The Crow of the Early Bird
By WARREN ST. JOHN and ALEX WILLIAMS
The New York Times
March 27, 2005

Mr. Iger, who is married to the television journalist Willow Bay, with whom he has four children, is up at 4:30 in the morning, works out and arrives in the office by 6:30.

The New York Times, March 14, profile of Robert A. Iger, the new president of the Walt Disney Company

Most days before work, Ward, 53, wakes up at 4:30 a.m. at her South Anchorage condo, grabs her mandatory morning coffee and heads to the gym. Part of her success rides on the fact that she exudes energy and sleeps only six hours a night.

The Anchorage Daily News, Jan. 3, profile of Robin Ward, a real estate deal maker

After Singer's call, Wirtschafter couldn't get back to sleep. He usually drops off for only about three hours a night, anyway, rising at around 1 a.m. to read scripts and scribble diagrams in a blue notebook, plotting the decision tree of the following day's phone calls.

The New Yorker, March 21, profile of Dave Wirtschafter, the president of the William Morris Agency

THERE was a time when to project an image of industriousness and responsibility, all a person had to do was wake at the crack of dawn. But in a culture obsessed with status—in which every conceivable personal detail stands as a marker of one's ambition or lack thereof—waking at dawn means simply running with the pack. To really get ahead in the world, to obtain the sacred stuff of C.E.O.'s and overachievers, one must get up before the other guy, when the roosters themselves are still deep in REM sleep. And of course since so few people are awake at such an ungodly hour, the early risers of the world take special pains to let everyone else know of their impressive circadian discipline.

"I'm an early riser, I'm achievement driven, and oh, my, has it served me well in the business world," said Otto Kroeger, a motivational speaker and business consultant in Fairfax, Va. Mr. Kroeger, who says he routinely rises at 4 a.m., preaches about the advantage of getting up before dawn to audiences and clients. "For 13 years," Mr. Kroeger said, "I never allowed myself more than 4 hours in any 24-hour period. It was all ego driven. My psyche was saying, 'I can do it, I can outlast.' It's a version of the old Broadway song from 'Annie Get Your Gun': 'Anything you can do, I can do better.' "

For late risers, the crack of dawn was a formidable enough benchmark. In today's age of competitive waking, they're made to feel even worse. The writer Cynthia Ozick, who goes to bed after 3 a.m. and wakes up sometime after noon, said she lives with constant disapproval. "I'm a creature of bad habits in the eyes of the world," she said. When Ms. Ozick answers the telephone in the early afternoon, she said, "you're approached in the most accusing voice—'Did I wake you?' "

At least since Benjamin Franklin included the proverb "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise" in his Poor Richard's Almanac, Americans have looked at sleeping habits as a measure of a person's character. Perhaps because in the agrarian past people had to wake at dawn to get in a full day's work outside, late sleepers have been viewed as a drag on the collective good.

Even today, said Edward J. Stepanski, the director of the Sleep Disorders Service and Research Center at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, "it's a uniformly negative characteristic to be asleep while everyone else is going about their business."

But before slinking back under the covers in shame, slugabeds of the world should consider: Sleep researchers are casting doubt on the presumed virtue and benefits of waking early, with research showing that the time one wakes up has little bearing on income or success, and that people's sleep cycles are not entirely under their control. Buoyed by the reassessment of their bedtime habits, a few outspoken and well-rested night owls are speaking out against the creep of sleepism.

"There are night owls who have just had their fill of people making them feel guilty and of other people who rag on them," said Carolyn Schur, a late sleeper from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, who advocates for night owls in speeches and in her book "Birds of a Different Feather." "A lot of people are just saying, 'I can't take it anymore.'"

Whatever the negative associations with sleeping late, scientists say there's good reason to doubt the boasts of the early risers. Dr. Daniel F. Kripke, a sleep researcher at the University of California, San Diego, said that in one study he attached motion sensors to subjects' wrists to determine when they were up and about. While 5 percent of the subjects claimed they were awake before 4 a.m., Dr. Kripke said, the motion sensors suggested none of them were. And while 10 percent reported they were up and at 'em by 5 a.m., only 5 percent were out of bed.

Dr. Stepanski said the same is true of people who boast they need little sleep. In a study in which subjects claimed they could get by on just five hours' sleep, he said, researchers found the subjects were sneaking in long naps and sleeping in on weekends to make up for lost z's.

"There's a tendency to generalize and to do it in a self-serving way," Dr. Stepanski said. "If your view is that you can get by on less sleep than the average person, then you're going to play that up."

Scientists call early risers larks, and late sleepers owls, and speak of morningness and eveningness to describe their differing circadian rhythms. Researchers believe that about 10 percent of the population are extreme larks, 10 percent are extreme owls and the remaining 80 percent are somewhere in between. And they say the most important factor in determining to which group a person belongs is not ambition, but DNA.

"Timing of sleep is genetically determined, whether you're an owl or lark," said Dr. Mark Mahowald, the medical director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center. While most people are a little bit owl or a little bit lark, for others, Dr. Mahowald said, altering sleep habits is "like changing your height or eye color."

Dr. Christopher R. Jones, the medical director of the Sleep-Wake Center at the University of Utah, said that just as there are morning people, scientists have found morning flies and morning mice. Variations in sleep patterns among the population, he added, may have benefited the species.

"The whole tribe is better off if someone is up all the night, listening for a lion walking through the grass," he said.

The rhythms of modern times are determined not by fanged predators, of course, but by the 9-to-5 schedule of the workaday world. While those hours would seem to benefit larks, there is little evidence that night owls are any less successful than early risers. Dr. Kripke said that a 2001 study of adults in San Diego showed no correlation between waking time and income. There's even anecdotal evidence of parity on the world stage; President Bush is said to wake each day at 5 a.m., to be at his desk by 7 and to go to sleep at 10 p.m., while no less an achiever than Russian President Vladimir V. Putin reportedly wakes at 11 a.m. and works until 2 a.m.

Night owls thrive, it seems, by strategizing around the expectations of the early crowd. Bella M. DePaulo, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who goes to sleep around 3 a.m. and wakes about 11 a.m., said that before she answers the phone in the late morning, she practices saying "Hello" out loud until she sounds awake. Ms. DePaulo said she has been a night person since childhood, and that she gravitated toward academia in part of because of her sleep habits.

"Academia is a good place to be if you're out of the mainstream," she said. "If you're doing 80 hours of work a week, what does it matter what 80 hours you work?"

Dr. Meir H. Kryger, a professor of medicine and a sleep researcher at the University of Manitoba, said that many people choose professions in line with their circadian rhythms.

"There are whole professions that tend to be larks," he said, like bankers and surgeons. "Very often people self-select themselves into that kind of career." Owls, he said, tend toward the entertainment or hospitality industries and the arts. But not everyone manages to find a perfect fit.

Drue Miller, a design and marketing consultant in San Francisco and the creator of a satirical late sleepers' bill of rights online bulletin board, said that when she worked as a Web designer, she was able to indulge her night owl tendencies by coming in late in the morning and working into the evening. That changed when she became the boss and found herself adjusting her schedule to fit the perception that people who run things are at their desks early. "I felt like I was being a 'bad boss' by showing up so much later," she said.

Perhaps the biggest boon to night owls in keeping up with the larks has been the Internet. Ms. Schur, the night owl advocate, said she spends the wee hours shopping, paying her bills and doing her banking online.

"It's a vehicle for maintaining a night owl lifestyle," she said of the Web. Ms. Schur added that if she is expected to get some bit of work to clients or colleagues by the early morning, she typically does it late at night.

"People will call me and say, 'Hey, your e-mail said 2 or 3 in the morning—did you really send it at that time?'" Ms. Schur said. "I say, 'Yes.' "

For people desperate to change their circadian rhythms, doctors say, there are some options. Dr. Kripke said that light therapy, melatonin and large doses of vitamin B12 can be used to adjust the body's natural clock. (Dr. Kripke outlines these treatments in a free e-book on his Web site www.BrightenYourLife.info.) But because sleep rhythms are so ingrained, the treatments must be practiced continually and so for many are impractical.

"People come to my clinic and want to change," said Dr. Jones of the University of Utah, "and I tell them I can't, I don't have a genetic screwdriver to get in there and tweak the gene."

Of course for hardened members of the early-to-rise crowd, any talk of being a slave to a notion as wispy as circadian rhythms is a sure sign of weakness. Their message to the drowsy is more or less: Get an alarm clock.

"If you work two extra hours a day," said Brian Tracy, the motivational guru, "you will outstrip everyone else in your field. The question is, where do you get those two hours? Early morning time is the most productive. It does no good to do work later in the day, because by then your batteries are burned out. Most successful people try to get up by 5 or 5:30 in the morning."

