Once again, the “real news” is mimicking the Onion. This is an actual headline from today’s Washington Post:
U.S., Citing Abuse in Iraqi Prisons, Holds Detainees
The military will not turn over detainees to Iraq until officials are satisfied that Iraqis are meeting U.S. standards.
No… no… You’re not doing it right. You hold the whip this way!
Did Wired just change their design?
ps. I didn’t know that Lycos still existed.
I was looking through my the various draft posts that I have left in Wordpress. I often start to write a post and then realize I haven’t yet formalized a coherent thought. Other times I know I want to flesh out an idea but don’t have the time to finish. This one is from December.
I can’t take it anymore. There is simply too much information for me to digest in any useable fashion. I have 3 email accounts (personal, school, and one for signup forms), 2 IM clients (AIM and GTalk). Accounts I use daily include, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Bloglines. I maintain two blogs, and try to keep up on news, events and other goings on by monitoring over 100 websites.
The wheels are coming off.
I suppose I never posted this half thought because it made more sense to do something about it.
I stumbled across this site and it made my day. Happynews.com’s credo is “Real News, Compelling Stories, Always Positive.” Headlines today include:
Even the weather carried good news.
The weather sure is nice in Atlanta today!
Atlanta, Georgia
Clear 45° F
Humidity: 46%
Winds: W 13 MPH
Barometer: 30.13 in
Heat Index: 45° F
Wind Chill: 38° F
The stocks, however, are covered with a big image that reads: Warning! Unhappy news Alert - Click at your own risk.
As of this morning, only two private bus lines that are in the process of being taken over by the MTA are on strike - all subways are running. The bus strike covers about 750 workers and affects approximately 50,000 riders a day. What upsets me about this “mini-strike” is that it only affects those people who need the transportation the most. The lines service parts of Queens where there is little alternative transportation. So this “mini-strike” is screwing over working class people.
I would have closed the 4,5 and 6 stations between Grand Central and the 110th Street. Keep the trains running, but have each station manager shut down his or her station. The 4,5 and 6 trains then would run express and pass all of the stops between Grand Central and the 110th Street.
If you are going to do a selective shut-down, screw over people who have options and will be merely be inconvenienced by the strike.
Update:
The NYTimes points out that they chose the Jamaica and Triboro Lines because they are private lines. New York state has a law that makes it illegal for public employees to walk off job. The state can impose heavy fines on the unions and on the workers directly. This “mini-strike” doesn’t fall under those rules since the drivers are employees of a private company.
I still would shut down the 4, 5 and 6 between grand Central and 110th.
Tim Boucher points to an article in USA Today about the return of late fees at Blockbuster. Apparently, they are blaming their customers for not returning movies, thus causing a shortage of titles. As Cosby’s Noah would say:
Riiiiiight….
Anyway, as I said before:
I stopped going to Blockbuster and Hollywood video when I tried to rent Casablanca and the clerk told me they didn’t carry that title. It was Hollywood video, but I banned Blockbuster by association.
Richard Pryor died today.
What blows my mind about Richard is that when you listen to much of his material, it doesn’t sound all that different from the likes of Chris Rock or a Eddie Murphy. Then it dawns on you. He was talking about having sex with white women on stage in the early 1970s! That was less than a decade after the death of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and John F. Kennedy. It was less than a decade after the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional. I read somewhere that Pryor was the Malcom to Dick Gregory’s Martin. I haven’t had any exposure to Gregory’s work, but I can see where the Malcolm reference is apropos. Pryor’s routines must have scared the bejesus out of some white folks at the time. When viewed in that context, Pryor’s material was truly political (and revolutionary).
Later tonight, I am going to dust off my copy of the Bicentennial Nigger LP, pore a glass of bourbon over ice, and spend some time with Mr. Pryor.
Rest in Peace Richard.
Update: I really hope that they do a tribute show for Pryor. The talent that would line up for that show might be unmatched in history.
I am interested to hear mroe about this deal. Yahoo’s MyWeb2.0 seemed to have most of the functionality that del.icio.us had and it had the added benefit of saving a cached copy of the web page - a feature that del.icio.us was sorely lacking.
