I just saw the recent film adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe and enjoyed it immensely. It was particularly interesting to see how the filmmakers chose material from a book whose content is sometimes not altogether easily filmed. I'm also interested in the quantity of 'Douglas Adams-ness' in the screenplay since he was working on an adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide when he died, though I'm not sure exactly how close to completion he felt it was.

In other news, I have stumbled upon Conversations with History an extremely wide-ranging archive of fascinating interviews with people of remarkable insight and experience in global issues that reach much deeper than most similar programs I have seen. Anyone interested in world events should browse widely within the literally hundreds of recorded interviews.

I just finished listening to Timothy Garton Ash discuss his deep insights gained from being at the epicenter of the collapse of Soviet Communism's influence on Central Europe. The whole interview is excellent but listen especially for the description of how he helped Lech Walesa communicate with Margaret Thatcher.

I also really enjoyed a fabulous interview with Thomas Goltz. Listen to how he came to get out of Samashki, the Chechen village he lived in for several weeks during the wars in Chechnya.

I also recommend that you visit Thomas Goltz's own site(thomasgoltz.com) and take a look at the beautiful slide show he has put together of his trip, by motorcycle (and sidecar), along the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline route in 2002.

Well, I guess I should get back to work... more soon!

A very nice philatelic view of an internal Chinese landscape. (original stamp is 2 by 3.5 inches)  

A bunch of miscellaneous but interesting stuff:

Spying on the Government: A UC Berkeley geographer maps the secret military bases of the American West -- where billions of dollars disappear into creepy clandestine projects.


Trevor Paglen The protagonist of the preceding story-- Includes Secret Bases, Secret Wars and Recording Carceral Landscapes.


Secret Service Visits Art Show at Columbia from the Chicago Sun-Times


A fascinating collection of historical airline and airport information

Building a Better Spy

Advice for John Negroponte: Go for broke. Face down Rumsfeld. Your country needs you.

Richard A. Clarke writes directly (and quite sharply) to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte here in a very interesting shot across his bow.

It's also amazing to think that Negroponte has been in this new office of 'Director of National Intelligence' for a month. It's amazing how seamlessly the bureaucracy has swallowed him up.

How prescient!

As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents more and more the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal: On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

--H.L. Mencken (1920)

Some very sad news:

Andrew J. Goodpaster, 90, Soldier and Scholar, Dies
The New York Times
May 17, 2005

Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster, a soldier and scholar who fought in World War II, commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and came out of retirement to lead the United States Military Academy in a time of crisis, died on Monday at Walter Reed Army Medical Center here. He was 90 and a resident of Washington.

The cause was prostate cancer, said his granddaughter Sarah Nesnow.

General Goodpaster was NATO commander from 1969 to 1974, after serving as deputy commander of American forces in Vietnam. Before beginning his Vietnam service in 1968, he was the third-ranking member of the United States delegation to the Paris negotiations with North Vietnam.

He retired as a four-star general after his NATO command but came out of retirement in 1977 to become superintendent of West Point and deal with the aftermath of a scandal involving cheating. General Goodpaster voluntarily gave up a star, assuming the rank of lieutenant general as superintendent. He retired again in 1981.

Andrew Jackson Goodpaster was born on Feb. 12, 1915, in Granite City, Ill. He attended McKendree College in Lebanon, Ill., for two years before transferring to West Point, where he graduated second in his class in 1939. That year, he married Dorothy Anderson.

In World War II he was twice wounded while leading a combat engineer battalion in North Africa and Italy. In addition to two Purple Hearts, he was awarded the Army's second-highest decoration for valor, the Distinguished Service Cross, for making a reconnaissance under heavy fire through a minefield, and a Silver Star.

Returning to the United States after being wounded for the second time, he served for three years on the general staff of the War Department. Early in that assignment, he helped plan for an invasion of Japan that became unnecessary after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the late 1940's, he studied at Princeton University, earning a master's in engineering and a doctorate in international relations. In the early 1950's he was attached to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, then served with Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe.

From 1954 to 1961, he was an adviser to President Eisenhower. He then served as assistant commander of the Third Infantry Division and, later, as commander of the Eighth Infantry Division. He held several Pentagon posts and served as commandant of the National War College before becoming deputy commander of American forces in Vietnam.