He added: "Getting up late, having fun at work, these are all for losers."

This is a really interesting site!

MLA Language Map

It's a map that shows national distribution of people speaking a wide variety of languages based on 2000 US Census data. The chloropleth geometry can be arranged by counties and by zip codes, making it useful both as an overview and in great detail.

This is hilarious! Take a look at this:

Le Bloggeur

I was talking with Hoosier Daddy and he showed me that his cell phone had Danse Macabre as a ring tone. Penguin in the City's phone plays the theme to Cheers.

This conversation has inspired me to look for a better ring tone for myself. All my phone does is play a canned version of a synthesized but traditional telephone ring with an unhealthy amount of re-verb. Does anyone out there have a good idea of what tune I should get?

I was just listening to a radio performance of The Case of the Noble Bachelor, a Sherlock Holmes mystery, while working and heard quite a surprising statement from someone in Victorian England.

After a major character storms out, Sherlock Holmes turns to an American man and says:

"Then I trust that you at least will honour me with your company," said Sherlock Holmes. "It is always a joy to meet an American, Mr. Moulton, for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes."

What a world it would be if something like that had actually come to pass....

Yet another piece of evidence demonstrating the flaws in the whole Iraqi War debacle, though I'm not sure I had put Tony Blair quite in that light.

MI6 chief told PM: Americans ‘fixed’ case for war
The Sunday Times (UK)-- March 20, 2005

More power to you, Dr. Rassias!

The Legacy of Our Moat Mentality: John Rassias on the importance of language for international understanding

Very sad news--George Kennan died last night.

The world has lost an incredible intellect and insight into how we interact with one another.

Aie!! Bush is trying to put Wolfowitz forward as the head of the world bank?!!?

This is absolutely ridiculous! First John Bolton, and now this?! This isn't Michael Bolton, the "no-talent ass clown". This is infinitely worse.

Every time the Bush administration does something so incredibly idiotic and harmful to the US and the world, it goes out and finds some way to screw things up even more. I hate these kinds of surprises.

I've included an article by Samantha Power that gives a good overview of what is going on, for non foreign policy wonks.

Boltonism
by Samantha Power
From the New Yorker
March 21, 2005

Barring a sudden and improbable outbreak of independent judgment in the Senate, John Bolton will soon be confirmed as President Bush's Ambassador to the United Nations, an institution he openly disdains. "It is a President's prerogative to name his ambassadors," Secretary-General Kofi Annan meekly told reporters last week. When he was asked whether he saw the nomination as a hostile act, he laughed and said, "I'm not sure I want to be drawn on that one." At U.N. headquarters, staffers walked around in a daze of disbelief. They had hoped that Bush's congenial European trip—combined with the U.N.'s moves toward internal reform and its indispensable role in pulling off the Iraqi elections—would spawn a U.S.-U.N. detente. Then came word that Bush was sending them Bolton.

"I'm pro-American," Bolton says, as if that required him to be anti-world. He dismisses the U.N.'s tools for promoting peace and security. International law? "It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so—because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States." (Never mind that such laws might have "constricted" the torture of detainees.) Humanitarian intervention? It's "a right of intervention that is just a gleam in one beholder's eye but looks like flat-out aggression to somebody else." Negotiation as a way of dealing with rogue states? "I don't do carrots," Bolton says.

It is easy to catalogue the things that John Bolton doesn't "do"—encourage payment of U.N. dues, support the International Criminal Court, strengthen international disarmament treaties. What he does do is less obvious. As Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, he has rightly been given credit for the Proliferation Security Initiative, which attempts to interdict shipments of fissile material and which is supported by sixty nations, including France and Germany.

But on his watch North Korea, the chief target of his ire, reprocessed enough plutonium to make six new nuclear weapons. Bolton boasts of "taking a big bottle of Wite-Out" to President Clinton's signature on the statute for the International Criminal Court ("a product of fuzzy-minded romanticism" that is "not just naive but dangerous"). Yet the Administration's assault on the I.C.C. has, in fact, bolstered the court's legitimacy internationally. Powerful middle-tier countries (like Germany) have helped make up the loss of American funds and personnel, and the court is now deep into investigations of mass slaughter in Congo and Uganda.

Bolton is also a longtime skeptic of tools that are increasingly part of the Bush Administration's arsenal. Nation building is a "fallacy," he thinks. "The U.S. is still engaged in nation building here two hundred and twenty-five years plus after the Declaration of Independence, and we still have a long way to go," he said in 2002. "The idea that we can nation-build for somebody else is just unrealistic." When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced Bolton's nomination, last Monday, she said, "We who are on the right side of freedom's divide have an obligation to help those who are unlucky enough to be born on the wrong side of that divide." But Bolton, who stood stoically next to her, has never believed that spreading freedom is America's business.

It is unclear what the Bush Administration has in mind by shipping Bolton to New York. The appointment has been spun as "Nixon goes to China." Nixon, however, actually went to China: the visit was compatible with his world view. Bolton, by contrast, seems averse to compromise, and is apparently committed to the belief that the U.N. and international law undermine U.S. interests. If he is to be an engine for U.N. reform, he will have to jettison his core values. He will have to work on expanding the Security Council, even though, in 1997, he said, "Leave the veto alone, and leave the Security Councils membership alone." (More recently, he suggested shrinking membership to a single state: his.) He will have to work with European states, even though he believes that "some Europeans have never lost faith in appeasement as a way of life." He will have to cooperate with China, even though he has called for full diplomatic recognition of Taiwan. And, if the Administration is serious about prosecuting the perpetrators of atrocities in Darfur, he will have to allow the Security Council to refer the case to the I.C.C.

The appointment of John Bolton has the look of a bureaucratic fix for an Administration that doesn't really care what happens to the U.N. At the State Department, Bolton, a protege of Vice-President Dick Cheney, has behaved more like a grandstander at a conservative think tank than like a diplomat. Colin Powell endured the collateral damage caused by his outbursts, but Rice made it plain that she would have none of it, and passed over Bolton for Deputy Secretary of State. Cheney reportedly then insisted that Bolton get the U.N. When Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke were appointed U.N. Ambassadors, President Clinton announced the nominations. Bush did the same for his first-term nominees, John Negroponte and John Danforth. Rice, in naming Bolton herself, sent a not so subtle signal that she expects to remain boss.

Nobody is more aware of a "U.N. in crisis" than the U.N.'s senior officials. They know that the U.N. is first and foremost a gathering of states, and an organization run by the most powerful of them. To be effective, the U.N., as Bolton himself has said, "requires sustained American leadership." Kofi Annan, speaking in Madrid three days after the nomination, praised Bolton's Proliferation Security Initiative and said that the "most vital" aim of the U.N. should be denying terrorists access to nuclear materials. The Administration did not return the love: instead, Rice sent Annan a letter informing him that the United States had unilaterally withdrawn from yet another international agreement, this one regarding an international court's jurisdiction over the claims of foreigners held in American jails.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will have a lot to contemplate when the ever-quotable Bolton arrives for confirmation. At the U.N. last week, the most discussed Boltonism was the claim that if the U.N. building "lost ten stories it wouldn't make a bit of difference." One staffer sighed and said, "He didn't say which ten floors he would like to see disappear. Perhaps that leaves us some room for influence."

Happy Pi Day!

Today is March the 14th or 3.14, as it might be written, and all over the world, engineers, high school math teachers and the odd college mathematics professor throw down their slide rules (or in high school, their graphing calculators) and dance around them (in circles of course).

Since I know people in each of those categories (especially some very odd math teachers and professors), I encourage you all to take the opportunity to act as odd as they do!

Listen to this discussion of the history of Pi, from the BBC program In Our Time

I was disturbed to read an article on Congressman Peter Hoekstra, the new head of the House Select Intelligence Committee now that Porter Goss has gone over to the CIA and been surprised by its workload.

Key Lawmaker Says US Needs Strategic Plan for Intelligence

The Washington Diplomat
March 2005

Reading that headline, I started rolling my eyes at such another example of incredible Republican stupidity but upon reading further, this was overtaken by the following:

One expert told Hoekstra's panel that although the country is tightly focused on the Iraq war, terrorism, Iran and North Korea, China is making a number of shrewd and largely undetected moves to expand its position across Asia.

'This concerns me,' Hoekstra said. What is China doing while the United States has its eyes on terrorism, Iraq, Iran and North Korea? What is China's position going to be in five or seven years when we finally turn our attention back to Asia?'

First of all, it doesn't evoke confidence when the head of the House Select Committee on Intelligence doesn't even realize that each of the places he mentioned are in Asia!! What paltry attention span he has is already dealing with Asia! Truly sub-par intelligence.

