Beef t-shirts coming back: it was quite a while ago now that my Cafe Press shop was the top Google result for beef t-shirt. Worse, I haven’t linked to the shop from MaisonBisson for a while either. So it was something of a surprise to discover that the products are still selling. Yes, real people […] » about 200 words
Defense Tech is reporting that the Warner/Electric/Atlantic conglomerate of music labels gave up its defense in a copyright case against their artist Wilco. It seems Wilco sampled from Irdial-Disc’s compilation of recordings from mysterious radio stations that everybody expects to be related to espionage (and clearly emanate from government buildings and embassies). Nobody argues that […] » about 400 words
More photos from MaisonBisson Taken Monday morning, around 5:30, before getting on the road to return to New Hampshire. Troy and Karen were kind enough to invite me to the Cape for the weekend, where I generally lazed about and did nothing. We did take in a double feature at the Wellfleet Drive-In (don’t miss […] » about 100 words
I was going through my files and found this unfinished letter to NHPR, my local National Public Radio affiliate, regarding the FCC’s proposed licensing of community-based low-power FM radio stations (LPFM). My point was (or it was going to be) that NPR was afraid to compete against other non-profit stations. NPR paints itself as an […] » about 1100 words
First I was amused to see comments, then somewhat angered to discover they were spam, then amused again to find that comment spam etiquette requires that it be gratuitously patronizing. Then I struggled to decide if I could delete the comments without feeling like I was censoring free speech. My solution (and it’s sort of […] » about 300 words
Troy has this image of a tin-foiled cubical on his blog. It comes from Servers Under the Sun and is interesting enough. Now that I’m checking his blog regularly, I’m sort of wishing he’d update more often (not that he doesn’t have a lot of interesting stuff in archive). . » about 100 words
Books:
Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
Audio Books:
Re-Reads:
I should be keeping notes about these as I read them. As it is, I’ll just have to catch up later. Then again, I haven’t even listed my reading for the last part of 2003.
AllConsuming.net aggregates book mentions on the web, mostly in blogs. Assuming bloggers can be trusted, the AllConsuming stats can show a lot about what people are reading and talking about. David Sedaris’ new book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is ranking with 22 mentions today and 15 the day before (or, that’s what […] » about 300 words
Richard Coniff writes in the January 2004 Smithsonian magazine about the work of UC San Fran prof Paul Ekman and his study of faces. It carries pictures of a work by artists Bill Viola and his wife Kira Perov. Yeah, sure, the face is capable of 43 movements expressing 10,000 different expressions. Yeah, Bill’s work […] » about 300 words
Sun had to make changes. They’re (or were) getting their butts handed to them in the mid-range and entry level server markets, so those changes had to come fast. There was a time when the top of their low-end server lineup was the V480 with four UltraSparc III CPUs in a 4U rack enclosure. Trouble […] » about 400 words
Kembrew McLeod’s story about How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop in Stay Free! Magazine is an interesting tale of how copyright kills culture.
In the mid- to late 1980s, hip-hop artists had a very small window of opportunity to run wild with the newly emerging sampling technologies before the record labels and lawyers started paying attention. No one took advantage of these technologies more effectively than Public Enemy, who put hundreds of sampled aural fragments into It Takes a Nation and stirred them up to create a new, radical sound that changed the way we hear music. But by 1991, no one […] sampled without getting sued. They had to pay a lot.
Remember: CopyFight.
Well, they sorta’ look the same. Sorta. » about 100 words
From an email from my Dad: Florida allows those who win permits to take three alligators. They sell the meat and hides , except the tails, which have the best cuts of alligator meat, and which they normally keep to feed their families. Mal asked how the alligator meat is cooked; the lady said by […] » about 300 words
Who can complain about being compared favorably to ol’ JFK? (Yes, in a really vain way, I was happy about it.) A co-worker was surprised to be matched with Saddam Hussein, but my boss was happy to be Gandhi. Numbskull, meanwhile, looks like Abe. In another test, I was matched with Indiana Jones and Raiders […] » about 100 words
A friend of a friend says his life is made up of places he can no longer go (or is no longer invited). Sad, but somewhat true. He’s also a funny bastard.
