and political economy) many of them Latin American or European in origin. The former have been criticized as empiricist, unreflective, and underdeveloped, while the latter are criticized for their totalizing emphasis on media systems’ relationship to power institutions, sacrificing attempts to grapple with audiences or textual meanings. Choose one reading from each set and contrast how they deal with each of the following concepts: The State; democracy; individual agency; decoding or interpretation, as with an active audience; and the masses. (The readings you choose for this question should be a ones that you do not draw on for a primary response to any of the remaining three questions here.)

2. How would diffusion theory account for the spread of DVD players? How would James Carey use a cultural studies approach to discuss the same phenomenon?

3. The political economy analysis of broadcast policy offered by Thomas Streeter and the broader topic of communication and cultural production explored by Nicholas Garnham both comment on the roles of private capitalist accumulation as well as the State in structuring (or destroying) the public sphere. Discuss the operations and significance of the public sphere (in the Habermasian sense) in their arguments.

4. How does the concept of popular culture intersect development or globalization processes? (To respond to this question, please use the readings addressing globalization or those addressing development (the classical, i.e., Schramm, Lerner, or the critical readings, i.e., Freire, Beltran, and so forth).)

You've heard of bitrot and linkrot, no doubt, but here are what could only be termed rotlinks. The CraftyPants blog is following in the footsteps of the StinkyMeat project and providing online documentation of rotting organic materials. This time, however, the project has a socially concious spin; Mary Ellen is taking pictures of various items in her compost heap and providing a few tips on successful composting along the way. She's even taking requests!

As I was walking up to the communications building tonight, there was a long line of people outside, which can mean only one thing: an Austin City Limits taping. As I walked past the huddled masses outside CMB, I noticed they were wearing thrift-store sweaters and Chuck Taylors, rather than the usual polo shirts and relaxed fit jeans and thought to myself, "Boy howdy, those kids sure look hip for Austin City Limits!" Worried that I might be missing out on a band I'd like to see, I checked the door, which said Spoon was playing, and headed straight to the computer lab.

The latest issue of Readymade arrived in my mailbox today, and I read it with my usual excitement. As usual, the content is inspiring, and the models (who aren't pros) are, well, adorable, but one of the ads particularly piqued my interest. (Okay, okay, I worked long enough in the magazine biz to know that the ads are really the point.) Anyway, yeah, American Apparel is a company based in L.A. that offers "sweatshop-free T-shirts." I get the impression that they plan to sell wholesale to screen-printers, but they have shirts for sale online. The prices are comparable to what you would pay at the Gap, so I wonder if they'll be able to turn a profit.
BoingBoing pointed me to this site, Thriftdeluxe.com, yesterday, which seems to share a similar philosophy as Readymade and GetCrafty, but not as much content. I may have to try the word belt project over the break.

Time to download picture pages; time to grab a crayon or a pencil! Here are two pages of pictures that may amuse you. There are shots of daily life in Queens on LightningField.com today. Be sure to check out that lovely, hip-hop inspired license plate. I wonder if its Barbie's. And then there's an older Photoshop contest that asks "What if h4x0r5 ruled the world?" I'm particularly fond of the Hollywood sign and The Daily Oklahoman spoofs.

I really like the lede to this NYTimes review of a Sonic Youth show. The article posits SY have "fought normal rock-star goals with every arty, truculent drop of non-sequiturial energy in them." Dammit, I wanna gush with arty, non-sequiturial energy! Maybe I should change the tagline from "we're stuffing cheese in places you never dreamed about" to "we're gushing with arty, non-sequiturial energy." Update (12/3): I haven't been following SY closely for some time, so I suddenly asked myself the question, "Jim O'Rourke is playing bass for Sonic Youth?" That seems like a waste of some gee-tar pickin' talent. Its like the dude has arguably the best indie label around right now, and he's half the rhythm section for major-label sluts Sonic Youth? Maybe he needs the cash.