I wonder if they bought it for the brand or if del.icio.us has something on the inside that the average user is not aware of (besides a ton of data). I do hope that they consolidate the two services.
I am becoming a bigger and bigger fan of Yahoo as they acquire some of the web’s most useful services - del.icio.us, flickr, upcoming.
Update:
I just realized that almost no one is using Yahoo’s MyWeb2.0 (what an awful name). As of today, the entire service only has 459,842 pages and 110,620 tags. I just misplaced the stats for del.icio.us but they tower over that. So, Yahoo wasn’t only buying data, they were buying users.
I am becoming convinced that this administration is just mean-spirited:
From the Washington Post:
Last month’s budget-cutting bill would save $50 billion over five years by imposing new fees on Medicaid recipients, trimming the food stamp rolls, squeezing student lenders and cutting federal child support enforcement.
Let me get this straight…
We don’t want the kid to get child support. If he manages to get it, we are going to make sure that he has a diffuclt time getting fed. If he manages to escape this fate and gets to college, we will try to bankrupt him. And if he lives through all of this, we are going to try to kill him in his golden years, and short of killing him we will make it as painful and expensive as possible.
I was reading something about ferrofluid (don’t ask) and came across this funny footnote:
Thought process of the guy who invented coffee: “I have an idea. Let’s pick these red cherry things, then dry them in the sun for a week or two, then throw away the fruit and keep the seed, then bake the seed for ten minutes, then grind up the burnt seed, then pour hot water through it, and then drink the brown liquid.
Rumour has it that Google will be launching a calendar program as early as December 6th.
The url http://calendar.google.com/ is live but points to the Google homepage right now. Typically when they activate a new sub-domain it indicates that a new service is imminent.
I’ll be interested to see how they do. Gmail and Google maps were absolute genius. Google Reader and Google Base… no so much.
Update: As of the 11th the site is still not live. Oh well.
Steven Soderbergh is set to release his newest movie, Bubble, on January 27 in the theaters, on DVD and on HDTV simultaneously.
Soderbergh makes a great point in his interview with Xeni:
Name any big-title movie that’s come out in the last four years. It has been available in all formats on the day of release. It’s called piracy. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, Ocean’s Eleven, and Ocean’s Twelve - I saw them on Canal Street on opening day. Simultaneous release is already here. We’re just trying to gain control over it.
I remember reading a while back that Mark Cuban has been planning to pull of this stunt for a while. Wait a minute…
Yep. This was from an interview in 2003 with… Xeni Jardin. Mark owns Landmark Theaters and HDNet. In the interview he talks about simultaneous releases. I bet he is doing this with Soderbergh.
Yep. Cuban is the Executive Producer
Apparently, with all of the old copper fixtures stripped from nearly every abandnoned house in Baltimore, folks in search of scrap metal have turned to stealing lamp posts. According to the New York Times:
Thieves are sawing down aluminum light poles. Some 130 have vanished from Baltimore’s streets in the last several weeks, the authorities say, presumably sold for scrap metal. But so far the case of the pilfered poles has stumped the police, and left many local residents wondering just how someone manages to make off with what would seem to be a conspicuous street fixture.
If you have seen HBO’s “The Wire”, then you are famailiar with the fact that drug users (Think Bubs) routinely gut the inside of abandoned homes in Baltimore, looking for any metal they can trade in for enough money to buy their next fix. But this is on a whole new level. Whomever is stealing these lamposts is organized and precise.
The poles, which weigh about 250 pounds apiece, have been snatched during the day and in the middle of the night, from two-lane blacktop roads and from parkways with three lanes on either side of grass median strips, in poor areas and in some of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods. Left behind are half-foot stubs of metal, with wires that carry 120 volts neatly tied and wrapped in black electric tape.
One of my favorite songs of all time is a Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton collabo entitled Sign Language. In the second verse Dylan sings:
Link Wray was playing on a jukebox, I was paying
For the words I was saying, so misunderstood.
He didn’t do me no good.