When he came out of retirement to become West Point's superintendent, the academy was reeling from a cheating scandal that involved 151 cadets. In his four-year tenure there, the general sought to substitute ''positive leadership'' for hazing and personal abuse, to bolster the academy's courses in humanities and public policy, and to ease the admission of women to the academy.

General Goodpaster was a senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Eisenhower Institute, which studies foreign and domestic policy issues.

He was a member of the American Security Council and a founder of the Committee on the Present Danger, groups whose central thesis was that the Soviet Union's military threat was underestimated and that the United States needed a correspondingly strong defense.

A West Point classmate, Lt. Gen. Edward L. Rowny, retired, said General Goodpaster was working on his memoirs until a week ago.

He is survived by his wife; two daughters, Susan Sullivan of Alexandria, Va., and Anne Batte of Salisbury, N.C.; and seven grandchildren.

This amazing man spoke at my conference and was actually cracking jokes, despite having gone through at least two rounds of radiation therapy relatively recently.

And the things that he had done and seen! A certainly full life!

Rest in peace, sir!

Here's something that I think people would enjoy:

CONELRAD
- an often 'over the top' look at Cold War propaganda, design and politics.

Plowing through a lot of work while I'm fighting off this damn cold but I decided that I had to stop to let the rest of the world know about a book I happened across:

On Bullshit
by Harry G. Frankfurt
Princeton University Press, 2005

The video interview is disappointing as only Princeton University Press could make it.

Anybody out there read it, so you can tell me whether it should drop the 'On' in its title?

Harumph!! I'm stuck in bed with a bad cold when I could be listening to Vaclav Havel speak in person at the Library of Congress.

At least the LoC is broadcasting the presentation via live webcam. If you want to watch it from home, click here and follow the directions. It's going to start in a few minutes, so I'd better go...

For all of you out there in need of an Esperanto fix, or if you want something to go with the poetry you have gotten from a Tajik guide in Afghanistan, take a look at Radio Polonia's Esperanto page!

You can listen to today's news by clicking on the red link in the top left of the page.

Or maybe you can go to Rebecca-stan or maybe to Symi-stan. ;-)

Very sad news-- Huit (08/08/88 - 05/13/05), my landlord's extremely sweet dog, died of old age (in his sleep) on Saturday. Sorry to see that your white muzzle has finally caught up with you.... 

Everybody beware! It's Friday the 13th!

Something I saw in a local Chinese restaurant:

Sake:
(for one) $3.50
(for town) $8.00

===================

I'm sure they meant to write 'two' instead of 'town' but I had a good laugh anyway...

That money talks, I can't deny.
I heard it once. It said 'goodbye'!
- Richard Armour

I was walking down the street the other day and saw a DC vanity license plate spelling out "Bacchus."

Just perfect.

Symi's in DC-- Yaaaaay!!

Fitting.

Three slime mold beetles now bear the names of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Sometimes I wonder what some parents were thinking when they name their children certain things.

Most of you know my feelings about people who call their children 'Chastity' but there are some people whose names must make their lives a living hell just because of their resemblance to other people or fictional characters.

Of course, there is the character in the movie Office Space named Michael Bolton but I have talked to a lot of other people with bizarre connections:

There is a Toni Braxton working at the National Park Service.

I had to get a guy named Jim Crow to send me some info from Atlanta a few months ago in order to finish a project I was working on...

I went to high school with a Benjamin Franklin and have since met another one.

One of the people I competed against in Academic Decathlon was named Travis Tritt.

And many, many others...

There are also a few people whose names just conjure up unpleasant references:

A really good British professor of mine decided to change his name after moving to the US because his family name happened to be 'Barff.'

I can also go to what looks to be an interesting lecture on Operations Research, Military Consulting and the Growth of Tyson's Corner, Virginia: 1945-1970 given by Paul Virus, Curator of Aerospace Electronics & Computing, Division of Space History at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum.

I just feel sorry for them...

NEWS FLASH

MOLVANIA DISQUALIFIED FROM EUROVISION!

The tiny Eastern European republic of Molvania was disqualified from the Eurovision Song Contest this year.