Not only that, but the PRC is North Korea's most important ally, economic supporter and protector. It has been hosting six-party talks on North Korea that the US considers 'the best way to end North Korea's nuclear programs and the only way for Pyongyang to achieve better relations with other countries.' There have been lots of Chinese citizens kidnapped in Iraq and China has been a huge influence on Iranian development of their missile systems and other military technology.

The Washington Diplomat is a surprisingly good little monthly newspaper--I recommend you read more of it than just that article. They did a relatively good job playing a very weak hand.

This was too good not to post-- apologies for all the puns (they're not mine)

Looking for a Job You Can Relish?
Here is a Job with all the fixings!

Oscar Mayer Wienermobile Spokesperson

Can you cut the mustard?
Here are some of the Qualifications that we are looking for:

- Must love to travel!

- A willingness to learn.

- Drive to succeed.

- An appetite for fun and adventure.

- Want to explore the US through the eyes of a Hot Dog!

- Willing to work and communicate with kids of all ages.


Who? - You! We need outgoing, creative, friendly, enthusiastic, graduating college seniors who have an appetite for adventure and are willing to see the world through the windshield of an Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.

Applicants should have a BA or BS, preferably in public relations, journalism, communications, advertising, or marketing, though applicants are not limited to these degrees.

Se Habla Espanol? - Bilingual candidates are encouraged to apply.

What? - To represent Oscar Mayer Foods as a goodwill ambassador through radio and television appearances, newspaper interviews, trade visits and charity functions. To meat and greet people from coast to coast. To maintain company car (Oscar Mayer Wienermobile). To work with internal and external consumer promotions, marketing and sales professionals. To manage your own traveling public relations firm; organizing promotions and pitching TV, radio and print media.

Where? - The Hot Dog Highways of America. Wienermobiles travel through all regions of the country visiting big cities and small towns alike, bringing miles of smiles to millions.

Why? - The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile has become an American icon. For over 65 years, the Wienermobile has been able to provide a Wienerwhistle and a laugh for all. Oscar Mayer continues to use the Wienermobile at special events throughout the country and they need people like you to coordinate all aspects of Wienermobile travel and event management.

Condiments-

- Receive $500 per week, plus expenses, benefits and clothing.

-Experience of being your own traveling public relations firm.

-Experience in a self-managed position with many responsibilities.

-Be a mini-celebrity in small towns and big cities through event appearances and media interviews, and for being the driver of an Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.

I don't remember how long I clipped this but it's still incredibly true. 

As some of you know, I will be out of the country for the next two weeks and may or may not be able to get online during that period.

Though, if I am, I will certainly try to post descriptions of all of the great things I will be doing and seeing in Paris and Prague.

I'll be sending those people whose mailing addresses I have post cards but this is a bit more instant gratification.

Take a listen to this -- sound file (mp3) about the Weimar Republic.

It's really bizarre-- I had to listen to it twice before I could stop laughing-- but it still covers the history pretty effectively.

FYI-- I found this at the bottom of the
Wikipedia article on the Weimar Republic.

I've got a lot to write about, so more soon!

Anyone out there know of someone looking for a new place to live? I just got a message from a friend that offers a great opportunity for this-- Check it out!

----

Hi everyone!
I have a room to rent in a two bedroom condo in Falls Church.
The rent is $ 725 a month, all utilities except electricity and cable
included. It would be a month-to-month arrangement until June.
The place is quiet and nice, with a small patio and large living room.
Please forward this to anyone who might be looking for a place inside
the beltway in Virginia.
Thanks!
- Ann
ann.bayliss@gmail.com
----

I just got this message from a friend of mine from Dartmouth. It's a great way to contribute to such an important cause.

----

Dear All,

One of my baby cousins is trying to raise funds for Tsunami victims on behalf
of UNICEF. His target goal is only $2,000. If you would like to help him by
making a contribution (ANY denomination, no matter how small, will be
appreciated!), please visit the following site:

Click Here

The fundraising effort is for a good cause and would only take a minute.

Happy New Year,

Saleela

---

Happy New Year, Saleela, despite the circumstances!

Wow-- California is really getting inundated. We've gotten over 4 times our average annual rainfall. Ok.... ok.... I'm from the desert and we're only pushing about 5 inches for the year. But we barely get an inch a year and have mountains between ourselves and LA.

On the other side of the mountains, it's getting pretty bad. I remember driving through a pretty little town called La Conchita huddled on the coast when my father and I were driving along US Highway 101 from Ventura to Santa Barbara for his business.

I say the town was 'huddled' because it was built on a tiny piece of flat land that was barely the size of the DC mall, connected only by the ribbon of highway that often had sea cliffs on one side and steep bluffs rising on the other without much shoulder at all.

This was a tenuous existence at best and the little town had been pummeled before by the weather-- sometimes dramatically (like in 1995).

It's a real pity to see the area around the landslide get built up again, only to (predictably) be demolished again with the rains this winter. I'm even more saddened to hear that 10 people ended up dying this time...

An Ariel Sharon insight into life:

The best thing to do when you've been stung by a wasp is to follow that wasp back to its hive and start whacking the hive with a stick.

Keep whacking the nest with a stick until they've learned their lesson.

If they sting you again, whack it harder.

(Andy Sultzman, BBC, "The Now Show," March 2004)

One of many reasons why it's important to study Geography...

Schoolgirl saved family and others by recognizing signs of coming tsunami
Jan 02, 2005 MacLeans, Canada

LONDON (AP) - A British schoolgirl who recognized the signs of a coming tsunami thanks to a recent geography lesson saved her family and some 100 other tourists at a Thai beach, a British newspaper reported.

Tilly Smith, 10, realized they were in danger when she saw the tide suddenly rush out -an indication earthquake-driven tidal waves are only minutes away -and told her mother, The Sun said in its Saturday edition.

She explained that she had studied tsunamis only two weeks before at her school in Oxshott, just south of London. Her parents, Penny and Colin Smith, warned nearby vacationers and staff at their hotel in Phuket, and the hotel swiftly evacuated Maikhao beach, minutes before the devastating waves struck, the newspaper said.

The Sun reported that the beach was one of only a few in Phuket where no one was killed or seriously hurt.

"I was on the beach and the water started to go funny," Tilly was quoted as telling The Sun. "There were bubbles and the tide went out all of a sudden. I recognized what was happening and had a feeling there was going to be a tsunami. I told mummy."

Penny Smith, 43, said that she ran off the beach after Tilly explained what was going to happen.

"I dread to think what would have happened if we had stayed," she was quoted as telling The Sun. "Minutes later the water surged right over the beach and demolished everything in its path."

Craig Smith, general manager of the JW Marriott Hotel where Tilly's family were staying, said the 10-year-old was a heroine.

"I think it's phenomenal that Tilly's parents and the others on the beach are alive because she studied hard at school," Smith was quoted as telling The Sun.

Tilly learned about tsunamis in a lesson with geography teacher Andrew Kearney at Danes Hill School, a private school in Oxshott.

"It is an incredible coincidence that our class were learning about this type of tsunami just two weeks before Christmas," Kearney was quoted as telling the newspaper. He added that Tilly "was particularly captivated by this force of nature and its effects."

© The Canadian Press, 2005

If you haven't noticed, I've been working a lot recently on coordinating work for a big conference, so I thought I'd put a link to the conference website just so the few people who hadn't realized what had been sucking away all of my free time....

Eisenhower and National Security
for the 21st Century

I know.. I know.. Those of you who know me are asking 'What free time?"

Check out this cool idea:

Researchers Compost Old Mobile Phones and Transform them into Flowers

A researcher at Warwick University in the UK has developed a cellphone cover including a flower seed that will decompose to create mulch and grow a flower when discarded.

Bananaz Burns Down

The Bananaz restaurant that we used to play NTN against burned down early Friday morning. I'm spending a few days at home for Thanksgiving, a few towns away from Bananaz and I read this story in the local paper (photos are available with the link):

Bananaz: Up In Smoke
Financially troubled club burns; probe of fire’s cause ongoing
The Desert Sun November 27, 2004
By Lois Gormley and Ferdie De Vega

---

PALM DESERT -- A bar and grill that has wrestled with bankruptcy since 2003 went up in flames early Friday.

Bananaz, at the corner of Highway 111 and Fred Waring Drive in Palm Desert, quickly became engulfed when firefighters arrived on the scene of the 5:31 a.m. blaze, said Battalion Chief Dorian Cooley, Riverside County Fire Department/California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Nearly 50 firefighters and supervisory personnel responded to the scene with at least nine engines and a ladder truck, he said. The cause of the two-alarm fire at the 15,000-square-foot restaurant and bar was still unknown Friday evening. Fire investigators teamed with insurance investigators in an effort to determine the what started the blaze, Cooley said.