One would think that if Dylan mentions another artist in a song, he is probably worth checking out. Oddly, I never did. Sign Language is on my mind because apparently Link Wray died this month in Denmark. I think it is about time I check out his music.
Baby girl born with heart outside here body (she was holding it in her right hand).
This week’s award for most useless value proposition goes to Podtrac, which claims to “enable podcast advertising and measurement by expertly giving podcasters and advertisers all the essentials they need.”
Update: I am not saying that Podtrac offers a useless service, only that their website copywriters could use some help spelling out the value of the service.
Warner Brothers is preparing a major new Internet service that will let fans watch full episodes from more than 100 old television series. The service, called In2TV, will be free, supported by advertising, and will start early next year. More than 4,800 episodes will be made available online in the first year.
The Candy Wrapper Museum will take you back… way back.
Cribcandy = bookmarkable stuff for your home.
Judy Rosen gives the lumber to David Brooks over his recent op-ed on French “Gangsta Rap”.
A friend of mine asked me the other day what I thought about my baseball team’s name and mascot. She would be referring to The Cleveland Indians and Chief Wahoo.
I have been a tribe fan all of my life. I can’t imgine calling my team anything but the Indians. But, both the Chief and the team name have got to go. If Detroit up and changed it’s name to the Detroit Negroes and sewed a sambo mascot to their hats we would be up in arms - and by we I mean nearly everybody.
We weren’t always the Indians by the way. From 1901 to 1914, the team had three different names: the Cleveland Blues, the Cleveland Bronchos and the Cleveland Naps. Naps was derived from a former player named Napoleon Lajoie. When Lajoie was traded to Philly, the team’s name was changed to the Indians in response to a local newspaper contest.
In 1995, the Indians released a press release explaining that:
“The Cleveland Indians organization is very aware of the sensitivities involved in this issue. We have gone to great lengths to respect those sensitivities. In no way do we intend to demean any group, especially one as pround as Native Americans. The logo is simply a caricature that has enjoyed decades of fan appeal in the Northeast Ohio area…”
Last time I checked, a caricature was “a representation in which the subject’s distinctive features or peculiarities are deliberately exaggerated to produce a comic or grotesque effect.”
So essentially the ball club was saying, “We don’t mean to demean. We are laughing with you, not at you.”
How on earth can anybody seriously defend this uniform anymore?
I advocate returning to the Cleveland Blues. If the show fits… wear it.
“Pirates Open Fire on Cruise Ship off Somalia”
Pirates in speed boats opened fire on a cruise liner carrying hundreds of tourists off the Somali coast on Saturday, but none of the holidaymakers were hurt, a shipping official and the ship’s owners said.
Shocking. (via washpo)
I wish that I could tag emails. Gmail is the closest with their labels, certainly better than folders. Actually I suppose labels are tags, I just don’t like the way they are displayed.
I think del.icio.us just updated its interface while I was on the site.
Very disorienting.
Very cool.
However, knowing me it could have been that way for weeks and I just didn’t notice.
I was walking with three friends in the village the other day when the following advertisement stopped exactly two of us in our tracks.
Can you guess how many members of our group are black?
P - heart - M’s project manager should be fired. I guess in the focus group, no one told him or her that nooses are still not funny to black folks.
The poet, Lucie Brock-Broido, came and taught my poetry class at Amherst one day back in 1997. She read this poem and I rushed to the store and bought her book that very same day. For some reason, looking at the Roster of the Dead[1] yesterday in the New York Times brought this poem back to the forefront of my mind. Of course, this poem and the war are not related, but of course, that is how the mind often works.
Did Not Come Back
By Lucie Brock-Broido
In the roan hour between then & then again, the now, in the Babel
Of a sorrel ship gone horizontal to a prow of night, the breach of owls
Abducted by broad light, but blind, in the crime, the titanesque of rare
Assault–we who have come back–petitioning, from the chair
Electric with bad news, from the stunning, from the narrows
Of an evening gall, from the mooring of an hour slanted on the follow
Bow, she rose from a bed of Ireland like a flyted trout, a shiny
Marvel on the sailor’s deck, an apologia–divining–
As once, as at a salted empire port, he washed
Her fleeted body & they lied, the best of them, the cream & crush
Of this, the madrigal & sacrifice of that, the best of them,
The slowest velvet suffocation of their kind, did not come
Whittled back by autumn, at an hour between thorn & chaff,
Not come riddled with oblivion, the crossing & a shepherd’s staff,
The moment between Have & Shall Not Want, we who have salt
Always know, that we who have–the best of us–did not come back.