Zladko “Zlad” Vladcik was to perform his very popular techno-ballad, “Elektronik – Supersonik” - described as “a melodic fusion combining hot disco rhythms with cold war rhetoric”. [ Click here to see the music video]

However, the 23-year-old singer was arrested at Istanbul’s Ataturk International Airport and immediately deported. While Eurovision does not normally test for recreational drugs, unfortunately for Vladcik, Turkish Customs do.

On his return, “Zlad” apologised to everyone in Molvania for letting them down, especially his family, his friends and his dealer.

“ZLAD” – A SHORT HISTORY

Zladko “Zlad” Vladcik rose to prominence in 2002 when he won Molvanian Idol in controversial circumstances - the other finalist, Ob Kuklop, pulled out due to a serious throat condition after one of the judges tried to strangle him.

“Zlad” immediately released the megahit, “Juust Az I Amm” – hailed by Rolling Stone as the most incorrectly spelt song of all time.

After barely 2 days on the Molvanian “Rhythm & Polka” charts, the track went platinum – remarkable considering it was only available on cassingle.

Then, in an exciting move, “Zlad” formed supergroup Wow! But while on their very first tour, he decided to go solo again, citing the fact that the rest of the band was “moving in a different direction” (Romania).

For more information on Molvania, visit the Jet Lag Travel Guide website and this NPR Interview.

Had a great time in NYC last weekend with Symi-- she's back in the US for a week to do research in the Columbia University libraries. Anyone out there have insight into antisemitism in France?

The cherry blossoms in New York were in full bloom and we had some phenomenal weather. And at night- a phenomenal time hearing Dee Dee Bridgewater sing the heck out of Les Chansons Francaises.

Looking forward to going back up for this coming weekend for Pesach.

This will be held only across the street from home in Indio-- looks like really good time. Some really impressive acts!

As many of you know, Penguin in the City (Tricia) has just celebrated a year after her harrowing bout with brain cancer. I encourage you all to read the following message and help however you can!

Justin

Please help me in the fight against brain tumors

Hello everyone!

On May 1st, the Brain Tumor Society will be hosting the 8th annual 2005 Race for Hope 5K to benefit brain tumor research. Last year, the Brain Tumor Society gave 1.3 million dollars to brain tumor research. This year it hopes to give even more.

I will be running/walking because, as many of you know, I'm a brain tumor survivor. (If you're able to come to the race, you'll definitely see me in the survivor's tent in a Lance-Armstrong inspired yellow T-Shirt!) I walk in honor and in memory of still a few other people. I hope that you will consider walking with me or supporting me and raise money and awareness to fight this horrible disease. Here are the various ways you can participate:

1. Sign up to walk/run on May 1st by visiting www.curebraintumors.org. When registering, you will have the option of making an additional donation on top of the $25 registration fee. All donations are tax deductible.

2. If you want to support me but cannot attend the race on May 1st, please go here to make your pledge and to be added to the honor roll list.

3. Help spread the word. Please send this email to your friends and family and invite them to join us on May 1st by participating in the Race for Hope or by making a donation.

4. For me, a big cheering section is also greatly appreciated! :)

Thank you so much for your efforts. We hope you will join us as we collectively bring strength and hope to all families who are battling this terrible disease. Please contact me if you have questions or need clarification on how you can help.

NOTE: Online Registrations close April 26th...

Sincerely,
Tricia Southard
email: plsouthard@alumni.furman.edu
phone: 202-412-6968
IM: ask via email

Follow This Link to visit my personal web page and help me in my efforts to support Brain Tumor Society

******************************************************************************
Some email systems do not support the use of links and therefore this link may not appear to work. If so, copy and paste the following into your browser:
http://raceforhope.kintera.org/2005/flyingpenguin?faf=1&e=275191906
******************************************************************************

Patricia Southard

Amazon.com just came out with a fascinating new feature-- "Statistically Improbable Phrases."

Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", show you the interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases that occur in the text of books in Search Inside the Book. Our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to how many times it occurs across all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

I'm really fascinated by this kind of 'smart searching' as one might call it-- seeing patterns or hiccups in data would be extremely useful in my work and raises a lot of intellectual questions with me too.

Anyone know of similar projects and/or research elsewhere? I'd be curious to hear about them!