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Sandee’s aunt had her 50th birthday not long ago. The aunt makes cakes on the side so it was no big thing when her daughters (who were planning the surprise birthday party for her) asked if she’d make a cake for some unknown group one of them was in. Later, after being appropriately surprised at her birthday bash, she was more surprised to recognize the cake there as the one she’d baked earlier.
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A hand signed photo of Herbert Hoover, the former and very scary head of the FBI, hangs at the top of my basement stairs. It was there when we bought the house and I have not heard a good explanation for how it got there or why.
Lamson Library’s portal integration project tops Google’s search hits for “library portal integration.” I’ve been crowing about it all over campus for a week now, and while you can argue about what real value it has, it’s still exciting.
I’d heard that that OCLC was opening up WorldCat, their huge bibliographic database, to Google. It seems to be online now.
If you happen to Google some very complete search terms for Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (look for the WorldCatLibraries URL), you’ll find a link to the public WorldCat record. Interesting, but I wonder where this will go.
In fairness, this news is about six months old. Jenny reported it in December.
He’s named it Officer Angry, and it eats like a monster. It looks like a monster too, so that’s not so bad. Videos of the fishy fellow eating are at Cliff’s website: Officer Angry Chases Chow and Officer Angry Eats Off a Stick. The second one is much better than the first. Yes, I shot […] » about 100 words
From Jon Link, who can also be seen at thenumbskull.com: I hate expensive gas as much as anyone BUT, this is a problem of our own design. We don’t need to stop buying oil for one day, we need to buy less oil in general. We love capitalism– supply and demand is it’s cornerstone… it […] » about 300 words
Okay, his self portrait on my white board has nothing to do with his recent website launch, but…well…. TheNumbskull.com More photos from MaisonBisson » about 100 words
Fish, octopus, squid, ox tongue, sweet potato, fried eggplant, crab, corn, rice, wasabi, shrimp, eel, noodle, chicken wing, miso, and cactus. Those may not sound like appetizing ice cream flavors, but it’s what they’ve got. tags: chicken wing, eel, flavor, flavors, fried eggplant, ice cream, ice cream flavors, icecream, japan, japanese, miso, octopus, squid, sweet […] » about 100 words
Pieces of Intelligence : The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld
From Amazon’s Description: “Until now, the poetry of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been hidden, ’embedded’ within comments made at press briefings and in interviews. His preferred medium is the spoken word, and his audience has been limited to hard-bitten reporters and hard-core watchers of C-SPAN.”
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns,
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know we don’t know.
– Feb 2, 2002, Dept. of Defense news briefing
and another
I was briefed on that story before I came down.
I have not gone over it.
It’s interesting.
Let me try to put it in context,
And then I’ll see if I can answer it.
I have no idea what it’s about
Yes, these really are quotes from our defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.
Also interesting: important information about the discovery of weapons of mass destruction.
Get the word out. The fight is on to create sensible limits to the DMCA. Read ArsTechnica’s DMCRA argument. Copyfight, of course, is covering DMCRA, and arguing for it. TeleRead is swinging for DMCRA too. Heck, they’ve even endorsed a congressional candidate based on his stand on fair-use.
Read those and act. Tell your congressperson you support fair-use and the DMCRA. Now say it again with the EFF: “I believe in fair-use.”
It’s actually called The Garlic Clove, but for a variety of reasons, we just call it The Twig. More photos from MaisonBisson » about 100 words
When you call around for realtors to sell your ‘house,’ how do you tell them it’s a castle?
I somehow found out about the Martin Castle in Kentucky, but that lead to information about the Dupont Castle and that sites guide to over 200 castles in the US. Dupont reports there was a fire at Martin Castle just yesterday. The Lexington Herald-Leader covered the fire.
So, I guess the real question is “who do you call to insure a castle?”