The fast-moving fire, which caused an estimated $2.5 million in damage, took place at a time it would be noticed, he said. By late Friday afternoon, investigators had not yet determined where in the building the blaze originated.

Nestled in the heart of some of Palm Desert’s busiest shopping hotspots, the club blaze was quickly spotted by post-Thanksgiving pre-dawn shoppers. A portion of Highway 111 was closed to traffic for seven hours.

Raylene Clark of La Quinta said she watched the firefighters battle the blaze at Bananaz for about an hour early Friday morning from behind a wall at the edge of the Desert Crossing shopping center parking lot across the street just before 6 a.m.

"I was dropping off my stepdaughter at Circuit City," she said. "We came all the way down Fred Waring (Drive)," Clark said, adding that they saw the billowing smoke in front of the mountains. "When you got to Monterey, you could start seeing the glowing," she said.

By 7:15 a.m., ash from the fire had landed on cars and trucks parked at the shopping center, and several onlookers had snapped photographs of the blaze with their cameras and cellular phones.

Charles Shamash, the Beverly Hills-based attorney who represented Bananaz Grill & Bar Palm Desert Inc. in its federal bankruptcy filing, refused comment Friday. Neither club owner Tom Budniak, nor office manager Craig Marlar nor club manager Randy Adams could be reached for comment.

The fire was fully controlled by 9 a.m., but fire crews remained on the scene throughout the day conducting extensive mop-up and overhaul. Charred debris were piled in the empty parking lot that was blocked off by yellow tape. At 4 p.m. temporary fencing had arrived be erected around the building; a few firefighters remained at the scene.

Formerly one of the busiest nightclub restaurants in the area, Bananaz was put up for sale for $3 million, according to a Baxley Properties listing early this year. The sale listing came after the mortgage holder on the building and the land sought to foreclose on the property and its owners filed for bankruptcy protection.

Bananaz Grill & Bar Palm Desert Inc. filed for Chapter 11 protection on June 24, 2003, after Zion National Bank of Utah started foreclosure proceedings. In June 2003, according to federal bankruptcy court records, the business filed for Chapter 11 protection. In September 2003, the case was dismissed and the file with the bankruptcy court closed in October 2003. In January 2004, the sale offering was reported. The Chapter 11 filing listed 25 creditors, ranging from the Internal Revenue Service to music-licensing giant BMI.

Oy--

Taking a break from a really crazy day at work to observe that one of the last things I need is someone supposedly called "Umbraged L. Vegetative" emailing me to buy into some sort of penis-enlargement scheme...

I feel like I might be a character in some kind of updated Kafka novel...

They say that hard work never killed anyone, but I'd rather not take a chance.
-Ronald Reagan

George W. Bush is giving him a run for his money.

Incredible! I had to push them to send me my absentee ballot but Riverside County lost no time in sending me a Jury Duty summons...


On a completely different note, here's something that's mildly amusing:

The Real Hussein II

A Flash video parody of Saddam Hussein to the tune of Eminem's "Without Me."

It hangs together relatively well with one major caveat. His statement that he "never even made a WMD" is false in that he used relatively simple (although extremely nasty) chemical weapons in the Anfal campaign, particularly on the village of Halabja in 1988. All the data I've seen shows that any WMD stockpiles or capabilities were destroyed or nonexistent at least from the end of the first Gulf War.

As the dog of complacency cocks its leg at the electrified fence of fate....

How's that for a transition?
(from a BBC comedy show)

I recently stumbled upon this Flash and have mixed feelings about it. So, I thought I'd put it up and see what other people's reactions are:

War

(Beware-- It's pretty dark. It's also pretty loud.)

What do you think?? I look forward to reading your comments.

It occasionally dawns on me how much people who pilot vehicles like airplanes, trains, buses, etc. along set routes must get incredibly bored with what they're supposed to tell their passengers over the millions of times that they do a particular route each day.

Like when I hear the following:

-- The pilot of American Airlines flight 3834 from Houston to Dallas comes on the PA at the beginning of the flight:

This is your master and commander of this aerospace vehicle speaking, His Excellency the Captain. Our airspeed velocity and cruising altitude will be....

-- And the operator of a Washington, DC metro train:

This is the Red Line to Glenmont, servicing downtown Washington, DC, Metro Center..... and beyond.....

Here's a really interesting and potentially fun contest that I recommend y'all try your hand at.

I used to work for an organization from which Citizens for Global Solutions was founded.

Check out their homepage! They do some interesting work...

Happy United Nations Day!



The United Nations was founded on this day fifty-nine years ago. Parts of it have received the Nobel Peace Prize eight times over that time though it sadly gets even less respect than Rodney Dangerfield.

I would be hard pressed to name another organization that has done as much demonstrable good for so many people around the world.

Look at the UN website and I guarantee you'll find lots of things that you didn't realize the UN was responsible for-- both in solving huge global problems and in ways that benefit your own daily life.

Take a look and actually speak up when people say manifestly incorrect things about the UN. Yes, it has a lot of flaws but those are nothing in comparison to what good it has done for the world.

Evidence of a Democracy Malfunction:
(compliments of Symi)
-----

Will We Need a New 'All the President's Men'?
by Frank Rich October 17, 2004
The New York Times

SUCH is the power of movies that the first image "Watergate" brings to mind three decades later is not Richard Nixon so much as the golden duo of Redford and Hoffman riding to the nation's rescue in "All the President's Men." But if our current presidency is now showing symptoms of a precancerous Watergate syndrome - as it is, daily - we have not yet reached that denouement immortalized by Hollywood, in which our scrappy heroes finally bring Nixon to heel in his second term. No, we're back instead in the earlier reels of his first term, before the criminality of the Watergate break-in, when no one had heard of Woodward and Bernstein. Back then an arrogant and secretive White House, furious at the bad press fueled by an unpopular and mismanaged war, was still flying high as it kneecapped with impunity any reporter or news organization that challenged its tightly enforced message of victory at hand.

It was then that the vice president, Spiro Agnew, scripted by the speechwriter Pat Buchanan, tried to discredit the press as an elite - or, as he spelled it out, "a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men." It was then that the attorney general, John Mitchell, under the pretext of national security, countenanced wiretaps of Hedrick Smith of The Times and Marvin Kalb of CBS News, as well as a full F.B.I. investigation of CBS's Daniel Schorr. Today it's John Ashcroft's Justice Department, also invoking "national security," that hopes to seize the phone records of Judith Miller and Philip Shenon of The Times, claiming that what amounts to a virtual wiretap is warranted by articles about Islamic charities and terrorism published nearly three years ago.

"The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before," wrote William Safire last month. When an alumnus of the Nixon White House says our free press is being attacked as "never before," you listen. What alarms him now are the efforts of Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame-Robert Novak affair, to threaten reporters at The Times and Time magazine with jail if they don't reveal their sources. Given that the Times reporter in question (Judith Miller again) didn't even write an article on the subject under investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald overreaches so far that he's created a sci-fi plot twist out of Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report."

It's all the scarier for being only one piece in a pattern of media intimidation that's been building for months now. Once Woodward and Bernstein did start investigating Watergate, Nixon plotted to take economic revenge by siccing the Federal Communications Commission on TV stations owned by The Washington Post's parent company. The current White House has been practicing pre-emptive media intimidation to match its policy of pre-emptive war. Its F.C.C. chairman, using Janet Jackson's breast and Howard Stern's mouth as pretexts, has sufficiently rattled Viacom, which broadcast both of these entertainers' infractions against "decency," that its chairman, the self-described "liberal Democrat" Sumner Redstone, abruptly announced his support for the re-election of George W. Bush last month. "I vote for what's good for Viacom," he explained, and he meant it. He took this loyalty oath just days after the "60 Minutes" fiasco prompted a full-fledged political witch hunt on Viacom's CBS News, another Republican target since the Nixon years. Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas, has threatened to seek Congressional "safeguards" regulating TV news content and, depending what happens Nov. 2, he may well have the political means to do it.

Viacom is hardly the only media giant cowed by the prospect that this White House might threaten its corporate interests if it gets out of line. Disney's refusal to release Michael Moore's partisan "Fahrenheit 9/11" in an election year would smell less if the company applied the same principle to its ABC radio stations, where the equally partisan polemics of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are heard every day. Even a low-profile film project in conflict with Bush dogma has spooked the world's largest media company, Time Warner, proprietor of CNN. Its Warner Brothers, about to release a special DVD of "Three Kings," David O. Russell's 1999 movie criticizing the first gulf war, suddenly canceled a planned extra feature, a new Russell documentary criticizing the current war. Whether any of these increasingly craven media combines will stand up to the Bush administration in a constitutional pinch, as Katharine Graham and her Post Company bravely did to the Nixon administration during Watergate, is a proposition that hasn't been remotely tested yet.

