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.”
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