For fear of becoming what one pretentious emoboy termed a "CNN feed," I'll consolidate another NYTimes story into the same post. This story outlines how FCC Commissioner and Colin's kid Michael K. Powell and the corporate media outlets believe that since there are about 89 channels available in the average American household, fears of a lack of media diversity are unjustified. Moreover, this would suggest that megamediaconglomerates like AOL-Time Warner serve the public interest by providing a variety of voices. While Powell says he sees an "explosion of variety," others counter "Just because there are five home shopping networks, four fix-em-up channels and five talking head news channels doesn't mean there's real diversity or competition." Update (12/3): Last night as I was walking home from school, I kicked myself for forgetting to also link to Paul Krugman's Friday column on the same topic.

Here's some interesting information from my alma mater that I found through BoingBoing. Sooners' Physical Chemist Bing Fung and his colleagues have stored a 32 pixel black & white image in a single molecule by adjusting the properties of constituent hydrogen molecules. Fung and company dub the process "molecular photography," and could lead to a new form of data storage.
In more banal news, I'm intrigued by Yamaha's DiscT@2 technology, which allows you to use a CD burner to etch images into the CD's substrate. According to Tom's Hardware, burning DiscT@2 eats up CD space that could be otherwise used for data, so this is a total novelty, but I can just imagine doing a big art project with a few dozen tattooed discs. Fry's sells IDE DiscT@2 burners for less than $100, so its not exactly exotic technology. Sadly, there's no online gallery of DiscT@2 art yet.

According to a Guardian story, Damien Hirst was commissioned by the British space agency for the first human art put on Mars. I guess this goes to show how little I know about British space exploration, since I had no idea they planned Beagle 2, a Mars probe set to land around Christmas next year. Although Hirst is best known for large-scale shock art like a preserved cow cut lengthwise, the inter-terrestrial piece is a small spot painting made from a color calibration chart. This is hardly Hirst's first small-scale piece, I remember back in college, The Idler held a contest to give away Hirst originals, cigarette butts signed by the artist. The accompanying picture in the magazine showed Hirst with a cigarette stuck in his foreskin.

I haven't blogged in the past two days for no particular reason. I've found a couple articles worth linking to, but I guess put the m4dbl0g on vacation, too. So, to get this here ball rolling, I thought I would list the records that have taken control of my brain in recent memory, none of these are particularly hip or new, but you might find it interesting nonetheless.
Albums of the moment:
Phoenix EP by The Warlocks.
Insignificance by Jim O'Rourke
A Tall-Tale Storyline by Mazarin
Knock Knock by Smog
Maggot Brain by Funkadelic
Guilty pleasures on the radio:
"Move B***h" by Ludacris
"Hey Ma" by Cam'ron
The "underrated" band that I didn't get in Philly, still don't get now that I live in Austin, but seems to be on the Austin Music Network every fifteen minutes, once with a painfully pretentious rendition of The 13th Floor Elevators' "Rollercoaster":
Spoon
The Austin band I'd recommend to Weezer fans:
Spoon
Oh yeah, and a coupla records I want for Christmas:
Phoenix Album by the Warlocks
Station to Station by David Bowie
I hope you found that somewhat enlightening. What records are driving you nuts? What do you want for the holidays?

When I was in middle school, Loophole and I, along with other band nerds, would huddle up around a reference book called Musical Instruments of the World or something. Through the book, we all-too-excitedly discovered some of the lesser-known instruments through the ages. We would wonder at the variety: the Flugelhorn... the Sackbut! But this site, melodicas.com, is devoted to one and only one of the instruments in use, the Melodica. Melodicas.com interviewed Jacob Fred's Brian Hass about his use of the Melodica in Jacob Fred's music, as well as his gear. In the interview, Brian reveals, "I went through two of those smaller Hohners that have the little rounded bottom, the curve on the bottom and the red backing." The last time I saw Jacob Fred, at their August show in Austin, Brian was indeed jamming on the Melodica, playing a song dedicated to his colon.