=-=-=-=-=-=-
The Roster of the Dead in the print edition was stunning in its breadth. Printed on several pages were the photos of the just under 1000 soldiers that have died since September 2005. That is almost half the total of all soldiers killed since the beggining of the war…
I have been maintaining for quite a while that Harriet Miers’ nomination to the Supreme Court might have been a politically brilliant move. What if President Bush threw her in to the fire to get people talking about qualifications and cronyism, knowing that she would withdraw and that he could then have a free pass to appoint an associate justice like Judge Luttig or Judge McConnell?
With Democrats having burned their political capital on arguments over qualifications, they could be silenced by the nomination of an appellate judge with overwhelming credentials (but with a judicial philosophy that is antagonistic to everything Democrats believe in - well almost everything).
When the term web 2.0 first stated getting bandied about, I was skeptical. Part of me still is, but some of the tools that have been coming out recently are starting to fulfill the promise of the web.
Zimbra
Zimbra is essentially a web based version of Outlook (but so much hotter). It looks and feels like Outlook (everything is drag and drop). If the word today or tomorrow shows up in an email and you mouse over it, your calendar events appear for the corresponding day. All phone numbers are clickable and launch Skype. While I have seen slick interfaces before, I am at a loss for how they pulled this off. It doesn’t look like a browser app… at all.
Dodgeball
Recently bought by Google, Dodegball ball is a social networking site that is a phone/internet hybrid. You sign up and develop a network of friends a la Friendster or MySpace. But when you are out at the club, you can “check in” by sending a text message to (for instance) nyc { - at - } dodegball { - dot - } com with the message “@crobar”.
Dodgeball checks to see which of your friends have checked in, and alerts those that are within 10 blocks of you, providing them with the address and giving them a heads up that you are in the vicinity. You can also check addresses through the service, which would have been enough for me to sign up. It works the oh so web 2.0 “degrees of separation” model as well. Dodgeball can let you know if friends of friends are around, and, more importantly they will give you his or her name and the details on how you all know each other.
Rollyo
Rollyo is short for “Roll Your Own” and at this site you are rolling your own search engine. Take the sites that you have come to love and trust that cover, say, major league baseball. Add them to Rollyo and save a custom search engine that will search all of the specified sites for your search terms. Users can have multiple search engines and, of course, it wouldn’t be web 2.0 unless they allowed you to create a profile.
Flock
I am writing this post from Flock, a new “social browser” launching soon. While Flock, based on the Firefox browser, is way ahead of Microsoft and the others, I am shocked that no one has done this before. Flock gets its 2.0 stripes by integrating its favorites with del.icio.us and making it easy to blog from within the browser (exceedingly easy). I don’t know if this beta is buggy or uninspired, but it is supposed to integrate with Flickr as well. I have been able to look at thumbnails of my photos, but cannot interact with them in any meaningful way. Don’t get me wrong, Flock is a major step in the right direction and I am sure they have a feature list that is a mile long. I can’t wait until they flesh it out a bit.
Upcoming.org
Upcoming was recently purchased by Yahoo. I haven’t had a chance to sign up and check it out proper.
There are tons of these services. These just caught my eye. Oddly, probably the greatest web 2.0 company of all is Google. Their suite of tools from Gmail to Google Maps use interfaces that were unheard of two years ago. They have become such mainstays of my digital life that I don’t even think of them as being somehow new or radical.
Times Select be damned. This op-ed is too provacative to stay in the walled garden.
Leading By (Bad) Example
By Thomas L. Friedman
Washington, Oct. 18, 2005
A delegation of Iraqi judges and journalists abruptly left the U.S. today, cutting short its visit to study the workings of American democracy. A delegation spokesman said the Iraqis were ”bewildered” by some of the behavior of the Bush administration and felt it was best to limit their exposure to the U.S. system at this time, when Iraq is taking its first baby steps toward democracy.
