Featherless Audubon
Upclose shot of Lightning Striking.
Sharks and the Broken Food Web
A recently published article in the March 30 issue of the journal Science reported that, Overfishing of big sharks along the Atlantic Coast has led to the reduction of bay scallops and other shellfish in the market. The article also reported that it has also led two linked marine species in the food web to the same fate.
The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships
About the John Adams originally launched 5 June 1799. Here is a short snippet:
Pirates were also active in the West Indies at this time. Taking advantage of the chaos attendant upon the dissolution of Spain’s American empire, lawless vessels from many nations preyed on neutral as well as Spanish commerce in the Caribbean, the Gulf o f Mexico, and along the storied Spanish Main. For the next few years John Adams was busy fighting buccaneers. On 22 December 1817 she demanded and received the surrender of Amella Island, off the east coast of Florida, the base from which corsairs of Commodore Aury pounced upon merchantmen of all nations.
Problems with the waterbill.
I had a problem with my water bill because my water main burst. The biggest problem is that I was out of town for two weeks so the water was running full blast for nearly the entire time. I replaced the water main line into my house, then got my water bill which was a killer. So I sent the following note to the water company…
It sounds boring, it isn’t.
13 Mile Dragon
Environmental officials in central China may stop the construction of a 21-kilometer (13-mile) -long dragon planned as a tourist attraction because of the environmental impact, state media reported Wednesday.
Makes me want a Lucky Strike
New York Acoustic Ecology
Andrea Polli wants you to guess what sounds in NYC these are.
Link
“Killer of Sheep” on Lopate Show
Posted by Dennis Doros of Milestone Films to AMIA-L:
There’s a lot of press on Killer of Sheep opening this week, thanks to Charles Burnett and the gorgeous restoration by Ross Lipman and the UCLA Film & Television Archive (along with his cohorts in crime, including John Polito) — you can just Google News it.
Anyway, WNYC’s Leonard Lopate did a very nice piece on Killer of Sheep today with Henry Sanders, Ross Lipman, Danny Glover and me (talking as little as possible). Ross covered the subject of its restoration very well. You can hear it on the net, or download the MP3 here.
Don’t wait for the DVD release. Check for a screening near you.
Hypothetically
If today was your birthday, and you were turning 38, what would you want for dinner?
Thai
Steak
Neapolitan style Pizza
Japanese
The Department of Justice
I spent more than 35 years in the department enforcing federal civil rights laws — particularly voting rights. Before leaving in 2005, I worked for attorneys general with dramatically different political philosophies — from John Mitchell to Ed Meese to Janet Reno. Regardless of the administration, the political appointees had respect for the experience and judgment of longtime civil servants.
Under the Bush administration, however, all that changed. Over the last six years, this Justice Department has ignored the advice of its staff and skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of elections.
Morale plummeted, resulting in an alarming exodus of career attorneys. In the last two years, 55% to 60% of attorneys in the voting section have transferred to other departments or left the Justice Department entirely.
At the same time, career staff were nearly cut out of the process of hiring lawyers. Control of hiring went to political appointees, so an applicant’s fidelity to GOP interests replaced civil rights experience as the most important factor in hiring decisions.
It’s been a while
since I’ve offered myself up for complete public dissification in re pop music, so I thought I might ought to go ahead and say that, despite his sometimes precious (and annoying) singing style and his often precious lyrics, Don McLean shows a real talent for melody and arrangement on several of the tracks from the American Pie LP.
Big Sisters
I’ve been getting ready to buy a pair of Big Boy Sandals, to go along with my Big Boy Shoes, for the Europe trip. I wanted sandals that pretty well covered the whole front of the foot, since it is my contention that men (I am one) have ugly feet and shouldn’t force innocent strangers to see them except at the pool or beach. Well, yesterday I found a perfectly acceptable pair, out here in the California desert, and my big sister insisted on buying them for me as my going-away gift. Aren’t big sisters sweet?
Here they are:
Wow
We have broken the 40,000 unique visitors barrier for this month. I know there are sites that get 40,000 unique visitors a day, but, hey, you celebrate what you have, right?
Best Film Monologues and Speeches
Why did I not know of this till just now?
Because only just now I was struggling to recite Dawn Davenport’s “I blew Richard Speck!” rant (from John Waters’s Female Trouble) — which once I had down cold, and I got a little hung up, so went looking for help.
Grotesquely disfigured Dawn Davenport’s (drag queen Divine) bizarre, freakish “nightclub act”, in which after she jumps up and down on a trampoline and fondles fish and a gun, she tells the audience:
“Thank you! I love you! Thank you! Thank you from the bottom of my black little heart! You came here for some excitement tonight and that’s just what you’re going to get! Take a good look at ME because I’m going to be on the front of every newspaper in this country tomorrow! You’re looking at crime personified AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT!
(More) Ethical Fast Food
While Burger King’s initial goals may be modest, food marketing experts and animal welfare advocates said yesterday that the shift would put pressure on other restaurant and food companies to adopt similar practices.
“I think the whole area of social responsibility, social consciousness, is becoming much more important to the consumer,” said Bob Goldin, executive vice president of Technomic, a food industry research and consulting firm. “I think that the industry is going to see that it’s an increasing imperative to get on that bandwagon.”
Life in the Attic
Last Night’s Fashion Shoot
The Departed
“It’s not a big deal to me,” Chase stated flatly at the start. “These are not real people.”
Irreducible Mind
In an interesting blog, Michael Prescott reviews this new and hefty tome that address a key question in modern philosophy, psychology, and epistemology, are mind and brain equivalent? Its worth reading his review, at least, if not purchasing the entire (and pricey) volume.
Practically every contemporary mainstream scientist presumes that all aspects of mind are generated by brain activity. We demonstrate the inadequacy of this picture by assembling evidence for a variety of empirical phenomena which it cannot explain. We further show that an alternative picture developed by F. W. H. Myers and William James successfully accommodates these phenomena, ratifies the common sense view of ourselves as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with contemporary physics and neuroscience.
The author is Edward F. Kelly currently Research Professor in the Department of Psychiatric Medicine at the University of Virginia. His central long term interests revolve around mind-brain relations and functional neuroimaging studies of unusual states of consciousness and associated cognitive phenomena.
Two links of interest:
Reality Internet
Hyperreality at its best: justin.tv
Twitterpated
I’ve already blabbed about Twitter more than enough in many different places, but I want to address this idea of “fads” in social web applications. Some people may eschew the comparison but I’m not afraid to admit it: Twitter actually does remind me of Friendster.
Will the sun ever set on the English language?
English was once the language in which power was exercised, note the authors, but now it is the language in which power is accessed. And in the future, speaking only English won’t be enough; the real advantage will go to those who are proficient in a multilingual, multicultural, increasingly interconnected world.
Gabriel García Márquez in 1976 after Mario Vargas Llosa hit him
Suck. I liked that venue.
Yes, another one bites the dust: Sin-é (pronounced shih-NAY), after a weekend of goodbye shows, will close for good on Sunday. Over two decades and three locations, the owner, Shane Doyle, maintained it as a cozy, unassuming place for up-and-coming musical acts, charting the perimeters of gentrifying areas as surely as Starbucks now defines them. But two months ago, as wealthy neighbors and city and state regulators encroached, he decided his low-key vision was out of step.