To understand what kind of journalism the Bush administration expects from these companies, you need only look at those that are already its collaborators. Fox News speaks loudly for itself, to the point of posting on its Web site an article by its chief political correspondent containing fictional John Kerry quotes. (After an outcry, it was retracted as "written in jest.") But Fox is just the tip of the Rupert Murdoch empire. When The New York Post covered the release of the report by the C.I.A.'s chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, it played the story on page 8 and didn't get to the clause "while no stockpiles of W.M.D. were found in Iraq" until the 16th paragraph. This would be an Onion parody were it not deadly serious.

It's hard to imagine an operation more insidious than Mr. Murdoch's, but the Sinclair Broadcast Group may be it. The owner or operator of 62 TV stations nationwide, including affiliates of all four major broadcast networks, this company gets little press scrutiny because it is invisible in New York City, Washington and Los Angeles, where it has no stations. But Sinclair, whose top executives have maxed out as Bush contributors, was first smoked out of the shadows last spring when John McCain called it "unpatriotic" for ordering its eight ABC stations not to broadcast the "Nightline" in which Ted Koppel read the names of the then 721 American casualties in Iraq. This was the day after Paul Wolfowitz had also downsized American casualties by testifying before Congress that they numbered only about 500.

Thanks to Elizabeth Jensen of The Los Angeles Times, who first broke the story last weekend, we now know that Sinclair has grander ambitions for the election. It has ordered all its stations, whose most powerful reach is in swing states like Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, to broadcast a "news" special featuring a film, "Stolen Honor," that trashes Mr. Kerry along the lines of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads. The film's creator is a man who spent nearly eight years in the employ of Tom Ridge. Sinclair has ordered that it be run in prime time during a specific four nights in late October, when it is likely to be sandwiched in with network hits like "CSI," "The Apprentice" and "Desperate Housewives." Democrats are screaming, but don't expect the Bush apparatchiks at federal agencies to pursue their complaints as if they were as serious as a "wardrobe malfunction." A more likely outcome is that Sinclair, which already reaches 24 percent of American viewers, will reap the regulatory favors it is seeking to expand that audience in a second Bush term.

Like the Nixon administration before it, the Bush administration arrived at the White House already obsessed with news management and secrecy. Nixon gave fewer press conferences than any president since Hoover; Mr. Bush has given fewer than any in history. Early in the Nixon years, a special National Press Club study concluded that the president had instituted "an unprecedented, government-wide effort to control, restrict and conceal information." Sound familiar? The current president has seen to it that even future historians won't get access to papers he wants to hide; he quietly gutted the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the very reform enacted by Congress as a post-Watergate antidote to pathological Nixonian secrecy.

The path of the Bush White House as it has moved from Agnew-style press baiting to outright assault has also followed its antecedent. The Nixon administration's first legal attack on the press, a year before the Watergate break-in, was its attempt to stop The Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the leaked internal Defense Department history of our failure in Vietnam. Though 9/11 prompted Ari Fleischer's first effort to warn the media to "watch what they say," it's failure in Iraq that has pushed the Bush administration over the edge. It was when Operation Iraqi Freedom was bogged down early on that it spun the fictional saga of Jessica Lynch. It's when the percentage of Americans who felt it was worth going to war in Iraq fell to 50 percent in the Sept. 2003 Gallup poll, down from 73 that April, that identically worded letters "signed" by different soldiers mysteriously materialized in 11 American newspapers, testifying that security for Iraq's citizens had been "largely restored." (As David Greenberg writes in his invaluable "Nixon's Shadow," phony letters to news outlets were also a favorite Nixon tactic.) The legal harassment of the press, like the Republican party's Web-driven efforts to discredit specific journalists even at non-CBS networks, has escalated in direct ratio to the war's decline in support.

"What you're seeing on your TV screens," the president said when minimizing the Iraq insurgency in May, are "the desperate tactics of a hateful few." Maybe that's the sunny news that can be found on a Sinclair station. Now, with our election less than three weeks away, the bad news coming out of Iraq everywhere else is a torrent. Reporters at virtually every news organization describe a downward spiral so dangerous that they can't venture anywhere in Iraq without risking their lives. Last weekend marines spoke openly and by name to Steve Fainaru of The Washington Post about the quagmire they're witnessing firsthand and its irrelevance to battling Al Qaeda, whose 9/11 attack motivated many of them to enlist in the first place. "Every day you read the articles in the States where it's like, 'Oh, it's getting better and better," said Lance Cpl. Jonathan Snyder of Gettysburg, Pa. "But when you're here, you know it's worse every day." Another marine, Lance Cpl. Alexander Jones of Ball Ground, Ga., told Mr. Fainaru: "We're basically proving out that the government is wrong. We're catching them in a lie." Asked if he was concerned that he and his buddies might be punished for speaking out, Cpl. Brandon Autin of New Iberia, La., responded: "What are they going to do - send us to Iraq?"

What "they" can do is try to intimidate, harass, discredit and prosecute news organizations that report stories like this. If history is any guide, and the hubris of re-election is tossed into the mix, that harrowing drama can go on for a long time before we get to the feel-good final act of "All the President's Men."

A while ago, I was working on a project that involved working with a guy who was located down in Metro Atlanta.

His name was Jim Crow.

Yes he is a real person. No, he wasn't pulling my leg.

I had to ask a few times to make sure I had it right but he wasn't fazed. Because he was having to go out of his way to something for the project, I didn't ask him specifically about his name but I'm still trying to figure out how something like that could have happened in earnest....

A very interesting article:

Deconstructing the War on Terror
by Pepe Escobar
October 13, 2004
The Asia Times

"Bush speaks of 'war', but he is in fact incapable of identifying the enemy against whom he declares that he has declared war." - Jacques Derrida, September 2001

Wales sinks into Irish Sea on EU map

Eh... Nobody could spell Welsh place names anyway--

It's amazing... the Bush administration can't find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but they're quite expert at leaving smoking guns around...

How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence

An Open Letter to the Heads of State and Government of the European Union and NATO
September 28, 2004

Very interesting. I wonder who specificially is their intended audience. More importantly, I wonder what all of these luminaries would recommend instead.

Finally, I find a real discussion about The Corporation, a documentary film and book that makes the case that the current status of the corporation within society is "psychopathic." It has, perhaps understandably, disappeared from theaters several months ago, after only about two weeks of very active promotion. I haven't seen or heard anything about it since. While I don't think I'd go as far as the movie seems to have done, the fact that it just disappeared really bothers me. I'm a firm believer in sunshine as being the most effective disinfectant.

But I just happened to stumble over this discussion on Radio Netherlands, an interview of law professor Joel Bakan, the book's author, and his responses to a few listener emails. The page opens onto a transcript of the discussion but you can find an audio link if you scroll down a little bit.

Does anyone out there know what happened to the film? I'd be interested to hear about it and what y'all think about the interview.

In case you missed it, here's the transcript of last night's "debate" between John F. Kerry and George W. Bush.

Ok, having grown up in a household that had a strong German hyper-diligent streak to it, I understand the phrase 'If you're going to do something, do it right' but this is just incredible.

Among the many foreign language versions of Deutsche Welle's homepage, somebody thought it would be funny to include something in the artificially developed Klingon language from Star Trek. But this goes waaaay further than just a few mentions....

A few happy birthdays to post--

First of all, many happy returns to DC Penguin on her birthday today--

What's this about my looking like I'm nine years old? That should make you, what? About four?? ;-)

Several other people have had birthdays in the recent past, who I don't think have blogs. (let me know if I'm mistaken)

Stuart Washington-- a truly remarkable guy who's pushing the bounds of science by, apparently, trying to read the minds of bats. I only found out about his birthday as it was hurtling by but warm wishes nonetheless....

Guy Jordan-- his birthday was last Thursday but I haven't had a chance to wish him well personally. If he stays at NTN tomorrow until I'm able to get there from my grad Russian class, I'll make sure that changes.

Congratulations all!

Happy Birthday to me... Happy Birthday to me...

Kind of torn about how to feel about today being my birthday. A lot of things have changed since I was born, though. 25 years is both too short and too long a time to be around...
(I was listening to this NPR story about the use of 'educational' filmstrips in the classroom. Damn, those recordings take me back. They were using those in my school district until the end of the 1980s!)

I'd like people to know about my birthday but don't want to toot my own horn about it. Doing that always seems to come across as expecting people to react in paroxysms of awkward congratulations. --Definitely not what I want.