The lead Iraqi delegate, Muhammad Mithaqi, a noted secular Sunni judge who had recently survived an assassination attempt by Islamist radicals, said that he was stunned when he heard President Bush telling Republicans that one reason they should support Harriet Miers for the U.S. Supreme Court was because of ”her religion.” She is described as a devout evangelical Christian.
Mithaqi said that after two years of being lectured to by U.S. diplomats in Baghdad about the need to separate ”mosque from state” in the new Iraq, he was also floored to read that the former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr, now a law school dean, said on the radio show of the conservative James Dobson that Miers deserved support because she was ”a very, very strong Christian [who] should be a source of great comfort and assistance to people in the households of faith around the country.”
”Now let me get this straight,” Judge Mithaqi said. ”You are lecturing us about keeping religion out of politics, and then your own president and conservative legal scholars go and tell your public to endorse Miers as a Supreme Court justice because she is an evangelical Christian.
”How would you feel if you picked up your newspapers next week and read that the president of Iraq justified the appointment of an Iraqi Supreme Court justice by telling Iraqis: ‘Don’t pay attention to his lack of legal expertise. Pay attention to the fact that he is a Muslim fundamentalist and prays at a Saudi-funded Wahhabi mosque.’ Is that the Iraq you sent your sons to build and to die for? I don’t think so. We can’t have our people exposed to such talk.”
A fellow delegation member, Abdul Wahab al-Unfi, a Shiite lawyer who walks with a limp today as a result of torture in a Saddam prison, said he did not want to spend another day in Washington after listening to the Bush team defend its right to use torture in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfi said he was heartened by the fact that the Senate voted 90 to 9 to ban U.S. torture of military prisoners. But he said he was depressed by reports that the White House might veto the bill because of that amendment, which would ban ”cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of P.O.W.’s.
”I survived eight years of torture under Saddam,” Unfi said. ”Virtually every extended family in Iraq has someone who was tortured or killed in a Baathist prison. Yet, already, more than 100 prisoners of war have died in U.S. custody. How is that possible from the greatest democracy in the world? There must be no place for torture in the future Iraq. We are going home now because I don’t want our delegation corrupted by all this American right-to-torture talk.”
Finally, the delegation member Sahaf al-Sahafi, editor of one of Iraq’s new newspapers, said he wanted to go home after watching a televised videoconference last Thursday between soldiers in Iraq and President Bush. The soldiers, 10 Americans and an Iraqi, were coached by a Pentagon aide on how to respond to Mr. Bush.
”I had nightmares watching this,” Sahafi said. ”It was right from the Saddam playbook. I was particularly upset to hear the Iraqi sergeant major, Akeel Shakir Nasser, tell Mr. Bush: ‘Thank you very much for everything. I like you.’ It was exactly the kind of staged encounter that Saddam used to have with his troops.”
Sahafi said he was also floored to see the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan agency that works for Congress, declare that a Bush administration contract that paid Armstrong Williams, a supposedly independent commentator, to promote Mr. Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy constituted illegal propaganda — an attempt by the government to buy good press.
”Saddam bought and paid journalists all over the Arab world,” Sahafi said. ”It makes me sick to see even a drop of that in America.”
By coincidence, the Iraqi delegates departed Washington just as the Bush aide Karen Hughes returned from the Middle East. Her trip was aimed at improving America’s image among Muslims by giving them a more accurate view of America and President Bush. She said, ”The more they know about us, the more they will like us.”
(Yes, all of this is a fake news story. I just wish that it weren’t so true.)
I did my own little remix of Flickr and Google Maps to create a site where people can view photographs of street art plotted on a map. The idea being that folks will (hopefully) be inspired to go see them in the wild.
I am going to use this post as a place where I can keep development notes. And those people who are using it can leave me bug reports and feature requests.
What I am working on
This new flickr group is insane. They are into pointing their camera at an interesting light source, setting a long exposure and then tossing the camera into the air.
