Category: Miscellany

  • Sleepless Planet's call for submissions

    Warren Ellis announces SLEEPLESS PLANET in his die puny humans blog, calling it “a one-year-long nonprofit webmagazine about creativity and activism on the web and any other bloody thing I feel like. It pays no money. It provides only the opportunity to show what you do to a wider audience and, hopefully, connect you with…

  • Krugman's unanswered critique

    I got to wondering why the voices raised in opposition to Paul Krugman’s series of columns about the Bush presidency always seem to go for the ad hom argument, at times resorting to coordinated smearing and so rarely seem to engage with the substance of his (coherent, by way of contrast) lines of argument. When…

  • Getting to the Brown and Root of things

    This August, 2000 Austin Chronicle article (The Candidate From Brown and Root) connects the dots on Brown and Root, LBJ, Halliburton, and Dick Cheney. [Bite Media via the Well]

  • Looks like I'm a man

    You’ll hate this test but it gets more accurate with each submission. It was 86% sure I’m a man, close to my own level of certainty. A somewhat girly man perhaps (fairly near the middle on the linear scale — must be that preference for a blue bedroom over white), but a man nonetheless. Hear…

  • Have your tickets out and ready

    I’m so out of it. After returning from a week and a half in New York I’m still reading The Gawker but without that same sense of immediacy (not that it matters where you are when you read about New York, and not that that prevents me from reading the Times, the Nation, the New…

  • John Edwards is the Grisham candidate

    Too lazy to pad out to my front drive and pick up the Sunday Chronicle, I’ve been reading New York Times op eds and now skimming Slate. There’s a tight little William Saletan article from Thursday, Wise Counsel – Edwards copies Clinton’s message—in invisible ink, that makes the point that John Edwards has mastered the…

  • What has Iraq got that North Korea hasn't?

    In his op ed today, A War for Oil?, Tom Friedman mentions the president’s recent soundbite: Mr. Bush’s recent attempt to hype the Iraqi threat by saying that an Iraqi attack on America — which is most unlikely — “would cripple our economy” was embarrassing. It made the president look as if he was groping…

  • Chatterbox adopts 'Meme Watch' term

    It looks like Slate launched a feature called Meme Watch back in November and refers, semifacetiously, to a MemeTracker™ device. Hey, as long as they pay us royalties! No, honestly, the more of us tracking memes the better. Timothy Noah’s latest column observes the ups and downs of the “Lucky Duckies” meme.

  • Another incorrectly dated post (actually

    Another incorrectly dated post (actually from 12/24): Drowning Mona. About 5 minutes before the end of this movie, Danny DeVito’s character says, “Know this….” A good example of lame Hollywood writing, a crutch-phrase I’ve never heard anyone use in real life….

  • d'oh

    whoops! my calendar keeps getting messed up for some reason. this was posted on 12/24/2002 actually, and I’m reposting it to that date now… (no way to change the datestamp on posts in Radio).

  • Memebusting the 12 days of Xmas

    Leading up to Christmas this year I was several times sent chain mail claiming that the lyrics to the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” encoded forbidden Catholic catechistic information under Anglican repression. Something smelled fishy about this, not least because it was presented without any evidence, and the correspondence seemed fairly weak for most…

  • Stormy Monday

    I stood out back in the shed listening to the wind pick up and drive the light rain against the walls and fences and trellises. Rose bushes lash the windows even now. The cat and I agreed to go back inside. Working on a longish blog entry about losing my wallet in New York and…

  • Bush/White House comment line: 202-456-1111

    GWB HOTLINE 202-456-1111 1 PHONE CALL EQUALS 10-20 PEOPLE WHO DIDN’T CALL, PLEASE PASS ON TO FRIENDS {source this?}

  • Ishle unplugged

    While I didn’t manage to stay long enough to see all three bands (I missed Zmrzlina and Sonny Smith) at Watchword‘s Dec 8 event at Café du Nord, I did catch Sam Tsitrin’s new combo, Ebb and Flow, who presented a fluid velvet beefheart groove style, and I heard all three poets (Ishle Yi Park,…

  • New reading series in San

    New reading series in San Francisco. Wednesday, December 4th at 7:30 pm 2390 Mission Street Suite #10, at 20th and Mission $2 New Series    New Writing///a creative//    new series of readings by some of the BayArea’s most talented writers   plus a free chapbook at every readingtonight’s fabulous readers:Chaim Bertman, Sasha Cagen, Stephanie Young, Liz WorthyFor further information contact…

  • Christmas on Park Avenue.

    Christmas on Park Avenue.

  • Christmas Blogging (the complete collection)

    Christmas Blogging (the complete collection)   As of 3:05 PM EST December 25, the following piece includes every single writer who has posted today. This is such a treat. I

  • Tip of the iceberg. I've

    Tip of the iceberg. I’ve been wondering when the Lott flap would lead to a more comprehensive investigation of how the old Dixiecrat movement became the Goldwater/Nixon “southern strategy.” To quote Lyndon Johnson when he signed the 1964 Voting Rights Act, “I think we’ve just delivered the south to the Republicans for a long time…

  • Google knows if you've been bad or good

    If you want to know what the wired globe cared about or thought about, or more exactly, searched for using Google in the past year, then check out Google’s 2002 Year-End Zeitgeist wrap-up. Naturally they filter out pr0n searches which would swamp everything else. (“You’ve got the most popular non-porn website on the Internet,” says…

  • Nothing like a sinus headache.

    Nothing like a sinus headache. Got my copy of Jaguar today, installed it no problem, so now I can use the latest version of Kung-Log for posting to MT (and it now picks up what tune your playing in iTunes, like the iJournal client for LiveJournal does, thanks to a request from shacker—woo hoo!—though it…

  • Well, sure. In Lott to

    Well, sure. In Lott to hold news conference – Dec. 13, 2002, CNN.com reports, “Lott said Wednesday night that he hoped he could be judged in the full context of his career, which he said has included support of historically black colleges and universities.