In a perfect world, this kind of thing would somehow be more genuine, though I have no idea how it would work....

I guess I'm just being wistful... and rambling. Well, I'm a quarter of a century old and getting older, so tough! There's a lot more rambling to come.

Anger mixed with frustration mixed with sadness...

This is what you get when you blindly follow the 'free market.' Oro Grande is only about 50 miles from where I'm from.

The New York Times
September 17, 2004

Collapse of 60 Charter Schools Leaves Californians Scrambling
By SAM DILLON


Ken Larson was pacing the floor of his office in a tiny elementary school in Oro Grande, Calif., surrounded by the chaos of fax lines beeping, three beleaguered secretaries peppering him with questions and phone lines ringing for the umpteenth time.

It had been a month since one of the nation's largest charter school operators collapsed, leaving 6,000 students with no school to attend this fall. The businessman who used $100 million in state financing to build an empire of 60 mostly storefront schools had simply abandoned his headquarters as bankruptcy loomed, refusing to take phone calls. That left Mr. Larson, a school superintendent whose district licensed dozens of the schools, to clean up the mess.

"Hysterical parents are calling us, swearing and shouting," Mr. Larson said in an interview in Oro Grande last week. "People are walking off with assets all over the state. We're absolutely sinking."

The disintegration of the California Charter Academy, the largest chain of publicly financed but privately run charter schools to slide into insolvency, offers a sobering picture of what can follow. Thousands of parents were forced into a last-minute search for alternate schools, and some are still looking; many teachers remain jobless; and students' academic records are at risk in abandoned school sites across California.

Investigators are sifting through records seeking causes of the disaster, which has raised new questions about how charter schools are regulated.

"Until the Charter Academy went into its tailspin, few people predicted that these crashes could be so bloody, but this has been a catastrophe for many people," said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley. "The critics of market-oriented reforms warned of risks with the philosophy of let-the-buyer-beware, but in this case, buyers were just totally hung out to dry."

Jack O'Connell, the California superintendent of schools, said in an interview that a majority of the state's 537 charter schools were making a solid contribution to public education. But Mr. O'Connell has concluded from the disaster that the state must apply "tough love" in regulating them, "to keep this kind of near-bankruptcy and chaos from happening again," he said.

"If there's mismanagement and malfeasance, we'll come in and put you out of business," he said.

Back in 1999, the national movement to provide alternatives to parents through charter schools, which face less burdensome regulation than other public schools, was gaining steam. Many charter schools have since flourished, and experts say that some of them offer an excellent education. But in Southern California, there were signs of trouble soon after C. Steven Cox, a former insurance executive whose only educational credential was his brief service on a local school board, founded the Charter Academy.

State auditors are now scrutinizing Mr. Cox's financial records to determine whether he exaggerated enrollments and to sort out claims from a line of creditors, said Scott Hannan, director of school fiscal services at the California Department of Education.

"But our highest priority is securing the student records," Mr. Hannan said. That is a sore point with Mr. Larson, who said that thousands of students' immunization and academic records had been virtually abandoned all across California.

Mr. Larson, superintendent of a tiny school district in Oro Grande, a Mojave Desert village 88 miles northeast of Los Angeles that looks like a set for "Bad Day at Black Rock," has converted a storeroom at his school into a warehouse for the records. He has arranged for dozens of file cabinets holding student records to be trucked to Oro Grande from schools that have closed across the Mojave Desert, he said, but he has no way to collect records and equipment left behind elsewhere.

Mr. Larson said Mr. Cox approached him in 2001, preaching the charter school gospel that money spent on filing reports to government regulators would be better spent in classrooms, and asking the Oro Grande district to license him to found charter schools. The Oro Grande school board approved the idea, and two other California districts forged similar relationships with Mr. Cox between 1999 and 2001.

Mr. Cox eventually founded 60 satellite schools in low- and middle-income communities stretching from Chula Vista near the Mexican border to Gridley, 140 miles northeast of San Francisco, and under California's financing formulas the state paid him about $5,000 annually for each student he enrolled. As his business grew, he hired his wife, son, daughter-in-law and other relatives to work at his corporate headquarters in Victorville, near Oro Grande.

But by early 2003, Mr. Cox had become mired in several costly confrontations with the California Department of Education; one centered on whether 10 of his schools were in violation of a 2002 law barring charter operators from opening schools in counties they had not registered in. The state withheld more than $6 million that Mr. Cox had expected to receive.

Mr. Cox sued, seeking to force payment, but lost that battle after running up huge legal fees, and the state withheld money as a result of other disputes, too. By the summer, Mr. Cox's financial difficulties had grown severe, and on July 28, the trustees of one of the four charters responded to the mounting crisis by voting to close the schools they had licensed. Mr. Cox stalked out of that meeting and stopped responding to most phone calls.

Within a week and a half, trustees voted to close the rest of Mr. Cox's schools, and his second in command announced to scores of employees gathered at the Victorville headquarters that they were out of a job. Kim Ehrlich, a billing supervisor, said she spent the first half of August with workers dismantling the offices around her, phoning local utility companies across California to turn off the power at Charter Academy schools, then lost her job.

The sudden collapse blindsided even the charter school principals. Melody Parker, whose Village elementary school in Inglewood was one of the most popular schools in Mr. Cox's organization, said that although her budget had been slashed and Mr. Cox had grown aloof, she never imagined that his organization could fall apart.

"It hit us like a tornado," Ms. Parker said. On Aug. 12, she informed teachers that their jobs were gone, and the next day she told hundreds of parents gathered at the school that it would not open for the fall term. Many had still not found schools by the second week of September, she said.

"The collapse was so disheartening,' said Dwayne Muhammad, who works in a funeral home and whose daughter Aisha was to attend the Village's fourth grade this fall. "Everybody began rushing to find alternate schools."

Mr. Muhammad has visited eight schools in the weeks since, all of which have been full, he said Monday. "We've been left by the wayside."

The nonprofit California Charter School Association said in a report this week that 80 percent of the students displaced from Mr. Cox's schools had since enrolled in other charter schools. Some teachers, like Maria Boatwright, who taught first grade at the Village, have found new jobs at other charters.

But teachers all across the state have reported difficulties in finding new teaching positions because most schools had hired their staffs by the time the academy collapsed, Mr. Larson said.

At the interview in Oro Grande, he produced a stack of letters from distraught, jobless teachers. Travis D. Taylor, who taught art and science to students at a Charter Academy school in Gridley, wrote to say that he had not been repaid the hundreds of dollars he spent on books and science equipment for his students.

Mr. Taylor's mother, Shelly, said that since the collapse, Mr. Taylor had been unable to find another teaching job. With his debts mounting, he has been harvesting rice "to keep his head above water," she said.

Mr. Cox did not respond to requests for an interview left on his voicemail, sent by e-mail and relayed through former employees. Mr. Larson has not been able to reach him either, he said.

One of Mr. Larson's secretaries interrupted the interview to announce that the landlord of a school forced to close in Los Angeles was threatening to dump desks and student records in the street to make way for a new tenant. Mr. Larson wrestled with the notion of driving a truck to Los Angeles himself to fetch the assets.

"There's 100 desks down there," he muttered. "What would we do with 100 desks?"




http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/17/education/17charter.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=

For those of you confused by the cover of "The Economist" I posted a few days ago:

Look at this for background.

So... I was at work the other day and get a strange call on my cell phone... my brother!? I hadn't heard from him in at least 6 months. Apparently Los Angeles hasn't swallowed him up.

In fact, he's coming to DC tomorrow night! Still a bit stunned myself but I'll manage. Any recommendations as to what to do with him?

Now I've just got to get rid of this cold... Blech!

Quite possibly could be lost footage from Office Space... or maybe not...

The guys in this video probably worked about as hard as Peter did, at least.

Search for chair_test.wmv if it doesn't open automatically.

Absolutely perfect....

Bizarre--

Mood of Blagoveshchensk customs officers should improve

Aromatherapy lamps are to be installed at customs posts in Blagoveshchensk, Amur Oblast, Vostok-Media news agency reported in July. In an effort to improve the mood of customs officers, maintain their psychological well-being and reduce stress, their union has initiated the aromatherapy drive. Customs officers will also be able to take aromatherapy courses.

-- Russian Far Eastern News (September 2004)

(Keep in mind, Blagoveshchensk is on the border with China, north of Manchuria.)

People who own white Sport Utility Vehicles should be whacked upside the head. No... probably worse. Just like any parent who decides to name their child 'Chastity.'

Yaay! Redheads finally get a little more respect! And so cute!!