The results are gorgeous. But I just can’t affod to lose the one camera I have.
Google recently launched Google Reader, their RSS reader. I was suprised to find that, unlike all other things Google, it is not the most intuitive applicaton on the planet. For instance, when you add a feed, a little note at the top of the screen alerts you to the fact that the feed has been added to your reading list. However, the little note is so far away from the button you click to add the feed, that it is not readily apparent that anything has happened. I clicked the little button ten times before realizing that the task had been completed. Additonally, when you add a feed, it appears that you have to log out and log back in before it appears in your reading list.
I am sure they will get it right (or better) in time. But for the first time in a long time, I won’t be rushing to adapt the newest Google product.
Sweethearting » Jason’s got a great idea that would allow you to quickly ping someone with one or two strokes of a keypad (an SMS equivalent to letting your friend know you are outside by letting the phone ring once). Interesting follow up here. #
Bill Waterson is releasing The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, a 1,456-page behemoth containing every panel ever published. It is three volumes. I must have it.
Calvin and Hobbes was magnificent, however, the Boondocks is sublime.
Update:
The Comic-Strip Revolution Will Be Televised Write up about Boondocks, the animated series, in the New York Times.
Jenny Holzer’s response to September 11th can be seen on the side of Bobst Library at New York University through the 5th. Projected onto the wall of the west side of the building (on Laguardia between 3rd and 4th streets) are various redacted government documents recently released under the Freedom of Information Act.
In addition to Bobst, Ms. Holzer will be showing her work on the facade of the Public Library from October 6th through the 9th.
I need to check the photos I took but if I have a good one I will post it here.
And just so you can get an idea of how big it was…
More about the exhibition can be found in this article from the NYTimes.
The third annual Open House New York is happening this weekend (Saturday & Sunday, October 8 & 9). Essentially, over 100 spaces typically closed to the public are open for touring. My brother and I attempted to go last year and only ended up seeing one of the 150 sites they opened up to the public in all 5 boroughs. Lines tend to get long so if you have a place you have been dying to see make sure you get there early. Good times.
You can find me here
Contagious Media Project » Jonah Peretti’s and Eyebeam’s Project that spawned Black People Love Us, Fundrace, The Rejection Line and and the Nike Sweatshop Emails #
Below is an excerpt from an email I just received from MoveOn:
“Ex-FEMA Director Michael Brown taught us that vital national positions must be filled with qualified candidates, not political friends with limited experience. With such a thin public record, how can Americans know Harriet Miers’ approach to critical issues like corporate power, privacy and civil rights?
Right now we urgently need more information, and we need your help to get it. In the next few hours the Internet will fill with facts, anecdotes and rumors about Harriet Miers. We need your help to sort through it all, select the relevant and important details, and let us know what you find—decentralized, grassroots research.”
I think the notion is brilliant. Information on this nominee exists, it is just disaggregated. Everyone has a public record to a certain degree. It is simply a matter of whether you have the resources to gather it. I wonder if anyone has done this type of thing before?
The page where you can upload your findings is here.
August Wilson died today. His Joe Turner’s Come and Gone singlehandedly got me into reading plays when I was in college. His 10-play cycle exploring the 20th century black experience, decade by decade, is truly a stunning work of art. I have seen a handful of his plays and read a few more. I plan to see them all (production schedules permitting). My favorite, to date, was a revival of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, starring Whoopi Goldberg and Charles S. Dutton.
Pick a play. Read it. They are wonderful.
Radio Golf (2005)
Gem of the Ocean (2004)
King Hedley II (2001)
Jitney (2000)
Seven Guitars (1996)
Two Trains Running (1992)
The Piano Lesson (1990)
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1988)
Fences (1987)
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984)
The Indians just lost the wildcard spot. As I mentioned here, we are used to this.
But this is just pitiful:
“Cleveland fans will look back and remember the clutch hits that never came despite countless chances in the past few days. The Indians went just 7-for-56 (.125) with runners in scoring position in the final seven games — five of them one-run losses.”
