Thank you, NYT, but we don't need this kind of filler right now:
Not all politically disparate couples are immune to each other's arguments. Jacqueline Cohen, 39, a drama therapist for poor children in Manhattan and a lifelong Democrat, began dating John Green, 36, a political analyst, a former marine and a conservative, last year. Initially, she said, they argued over politics, but eventually she came to accept Mr. Green's contention that she would be safer and pay lower taxes if Mr. Bush remained in office. "Yes, I've been influenced by the man I'm in love with," she said. "You speak to a Republican, and all of a sudden this conservative nature that you have under your skin starts coming out." Ms. Cohen said her family of die-hard Democrats were appalled when she told them she was voting for Mr. Bush.
—Warren St. John and Rachel L. Swarns, "Politics Makes Estranged Bedfellows," New York Times, 31-Oct-2004
Carter Burwell, "Orchestrating War," Harper's, Feb-2004, posted 28-Oct-2004
Nicholas D. Kristof, "Taking Bush at His Word," New York Times, 30-Oct-2004
Frank Rich, "Decision 2004: Fear Fatigue vs. Sheer Fatigue," New York Times, 30-Oct-2004, posted 31-Oct-2004
Lakshmi Chaudhry, "Seymour Hersh: Man On Fire," AlterNet, 27-Oct-2004
Montana Miller, "Justice, Done?," The Lozenge, 26-Oct-2004
Timothy Noah, "John Kerry, Rock Star," Slate, 29-Oct-2004
Multiple good things happened today. Dessert was finding a Pentium 4 PC in the trash during an evening walk. Looks like the former owner probably chucked it because the IBM "Deathstar" Deskstar drive inside did what that beast is wont to do, which is eat itself (see 22-Nov-2003 and 24-Nov-2003).
Who is Kristof trying to influence, and will it really work? Nicholas D. Kristof, "Pants on Fire?," New York Times, 27-Oct-2004
I meant to link this cancerphone awhile ago. "Mobile phone use linked to benign tumors," cancerfacts.com, 15-Oct-2004
Snapshot in Boston this summer: REVERSE THE CURSE
More superhuman magnetic attraction between Bill Clinton and clusters of attractive younger women, unmarried and not. Elderly in foreground seem resigned to neglect of the Clinton love. (AP photo, noted by Wonkette 27-Oct-2004)
In case you hadn't heard, the curse was reversed. Now let's see if Boston can do 2-for-2 on Nov 2nd.
Oliver Burkeman, "Bush exploits suffering of 9/11, says Carter," Guardian, 25-Oct-2004
James Carroll, "For nuclear safety, the choice is clear," Boston Globe, 26-Oct-2004
The Chicago Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Orlando Sentinel and The Commercial-Appeal in Memphis, Tenn., were among the 24 papers that backed Bush in 2000 but today chose Kerry.
—Greg Mitchell, "Daily Endorsement Tally: On 'Super Sunday,' Kerry Makes Huge Gains," Editor & Publisher, 23-Oct-2004
The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations. [...] United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year.
—James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, "Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq," New York Times, 15-Oct-2004
Judd Legum, "100 Facts and 1 Opinion: The Non-Arguable Case Against the Bush Administration," The Nation, 8-Nov-2004 issue, posted 20-Oct-2004
Boston has deployed hundreds of police officers just to contain people who use Red Sox fandom as an excuse for drunken violence.
metacritic.com is great for skimming film reviews. It would've saved me from I Heart Huckabee's.
We saw Stage Beauty the other night. I liked it.
As I write, a few minutes after midnight, drunken Bostonians outside are swearing enthusiastically over some athletic competition.
Looks like I'll be working in Java for the forseeable future. I'll continue to maintain the Scheme code that I've released thus far, but the bulk of my Scheme code will be mothballed for now.
Some enterprising travel agency should set up an "inoculation tourism" program, whisking away USians for a weekend of foreign food and flu shot.