Red Letter Day for Red-Heads at London Zoo

LONDON (Reuters) - They say blondes have more fun, but redheads will have the edge on Sunday when they get into London Zoo for free to view a rare new-born ginger-coloured monkey.

The endangered south east Asian Francois Langur monkey, called Laa Laa, has typical baby orange fur which in six months will turn a glossy black.

London Zoo said 9,500 red-heads had already downloaded free vouchers from its Web Site.

"It has been very popular. We will accept all shades of red, auburn, titian, ginger, you name it," a Zoo spokesman said.

Ginger Sunday will also allow red-heads, often the butt of jokes in Britain, to win some friends since the vouchers allow them to bring a friend, be they brunette, blonde or even bald.

Britain has one of the highest concentrations of redheads in the world, but a recent survey showed that 9 out of ten were teased at school about their hair colour.

A national utility company even decided to poke fun at redheads when it ran an ad campaign during 2000 which showed a family of gingers above the caption - "There are some things in life you can't choose".

You've got to hand it to this guy---

Ghana: Opposition party wants US to pay for 1966 coup

GHANA BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 1
Saturday, July 31, 2004

(FBIS Transcribed Excerpt)

The EGLE (Every Ghanaian Living Everywhere) Party has asked the US government to make amends for derailing Ghana's progress through the sponsorship of the 1966 coup d'etat that overthrew the government of Dr Kwame Nkrumah.

According to Mr Danny Ofori-Atta, chairman of the party, the Central Intelligence Agency's recent declassified files clearly admit the role of the United States played and it was only fair that it made up for causing Ghana's economy to stagnate ever since.

He has, therefore, called for a total cancellation of Ghana's 5bn-external debt and the setting up of "credit guarantee for a private company capitalized with 5bn which will be in the form of a 30-year US Treasury insurance guarantee to back the capital of the private company to be listed on the Ghana Stock Exchange". (Passage omitted)

(Description of Source: Accra Ghana Broadcasting Corporation Radio 1 in English -- state-owned, government-controlled radio)

I wish this were a surprise-- but it unfortunately was only a matter of time:

Bombs rock American and Israeli embassies in Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Well, the whole Democratic convention has been and will be analyzed and hyped so there isn't much original I would add.

The only thing I can say is that I am extremely glad to see them reaching across party lines to formulate "American" policy instead of "Democratic" policy. I know it's only talk until it is lived up to but it puts a lot of momentum towards turning the corner from the 50-50 stalemate we've been stuck in.

We'll see.

Just when you thought North Africa didn't need any more problems, with grinding poverty, Islamic extremism and the crisis in Darfur....

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has launched an urgent appeal for $83 million to curb a deadly locust plague ravaging north and western African crops. Government ministers from Algeria, Chad, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal and Tunisia met in Algeria this week to discuss efforts in their countries to deal with the problem before drafting a plan at regional level.

News clip from today's Global Development Briefing by the Development Executive Group

 
Unfortunately, my blog is one of the first things that has to go when I get busy but here's something to show that I'm still around....  

US Cuts Off Aid to Uzbekistan

It was a slow day and the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all

The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry, don't cry

It was a dry wind and it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers and the automatic earth

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all

The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry, don't cry

It's a turn-around jump shot
It's everybody jump start
It's every generation throws a hero up the pop charts

Medicine is magical and magical is art
The boy in the bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart

And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all

The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry, don't cry

"The Boy in the Bubble" by Paul Simon
Graceland album

This has been running through my head as I hear the news and (try to) deal with a lot of stuff that has been coming up in my life recently. Hope to be posting a bit more soon.

"Holy Men in Tights!"-- A Superheroes Conference

A call for papers at a conference hosted by the Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia

I know a few people who could submit papers here no problem....

Interesting:

Global Dispatch: From Turkey to Tibet
The Guardian, Monday February 23, 2004

Brian Whitaker tries to pin down the boundaries of the Middle East and discovers that over the years it has been all things to all (self-interested) people

I have been writing about it in the Guardian for almost four years and I'm fairly sure that I have been there, but I have to confess that I don't know for certain where the Middle East is.

The only consolation - for me, if not for those on the receiving end of US Middle East policy - is that the state department, the Pentagon and the military are as confused as I am.

Read the entire article

This is disturbing:

Spying Commonplace at the UN, Diplomats Say

It reminds me of a story one of my former professors used to tell. A native of Ceaucescu's Romania (one of the more paranoid Communist satellites), she was celebrating the new year with her family in Bucharest when she, knowing her phone was being monitored, said simply into the phone (without dialing or having it ring):

"Happy New Year"

and a man's voice on the phone responded:

"Happy New Year to you too."

and no, that last post wasn't an april fool's joke...

Happy April Fools Day!

This came out at least a week before but this is just too funny to be true...

Canada Could Ditch Winter Blues by Annexing Caribbean Paradise Some Canadians (including members of Parliament) are lobbying for Canada to annex the Turks and Caicos Islands!

Here's the site they put up to promote the idea

The Turks and Caicos is a small island group near the Bahamas, thousands of miles from even the closest point in Canada. They've got a population of not even 20,000 people and they're talking about making it a possible new province?!

Where I come from, life is unfit to be lived. Given the strong winds and poor public transport, whatever you plan to do turns into an immensely arduous undertaking. At the age of fourteen you are already incredibly weary, and you don't get a proper break until you're fourty-five. Very often people go out shopping and don't come back, or else they write a novel and on page 2,000, they suddenly realize how confusingly out of hand the whole thing has got and start all over again from the beginning. It is a timeless life, one of the gtreat achievements of which is the chance to die in one's own bed.

From Russian Disco by Wladimir Kaminer (Ebury Press; August 1, 2002)

With all the stories of crises and bad things happening throughout the world, I thought it would be good to post something positive for a change:

Participatory Government: A New Reality Slowly Emerges in Tajikistan (January 2004, from the Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative of the American Bar Association)

According to the State Department,

"More democracy is the best antidote to terror."
-- Richard Boucher, State Department Spokesperson

Powell Offers Help in Uzbekistan Probe

Funny how our democratic freedoms in this country are continually eroded with things like the Patriot Act.....

Taking a quick break during a crazy day at work.....





Which Homestar Runner character are you?

this quiz was made by jurjyfrort

To explain the puzzling absence of recent blog postings, I present this rant:

Argh--

I finally get my computer fixed after fighting with Dell to get my warranty recognized, my requests getting lost twice because of computer problems on their side, long delays in actually having the repairman come to perform surgery, and digging up a strange OS that my system had never run to reboot my computer to find that the firm I took it to initially for data retrieval had stuffed an entirely different harddrive into my defunct machine!

(try to say all that in one breath)

So where does that leave me? I've been basically computerless for 2 months, using only a klunky system here at work, trying to get my system back in order and I'm stuck with a messed up piece of hardware running the memories of some AU Washington program student whose most pressing computer need was downloading pictures of Matt Damon...... Argh! [sorry Tim ;-)]

So bear with me as I plunk down a big wad of cash (that I don't really have) to get operational again. I should be more digitally active when that comes...

Lots of upheaval here, made worse by an ongoing battle to make the electronic gadgets in my life work. I've succeeded in resolving problems with my phone and now the long saga of my string of computer problems seem like they will (hopefully) come to a close soon. (We'll see if the repair person comes when they said they would)

In the meantime, here's something bizarre that caught my eye:
(from RFE/RL NEWSLINE Vol. 8, No. 30, Part I, 17 February 2004)

PUTIN ENCROACHING ON SANTA'S SPHERE OF INFLUENCE. A boy living in Ufa who sent Russian President Putin a letter saying he "does not believe in God but believes only in the president" has been given a computer, an RFE/RL Ufa correspondent reported on 12 February. The gift was reportedly paid for by local authorities. Another child from Bashkortostan reportedly wrote to Putin asking for a puppy. The 8-year-old girl from Ufa received a reply saying her request was forwarded to the Bashkortostan authorities. Ufa's Sovietskii Raion administration, which was tasked with dealing with the issue, determined that the girl's family is too impoverished to support the puppy. However, raion officials said that they cannot avoid giving the child a puppy because it was an order by the Kremlin. JAC

I'm glad this story is finally percolating up through the Western media but it has hit a brick wall of late--

Trial Could Dredge Up Sordid Role of US (in Iraq)

I'm looking for the transcripts of American officials commenting on the Halabja chemical weapons attack-- surprising nobody has brought those up in view of recent events...

And it's also interesting that Bill Frist is the recipient of this ricin attack, or whatever it turns out to be ...
Why him and (apparently) only him? There are plenty of more government officials that would give extremists on any side more "bang for the buck" without running into that much security. Frist has kept a relatively low-profile and am just confused as to why this is happening to him specifically instead of a more random or high-profile target.