From Karen Russel at huffingtonpost.com - The GOP’s African-American Talking Points
From Arrian Huffington herself:
“Delay, Frist, Abramoff, Safavian… Wasn’t this the crowd that was going to “restore honor and integrity” to Washington? If this is what integrity looks like, let’s bring back Oval Office blow jobs.”
According to Bill Bennet criticism of his comments below are “ridiculous, stupid, totally without merit.”
“I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down,” Mr. Bennettsaid in the broadcast. “That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.”
I was going to be upset if The New York Times decided to hide this article under the Times Select. Alas… they did not.
Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia, has penned the most well written piece on science, for general consumption, that I have ever read. His illumination of the ubiquitous, but little understood (at least by science-phobic persons such as myself) E=MC2 left me wishing that men and women of letters were regularly assigned by newspapers to demystify some of the underlying (and often taken for granted) systems that have a deep effect on out daily lives. And I don’t just mean science. For instance, I can imagine that many folks look at the deficit in much the same way they look at Einstein’s theory. They know what it is, but they don’t really understand what it means and how it works.
Thank you for not hiding this educational and vitally important article in the “secret garden” that is the Times Select.
Ok… so my blog has been somewhat schizophrenic over the last few months as I switched from writing posts to simply uploading some of the photos I have been taking. It has been bothering me, but I couldn’t figure out how to fix it.
I finally dove under the hood of Wordpress and figured out how to make a separate blog for my photos that suits my tastes. So from here on out, my new photos will be posted at http://mikeoliver.org/photolog. My blog will remain at this address.
Go ahead… check it out.
Coney Island. Brooklyn, NY
I guess I didn’t take this photo on the sly. Even the little kid on the left is eyeing me up…
Adams Morgan. Washington, DC
City Hall. New York, NY
Alley off of P Street, N.W. Between 17th and 18th. Washington, DC
Thompson Street, between 3rd and Bleecker. New York, NY
I am currently migrating from Blogger to Wordpress (the first time I have ever shifted away from a Google product). I have managed to get all my posts and comments ported over, but things might be a little broke down for the next few days as I get settled in.
ps. categorizing over 400 posts is going to be un-fun.
pps. I thought about not doing it, but my inner-librarian protested.
Found just outside Washington Square Park. New York, NY
View from my deck. New York, NY
Father Demo Square. New York, NY
Hudson River. New York, NY
Found in NoLiTa. New York, NY
The missing words are “Children’s Aid Society”
Midtown. New York, NY
Carmine Street between Bleecker and Bedford. New York, NY
Our Lady of Pompeii, at the corner of Bleecker and Carmine. New York, NY
My brother and I went on a photowalk out to Coney Island yesterday. Coney Island is one of those places that since childhood has built up its own mythology in my mind. Sorta like Paris or Hawaii - a place far far away that holds exotic and magical adventures if you can just ever get there.
Well, turns out it wasn’t magical. But I did have fun. And hell… I can still hold out hope for Hawaii.
My brother on our photowalk at Coney Island.
Amherst, MA (1996?)
My brother and I are nearly two years apart in age, but were always one year apart in school (Who knows if I was dumb or he was smart…) This was taken in front of the “social dorms” at Amherst College. I am still unsure how he ever came to the decision to attend the same college as me, but I am glad that he did.
I am carrying my requisite cup of coffee (yes it is night time) and wearing my favorite shirt (which I just retired this year when the arm nearly fell off because the hole in the elbow had gotten too big).
Found inside the Dove, Thompson btw Third and Bleecker, NYC
Looking east from my “temporary bedroom” at sunrise.
Found in Nolita, NYC
Lower East Side. New York, NY
China Town. New York, NY
Alley between 13th and 14th on U Street, NW. Washington, DC
Found in my friend’s backyard. Brooklyn, NY
West 4th Street between 6th Avenue and McDougal Street. New York, NY
Just off Smith Street, one block from the Bergen Street subway stop on the F line. Brooklyn, NY
Flickr was kind enough to point attention to a few of my street art photos on their blog.
And I just found out that the DCist recently used one of my photos.
2-3 blocks north of Dupont Circle on Connecticut Avenue. Washington, DC
The Police finally caught up with the graf