A reminder that I don't want Boston University to build that Biosafety Level 4 lab in a major urban area:
The 1918 flu virus spread across the world in three months and killed at least 40 million people. If it escaped from a lab today, the death toll could be far higher. "The potential implications of an infected lab worker — and spread beyond the lab — are terrifying," says D. A. Henderson of the University of Pittsburgh, a leading biosecurity expert. [...] The latest work was done by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His team showed that adding the 1918 gene for the surface protein haemagglutinin to modern viruses made them far deadlier to mice. The researchers also found that people born after 1918 have little or no immunity. The team started the work at the highest level of containment, BSL-4, at Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. Then they decided the viruses were safe enough to handle at the next level down, and did the rest of the work across the border in a BSL-3Ag lab in Madison.
—Debora MacKenzie, "Experts fear escape of 1918 flu from lab ," New Scientist, 21-Oct-2004
Biosafety lab controls are not perfect, even at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases:
Anthrax was found in three places outside the containment lab. Colonies of two anthrax strains were found in the "clean change room" where male scientists disrobe before showering and donning sterile suits to enter the secure lab suite. The strains were Sterne, a benign form used in inoculations, and Vollum 1B, once Fort Detrick's signature bioweapons strain. Vollum 1B was grown from the blood of lab microbiologist William Boyle, who died after inhaling anthrax in a 1951 lab accident, hence the B in the name. Further away from the lab suite, researchers found three strains of anthrax in the office called B-19 that Ivins and his colleague shared: Sterne, Vollum 1B and Ames. Ames is now the preferred strain for biodefense research and was the strain found in the Daschle letter. Their tests also found more than 200 colonies of Ames strain on the lab's "passbox." The passbox is a 2-foot-square ultraviolet-bathed portal — a blue glow emanating around the edges of its door — used for safely passing potentially contaminated material into and out of the laboratory suite.
—Dan Vergano and Steve Sternberg, "Anthrax slip-ups raise fears about planned biolabs," USA Today, 13-Oct-2004
Shaw's has a sale on Cheez-Its, 10 boxes for $10. In lighter news tonight, Harvest Co-op has Annie's Naturals Goddess Dressing on sale for $1.99
The Sucralose Toxicity Information Center (holisticmed.com) wants have a talk about Splenda.
My dealer for black-market black TrackPoint caps, nudemike, has disappeared. Turf battle? Foul play? Maybe it was the same bastards that colored the keyboard of the IBM ThinkPad X30.
Apocalyptic quote of the day:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. [...] The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
—Ron Suskind, "Without a Doubt," New York Times Magazine, 17-Oct-2004
Another quote, ibid.:
That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. "You think he's an idiot, don't you?" I said, no, I didn't. "No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!"
We impulse-viewed "I Heart Huckabees" on Friday evening in Harvard Square. A few people clapped briefly when the credits rolled, and I thought "oh, maybe Jude Law is in the audience," but then those people were silenced by disapproving looks or bludgeoning. The film had some funny bits, and wasn't actively unpleasant in many places, but I was waiting for a payoff that never came. Disppointing, since they had lots of acting talent and the start of a great concept.
Product idea of the day: DIY Lucite embedment kit.
"Long-Lost Jules Verne Short Story `The Camera-Phone' Found," The Onion, 13-Oct-2004
Noel Welsh pointed me to this article for more info on the UK Windows For Warships scandal: John Lettice, "OSS torpedoed: Royal Navy will run on Windows for Warships," The Register, 6-Sep-2004
The non-HTTPS PayPal home page provides an account login form. Encouraging users to enter their
PayPal password into a non-HTTPS Web page is a bad idea. Even though the HTML
form action uses HTTPS, the form action URL is not exposed to the user, so
anyone who can spoof http://www.paypal.com/ (open WiFi AP,
anyone?) can steal passwords without HTTPS authentication alerting the user.
I went to mention this to PayPal, but they actively discourage emailing them
for most purposes, and I gave up after a couple minutes.
Marc Feeley has released Gambit-C 4.0 beta 9.
Anyone have more info on the below story?