Wow-- I just came across an address for a person in Bayonet Point, FL.

What a terrible name!! I'm not sure I would ever want to live in a town named that, just on principle!

Very interesting....

And a breath of fresh air since it seems the clout of the big consulting and financial companies that was so stifling when I was at Dartmouth has been broken. More power to my fellow alums who have broken out of the corporate mold-- though I am surprised that 11% of this year's class went into a single program, however worthy.

Teach for America Attracts Record Number of Graduates
NPR Morning Edition, April 12, 2005
(transcript)

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

More college seniors than ever before are applying to Teach for America. That program is a little like the Peace Corps. For the past 15 years it has recruited top college graduates to teach for two years in low-income rural and urban schools. NPR's Anthony Brooks visited Dartmouth College to find out why applications to the program are up.

(Soundbite of voices)

ANTHONY BROOKS reporting:

This past week it was warm and sunny as the long New England winter finally released its grip on Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Students in T-shirts and flip-flops played Frisbee on the campus green while a campus tour guide made the most of this spring day.

Unidentified Woman: Yeah, welcome to Dartmouth. This is clearly an amazing day to see the school.

BROOKS: As the guide welcomes this group of prospective students, another class of Dartmouth seniors is preparing to leave.

Mr. ALEX DOMINGUEZ (Student): I'm from Brooklyn, New York. My focus is international economics and international relations.

BROOKS: But Alex Dominguez says what excited him most about the last four years was volunteering as a mentor for an underprivileged boy from a nearby town, so he applied to Teach for America, was accepted, and for the next two years he'll be a special ed teacher in a Newark, New Jersey, elementary school.

Mr. DOMINGUEZ: A lot of my friends necessarily didn't go to as good a college or even go to college, and I felt that I owed it to society, you know, to give back a little bit.

BROOKS: That's a common theme here. Senior Julia Hildreth wants to go on to law school, but first she'll spend the next two years teaching urban schoolkids. Hildreth, who comes from New Hampshire, says she's committed to Teach for America because of the inequities she's seen between rich and poor schools.

Ms. JULIA HILDRETH (Student): It just seems so unjust for those children in the lower-income schools, and that's a driving force behind my excitement about the program and my reasons for wanting to do it.

BROOKS: More than a hundred Dartmouth seniors have applied to Teach for America. That's 11 percent of the senior class. Surprising, perhaps, given the many lucrative career opportunities available to these Ivy League grads.

Ms. CHELSEA NILSSON (Student): There's a desire to make an impact, there's no question.

BROOKS: Chelsea Nilsson is a senior from Pennsylvania who applied to Teach for America. If accepted, she wants to teach English in an urban high school. It's hard work for relatively little pay, but she says it offers immediate responsibilities that most first jobs don't.

Ms. NILSSON: So many recent graduates feel that you have to commit this obligatory time to being someone's photocopying assistant or someone's coffee runner. I want to find a way to make an immediate impact.

BROOKS: This year, Teach for America has attracted some 17,000 applicants to fill just 2,000 openings, a jump of almost 40 percent over last year. The numbers are up at many schools, from Dartmouth to Yale to the University of Michigan. Elissa Clapp, who heads recruitment at Teach for America, says she's not surprised.

Ms. ELISSA CLAPP (Teach for America): I do think that this generation of leaders is outraged by what they're seeing, and the gap in educational outcomes that continues to persist along racial and economic lines. And at the same time we have ramped up our effort to reach the top graduating seniors on campuses.

BROOKS: A survey by The Brookings Institution two years ago found that more than a third of college seniors were interested in public service work, though many didn't know how to find it. Dan Kessler of Idealist.org, an online clearing house for the non- profit sector, says Teach for America has successfully tapped into that interest in public service. He says the program is highly visible on campuses and employs young recruiters who compete aggressively with the private sector to attract the best and the brightest.

Mr. DAN KESSLER (Idealist.org): It's prestigious and it's intensely competitive, so one of the things that they've done incredibly well in addition to the program itself is simply have absolutely brilliant marketing.

BROOKS: As one professor put it, Teach for America is cool. Senior Alex Dominguez agrees with that and says he looks forward to a new challenge, even if he'll be sad to say goodbye to Dartmouth.