(as a disclaimer, I have friends who work in the Senate offices that have been evacuated and am therefore extremely serious in my condemnation of this and any other terrorist attack)

Instead of having to deal with the tedious process of nurturing democratic institutions in Iraq, the United States should solve the whole controversy about elections by sending out a ballot asking "Should Saddam Hussein be recalled?"

Bursting with gratitude for their benificent liberators, the United States, Iraqis of all political backgrounds would undoubtedly embrace democracy as totally as it is in the US. Arnold Schwarzenegger would surely win in a landslide.

California would be bursting with gratitude too.

It's me again-- Still plagued with computer problems and much more...

Have lots of things to write on:

Like why you should avoid American Express-- especially financial services.

How the toppling of the Shevuardnadze regime in Georgia demonstrates the operation of a very interesting activist movement in many of the former Soviet republics.

How the Republican junta running our country is finding even more ways to run it into the ground.

All this and much more, when I actually can dedicate time to writing!

In the meantime:

Check out al3x.net, a site maintained by Alex Payne; who I had the pleasure of meeting recently.

Read this article to get a little perspective on how many people still see Stalin.

And watch me indulge my love of maps, this one of the states I've visited (thanks, Tricia). Anyone want to show me around the south or the midwest?



create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide

More soon.....

It's one of the most overused cliches of the universe but you really don't know how much you use something until it's gone. Without warning, my computer has stopped working entirely; not even responding to being plugged into the wall. I?ve done as much as I can to figure out what's going wrong to no avail. Hardware problems are beyond my experience and I?m trying to figure out where to go from here. Lots of mitigating circumstances, complications and headaches.

So, I have another quibbling excuse for not writing as much as I have material.

But, here are a few things that have caught my eye recently:

Growing up in a family of teachers, I can tell you that this is all too true:

Talk the Edutalk

Take a look at this interesting and revealing story about a focus of real power behind the president:

The Strong, Silent Type

I also got this email forwarded to me and thought that it deserved to be distributed to the paltry readership of my blog:

The American Family Association, an anti-gay organization, is doing a poll on gay marriage. They are going to present the results to Congress, hoping to gain support for the federal constitutional amendment to define "marriage" as solely a heterosexual union. However, anyone can take their poll, so please pass this URL far and wide. (I doubt they expect anyone but their own, anti-gay members to answer it.)

Marriage Poll

Note: If the link doesn't work, go to www.afa.net and in the upper right corner of the web page is the poll link.

The Bush Administration: The model of financial responsibility....

The United States is running up a foreign debt of such record-breaking proportions that it threatens the financial stability of the global economy, according to a report released Jan 6. by the IMF, noting the rising U.S. budget deficit and ballooning trade imbalance. The report warns that the United States' net financial obligations to the rest of the world could be equal to 40 percent of its total economy within a few years-"an unprecedented level of external debt for a large industrial country," according to the fund, that could play havoc with the value of the dollar and international exchange rates.

(From the Global Development Briefing for January 8, 2004-- Published by The Development Executive Group)

It’s been a long time since I have posted anything—too long. And, you know me, I’ve got a few (thousand) thoughts and ideas scribbled down on little scraps of paper…..

Time to do some… well—whatever the digital equivalent of scribbling is…

Happy Birthday to two great people!

We're just coming up to a state holiday in Borealum as its favorite son and Answer Guy is getting just a little bit wiser than before. Happy Birthday, Tim!!! :-)

And warm wishes go out to another friend, this time a chick-- or should I say Rotisserie Gold? ;-) Happy Birthday Michele!!

Here's a submission for the 'least exciting title in government' competition:

Associate Administrator for Administration for the Federal Highway Administration

I guess the only thing I can say about this posting on one of the listservs I subscribe to is -- huh? I'm half tempted to ask for more information. But, then again, the other half has more sense.

1 -- Crazy Boy - Empowered By Girls (MD/DC/VA)
Reply to: anon-19244216@craigslist.org
Wed Nov 12th

Do you have a teen-aged daughter who struggles with self esteem issues? Perhaps she is hanging with "the wrong crowd," or when conversating with her you just don't seem to connect. "Crazy Boy - Empowered By Girls" can help. We use science to help teen-aged girls through what is one of the toughest periods in life.

If interested, please e-mail us and we will give you information on our next workshop.

Peace and blessings!

it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests this is in or around MD/DC/VA
This posting can be found at:
http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/grp/19244216.html

Things have been absolutely crazy these last few days-- should have a few hours or so to breathe a little..

Got to hear the Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni tonight at the "premiere" of the new travelogue he has produced with the help of the Discovery Channel. Of course, things were swept up and they only gave the most optimistic view of his rule and country but his time in power actually hasn't been all that bad for the Ugandans. (He came to power in a coup overthrowing Idi Amin but has now held generally free and fair elections.)

It should be showing on the Travel Channel in mid-December sometime. It's well done-- but don't let his role as the gruff guerilla leader and African head of state fool you-- he's really funny!

Going to crash soon, but this warranted a mention:

The German Post Office and Weltbild, a German publishing company, have teamed up to provide "witching hour delivery service" for the next German installment in the Harry Potter series. German Harry Potter fans can sign up for a service that will have the book delivered to their homes at the witching hour-- midnight-- of the day it is released to the public (Nov. 8).

No word yet on how many owls they're going to employ....

There is a small, metallic ladybug balloon with little legs and a bright red carapace trapped up in the vaulted ceiling of the 'Metro Center' station. When I saw it up there last week, I could just imagine a toddling little one losing grip of this sparkling treat in the onward crush of DC's metro system and seeing this wide-eyed balloon with its exaggerated antennae float out of reach to be trapped in the sprawling concrete arches.

Today, I happened to be walking through the same part of the station and the balloon was still there--its little legs dangling and body dented by lack of air.

I could see a little face, hanging up there in the arches. Deflated.

And now for a little bit of fun:

The stuff this guy/gal scripts is amazing!
I especially recommend checking out the eye and face scripts.

And in celebration of Halloween, here is an interview with Bill Kelly, Vice-Chairman of the Jelly Belly Company. It starts out talking about candy corn but listen for some insight into the mystery of the buttered popcorn jelly bean.

More soon.

In the line of fire:

One of my mom's first graders described the fire-line as the edge of a lava flow-- glowing and leaving ash and charred wreckage behind. We're not being affected, thank goodness, but we're just over the pass from the San Bernadino fires and not too far from the others. Some of my friends, however, aren't as lucky. This tragedy is more than blood red sunsets and huge clouds of smoke ringing the edges of my home valley. All of you are in my thoughts--if you need anything, I'm here.

The scary thing is that, for all the destruction they have wrought, the fires have only burned a fraction of the fuel that's out there. All the "Old" fire needs to do is hop over a ridgeline and there's a whole other set of heavily populated valleys full of dead, dry trees with hot, dry winds making things worse. It was 99 degrees at home a couple of days ago-- a pretty toasty end to October, even in the desert.

Here's what it looks like:



Keep in mind that this map is about 150 miles west to east.

*&!!@??!!^%!! Damn Dubya! Either he and his advisors are even bigger idiots than I thought or he is simply satan's spawn.

When the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, another ultra-conservative politician, was at Dubya's ranch in Crawford, TX, Dubya made a big show of praising Howard in general and specifically for his support for the invasion of Iraq and the "war on terr." (sic)

One of Bush's biggest ways of talking up his Australian counterpart was to call him a "man of steel."

Not a good man. Not a great leader. Not even a visionary. Specifically a "man of steel!!"

If you don't understand what I'm getting so worked up about, consider a certain someone who killed millions of his people by both enforced starvation and direct killing. Whose name is synonomous with extreme repression and brutal tyranny. He was also US enemy number one for a good chunk of the 20th century.

Consider the name Joseph Stalin. People who know Russian history or a little about the politics of the time will remember that "Stalin" was actually not his real name. He was born Iosip (Joseph) Djugashvili but started to use the surname "Stalin" for political effect.

What does "Stalin" mean? You guessed it. It translates into "Man of Steel."

And what did our current president call one of his closest allies in a speech yesterday in front of the Australian Parliament?

Five months ago, your Prime Minister was a distinguished visitor of ours in Crawford, Texas, at our ranch. You might remember that I called him a "man of steel." (Laughter.) That's Texan for "fair dinkum." (Laughter.) Prime Minister John Howard is a leader of exceptional courage, who exemplifies the finest qualities of one of the world's great democracies.

He even has the stupidity or gall to bring it up again!

Why does it feel like my life is a concerted attempt to thwart Occam's Razor?

Tomorrow will come. But the question is-- How will it leave us?