Last night [Gerald Wilson] told Channel 4 news that "the use of Windows For Warships puts the ship and her crew at risk, and the defence of the realm". There are also plans to install a similar Microsoft Windows-based computerised command system on Britain's nuclear submarines. Wilson said: "It is inconceivable that we could allow the possible accidental release of nuclear missiles. The people who survived such an exchange, if any, would certainly regard such a thing as a crime against humanity. And I can't help feeling that even planning to deploy such systems on Windows, with its unreliability and lack of security, is itself some sort of crime in international law."
—Neil Mackay, "New Navy battle software unsafe, says designer," (Scotland) Sunday Herald, 10-Oct-2004
I have to defer to Mr. Safire's intimate familiarity with certain Presidents:
Bush, adding engagingly in what was the most natural moment in the debate, "Need some wood?"
—William Safire, "How Bush Won Round 2," New York Times, 11-Oct-2004
Okrent stakes out new ombud territory in the Sunday Times:
That's what a coward named Steve Schwenk, from San Francisco, wrote to national political correspondent Adam Nagourney several days ago because Nagourney wrote something Schwenk considered (if such a person is capable of consideration) pro-Bush.
—Daniel Okrent, "How Would Jackson Pollock Cover This Campaign?," New York Times, 10-Oct-2004
Just don't drive up my rent:
The grittier Central Square is home to great clubs and cheap, sophisticated ethnic restaurants, and Inman Square is fast becoming the funkiest neighborhood in town.
—Pooja Bhatia, "36 Hours: In Cambridge, Mass.," New York Times, 8-Oct-2004
After winning highly publicized convictions of two suspects on terrorism charges in June 2003, the Justice Department took the extraordinary step five weeks ago of repudiating its own case and successfully moving to throw out the terrorism charges. In a long court filing, the government discredited its own witnesses and found fault with virtually every part of its prosecution. The blame, the department suggested in its filing, lay mainly at the feet of the lead prosecutor in Detroit, Richard G. Convertino, whom it portrayed as a rogue lawyer. But documents and interviews with people knowledgeable about the case show that top officials at the Justice Department were involved in almost every step of the prosecution, from formulating strategy to editing the draft indictments to planning how the suspects would be incarcerated
—Danny Hakim and Eric Lichtblau, "After Convictions, the Undoing of a U.S. Terror Prosecution," New York Times, 7-Oct-2004
"Times Reporter Is Held in Contempt in Leak Inquiry," AP via New York Times, 7-Oct-2004
Martyring Judith Miller over a journalistic integrity issue doesn't absolve her of blame for the propaganda that helped enable the invasion of Iraq.
One of my European agents reports that Kerry lost points with Europeans in the first debate because he said he'd hunt and kill terrorists. They knew he had to say that for the American audience, but they're hoping he'd fight it as criminal activity, not as war.
Replaced my ThinkPad X20's dead IBM Travelstar drive with a Fujitsu from PCs for Everyone. That's the third IBM hard drive that's died on me. Perhaps to save a penny on manufacturing cost, the QVS brand 2.5"/3.5" IDE adaptor I bought at MicroCenter is not keyed. If you have the misfortune to have purchased QVS product, Sci.Electronics.Repair FAQ sec. 6.11.7 will help you not fry your laptop's replacement hard disk drive.
The premise of the "God Is My Friend" comic is that George W. Bush is actually a decent, intelligent person, but God is Bush's friend, and Bush's friend is a real jerk... Link it now.
Though you can buy the DVD for $14.95, its makers told the right-wing news service WorldNetDaily.com that they plan to distribute 300,000 copies to America's churches. And no wonder. This movie aspires to be "The Passion of the Bush," and it succeeds.
—Frank Rich, "Now on DVD: The Passion of the Bush," New York Times, 3-Oct-2004
Just sold another photo. The money seems to be in stock photography. I'm now looking for Boston area portraiture models for a new creative project that won't make any money, but will have much more value as art.
As with many classics, the main reason to watch "Lawrence of Arabia" is so that you can say you did.
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