Mr. DOMINGUEZ: I think it's time that, you know, I go and venture out into the world and, you know, start to make my place out there.

BROOKS: Next fall, Dominguez will take his place in a classroom in Newark, New Jersey.

Anthony Brooks, NPR News.

MONTAGNE: You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.

My apologies-- I misread the dates for my previous post. This year's American Library Week is actually this week (April 10-16)-- Sorry Tricia...

Next week (April 18-24) is National Library Week, according to the American Library Association.

Must..... resist..... using.... 'check out'.... pun.........(gasp)

Here's a story Symi sent me:

In Steinbeck's Birthplace, A Fight to Keep the Libraries Open
New York Times
by Carolyn Marshall
April 4, 2005

An absolute travesty!!

A bit of a laugh for all of you who are part of fantasy sports leagues.... (Washington Post 040305) 

Bleagh! The 'n' & 'delete' keys have died o my home keyboard. Likely the
begi i g of the e d for the whole keyboard-- the same thi g happe ed to my previous keyboard.

Tha kfully, I thi k it is still u der warra ty.

(btw-- if you have a problem with how I typed the letter I was missi g above, realize that I copied it from a other page & pasted it here.)

For those of you interested in a deeper look at current issues, I highly recommend PBS' program Frontline.

I have just finished watching one of their reports on the issue of prescription drugs in the US, entitled The Other Drug War. There's a wealth of background information on the site, in addition to a full video copy of the program, divided into six parts for easy loading.

Other topics I think they do exceptionally well are as follows:

Beyond Baghdad

In the summer of 2003, as violence against the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq spiked alarmingly, the top U.S. administrator there, L. Paul Bremer, told FRONTLINE producer Martin Smith that the press was doing a terrible job of covering the story. He said they needed to get out of Baghdad to see the kind of progress that was being made.

Accepting Bremer's challenge, in November FRONTLINE went back to Iraq to see how the U.S. plan to turn the country into a showcase for democracy in the Middle East was faring.

The Secret History of the Credit Card

In "Secret History of the Credit Card," FRONTLINE® and The New York Times join forces to investigate an industry few Americans fully understand. In this one-hour report, correspondent Lowell Bergman uncovers the techniques used by the industry to earn record profits and get consumers to take on more debt.

Some of you are aware that a friend of mine is involved in a legal dispute with George Washington University regarding housing there. The following is an article published in the GWU newspaper, The Hatchet

Student Vows to Continue Legal Battle Against GW
by Larry Adler, Hatchet Reporter
Published 04/11/05

A GW student who unsuccessfully sued President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg over health code violations in his dorm room said he plans to continue with his case even though it was dismissed.

The violations, which were identified by a city agency last semester and have since been fixed, included cracks in the ceiling and walls, defective doors, loose paint, broken floor tiles and missing caulking in his 2109 F St. room. Mike Strong, a senior, also unsuccessfully sued Tom Dwyer, managing director for Property Management, and Walter Gray, director of Facilities Management. He was seeking damages of $4.5 million.

On Aug. 30, Strong went to the basement of his dorm to do laundry and placed a call to Fix-It upon finding roaches there. He then left his dorm for two days, and returned to find a padlock on his door.

After being locked out of his room for hours, he said he was finally allowed back in, and found that the room had been left a mess and was mistakenly fumigated.

Strong said that inside the room was a sign warning that it had been treated for roaches. He said there was no indication that he was in any danger because he did not smell poison. A few days later, Strong started to feel sick and went to GW Hospital, where he was admitted for insecticide poisoning.

Strong also said he noticed other safety problems in his room and asked Dwyer to come take a look at, among other things, a door he was able to unlock with a plastic knife.

"I called in Facilities Management, but they didn't do anything for six weeks, so I called in (the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs)," Strong said. "The day I got the report, I filed the lawsuit for $4.5 million dollars in D.C. Superior Court."

DCRA documents obtained by The Hatchet indicate that on Oct. 4, 2004, the city served GW with nine housing violations for Strong's room plus one for an infested basement.

Facilities Management director Peter Comey referred calls for this article to the University's media relations department and its lawyers. Media relations could not be reached for comment. Linda Schutjer, GW's associate general counsel, said the University was not concerned with the suit.