It was pretty clear when the likes of MSNBC started including blogs on their site the medium would be co-opted by the corporate media, but but the nail is in the coffin. Barbie, the beloved anti-feminist totem, now has a blog. On the site, Barbie relates how she shops in the post-hip Chelsea neighborhood and loves hip-hop, and generally legitmates a consumption-heavy lifestyle. Unlike the recent Tony Soprano blog, this is apparently endorsed by the corporate mothership since it has a Mattel copyright notice at the bottom. Stuff like this is why I check in with bOINGbOING regularly. This somehow recalls Mark Napier's pioneer piece of NetArt, The Distorted Barbie.

If y'all haven't seen the Trailer Park Girl blog, you're in for a treat. Jenny leads a life far more interesting than mine and describes it in engaging terms. In today's post, she discusses how she's dreading going to Northern Virginia for Tofurky day, and then discusses some brownies consumed at a party have affected her blogging. BTW, guys, if you have a "Blogchalking" icon on your site, you should take it down. The reason why Jenny's site looks so funkdafied is that the image is no longer available, leaving a long, long "alt" tag in its place, stretching out her table past the side of the screen, mine anyway.

I feel like I've been blog-slacking, like I should be blogging more than I have been or the quality of my posts is inferior to those of the Jumphead days. Anyway, I thought I would blog some stuff from daily life, a la Loophole.

First, social skills drive me crazy. I'm pretty certain I have iffy social skills. Although I can talk your ear off, I'm a pretty introverted guy, and I adolesced weirdly, so I really don't feel like I know how to act around other people. Like, I just had an awkward social interaction, where I unintentioally butted in on a conversation in public. I've now spent the last 10 or 15 minutes internally bemoaning my inability to pick up on social cues. Maybe some day, I'll feel like I've been properly socialized.

Secondly, I've seen a dramatic increase in spam in my Hotmail account since I started school. I block the senders each time they come, but they just keep coming in. In desperation, I turned on Hotmail's spam filter last night, and this morning, I still had the same three-to-five spam messages I see each day in my inbox, while the messages I want - blasts from the department and listserv stuff - relegated to my junkmail folder. This seems like the kind of situation Douglas Adams would dream up. I guess the obvious solution is to activate a UT mail account for all my school mail and keep my hotmail account for spam-catching and personal emails, but I still don't like all this spam. Its also a bit of a hassle to check two email accounts via the Web, now that I roam from machine to machine. Oh well. Well, there's my hunk o' viscera for the day.

The Village Voice is running a story on how to rip mp3s from vinyl, something Cate was asking about a while back. The author outlines a few of the products available, but not Cakewalk Pyro, which I use. He also outlined one method I found particularly cool. Ofer Springer, an engineering student in Israel, has developed a novel way to digitize audio from vinyl LPs. He scans the wax, then applies an algorithm to the image data to detect the minute waveforms that appear in a groove. The result is a questionable facsimile of the original recording, but the mp3s on his site (scroll down) are trippy as a muppet-humper. BTW, I got like four hours of sleep last night, and I'm about to crash in front of this machine, so the drive to Tulsa will be postponed until tomorrow.

I'm driving up to Tulsa today to celebrate Tofurky day with my family, so postings will be infrequent, if at all. Is anyone else going to be in T-Town? Loophole, you usually go to Missouri, right? Update (10:15 AM): I just picked up today's Daily Texan, and they're running a front page feature with the headline "Happy Tofurky Day." Great minds think alike, I guess. Anyway, a campus group was serving a vegan Thanksgiving feast on campus yesterday, which I unfortunately missed. Readers in the Philadelphia area also missed out, since PETA held an action in Trenton where they handed out Tofurkys. All this Tofurky talk reminds me that I never posted my recap of Christmas last year where I made a Tofurky and took pictures each step of the way. Well, dear readers, look forward to a very special episode of m4dbl0g, "m4dd4wg's meatless family Christmas!"

One of the amenities of my apartment complex is free cable, including HBO and Cinemax. When I moved in, I didn't think I would avail myself of this as much as I do. Well anyway, I turned on the cable last night while I was doing my laundry and caught the better part of Not Another Teen Movie, a spoof of 80s and 90s teen flicks set at John Hughes High School. It wasn't The Sorrow and the Pity by any stretch, but it was