"He serviced the wrong people," Schutjer said. "He should have sued the University. On these kinds of technical ground they typically try and give them another shot at filing it correctly."

In response to the lawsuit, the University made three petitions to have the case thrown out. One said Strong did not properly serve the University with the lawsuit, and the other two were that the case was moot.

The case was originally thrown out and later dismissed without prejudice, meaning Strong could re-file the case. Strong believes he still has a case and is hoping to make the University aware of the problems with its dorms.

"The lawsuit is not about me, it's about bringing change. It's to ensure students' safety in the future. The University has a rank for their house," he said, referring to the widely held belief that GW offers some of the best college housing in the country. "It's time to live up to their rank."

Lots of stuff happening with, to and around me... people have moved into the office next to the Commission... the washing machine is broken.... I'm working hard to make sure the book that's arranged around my conference is moving closer to completion....and lots more to boot.

I'll write more once things wind down a bit...

Not been able to decide on a dish to bring to Penguin in the City's potluck this weekend. Anyone out there have any great (and portable) ideas?

Just got an envelope of newspaper articles from home and found one piece of very sad news. Below is the obituary, run in the local paper (The Desert Sun) on April 1st.

After a full career as a teacher and counselor in one of the outer LA suburbs, she came to the Desert and became a leader in things like Gifted and Talented Education, Career Prep and various parts of the curriculum. She was a tiny woman, definitely under five feet tall, with a heart of gold and able to hold her own in front of a classroom, even at 75 (when I graduated from high school).

The fact that she has died is not a big surprise--she lived an extremely full and long life--it's just a pity that the Earth lost someone so exceptional.

The Desert Sun
April 1, 2005 (Palm Springs, California)
Lives Remembered

Julie Hilla

Julie Hilla, 82, of Ashland, Oregon and formerly of Palm Desert, Died February 23, 2005, in Medford, Oregon.

She was born in 1922 to Albert and Jeanne Schoensieqel in Maracaibo, Venezuela.

She married Harold Abshear in 1943 in San Bernadino and later became an educator for the Whittier High School District. After retiring from that position, she moved to Palm Desert and became an active volunteer in local Coachella Valley schools.

She was active in the Unitarian Fellowship, the Children's Discovery Museum of the Desert and the Democratic Party.

She is survived by her husband, John Hilla of Ashland; her daughter Joan Brown of Ashland; two sons, Donald Abshear of Grand Junction, CO and Robert Abshear of Ashland; her brother, Richard Schoensieqel of Del Mar; six grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

Arrangements were under the direction of Litwiller Simonsen Funeral Home in Ashland.

This was just too wonderful not to post. [Children of the World, a 4-stamp block issued by Sharjah & Dependencies (now part of the United Arab Emirates), 1972.] 

Extremely beautiful! 

I'm finally getting the time to post photos from my trip to Paris! This is the wonderful Symi and I in front of Notre Dame.  

For those of you who had a hard time in HS math class... 

I saw one of the cutest things the other day.

After I finished some work on Capitol Hill, I stopped by the Union Station Au Bon Pain to get something to eat. While munching on a little snack, I was able to look out on a pretty busy passageway of people walking between the Amtrak part of the station and the Metro.

As I looked out into the general bustle, I saw a new mother walking by with a little baby girl, about 5 months old, in a pink snuggly that was strapped to the mother's chest. Every time the mother took a step, the baby's arms and legs (which were sticking out of the snuggly) bounced around, much to her delight.

That pair happened to pass a family walking the other way-- a mother and father pushing an older child in a stroller. Probably about 10 months old.

The parents, each focused on wherever they were going, didn't give each other a second glance but stroller baby saw snuggly baby's arms bouncing around, gave a big smile and waved back.

Everybody saw this and there was about 15 seconds of baby waving to baby--snuggly baby was still a bit young to have the whole coordination thing down, so for her, it was more good-natured flailing--until everybody walked off on their separate ways with a smile on their faces.

Including myself.....

This looks kinda cool and I wholeheartedly support the premise.

The UN recently issued a stamp to celebrate its work on Disarmament.
I like the premise: Books--Not Guns.

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!