Category: Miscellany

How do they do it? The Morning News is the kind of web publication I’ve always wanted to produce. They publish new stories every day, their design is succinct and tasty, they drive it all with Movable Type, I don’t see any typos, and I don’t imagine anyone’s getting paid. I could hate them but…

Looks like I jumped to conclusions. The news appears to be that Kerry will have surgery for prostate cancer, not that he will be dropping out of the race. When TPM posted that this news would “shake up” the race, I mistakenly assumed this meant a reshuffling of the candiates. My bad. Best wishes to…

For years I’ve been bugging my friends about an untenable, unmarketable, too-expensive-to-produce idea for a dynamic atlas. I’ve always been a huge fan of historical atlases, those books that show not just where the borders and populations are now but where they used to be and how they’ve changed. What I like about the idea…

With the demise of the nonpartisan exit-polling service and the news of uncheckable voting machines owned by Republican politicians, Douglas Rushkoff has concluded that voting rights in the U.S. are in even worse shape than some of the dirty tricks in the last two election cycles may have indicated: My farewell is also a sad…

Well, it looks like the remaining members of the Grateful Dead have shucked the played-out “Other Ones” monicker and have decided to call their new band simply “The Dead.” In doing so they’ve managed to split hairs, technically leaving the official name of the Jerry-era band retired but resurrecting a name that matches how most…

If you didn’t find Bush’s state of the union message convincing, maybe you need to read between the lines, as in this remixed version of the SOTU speech. [via Hyperbole]

Last night a creepy wind blew west from the hills, in strange pulsing gusts, dying down to nearly nothing and then growing almost instantly to gale force, whipping shrubs and vines against our drainpipe and windows, stripping new buds from plants fooled by the false spring we’ve been having around here lately, tossing the top…

By now, most tapped-in Deadheads have heard that GDP is shutting its doors and outsourcing its merch business, laying off most of their longtime employees. Here’s a report supposedly from an insider (while I can’t vouch for the veracity, it’s interesting enough to pass along): …awful news from GDP today. All 4 of the band…

I rejoiced a week or so ago when I learned that Peet’s was about to reintroduce Aged Sumatra beans after a several-year hiatus. I am drinking it right now. Sumatra is fine as it goes, but the aged stuff is just incredible. Mellow, chocolate-y, rich, flavorful. My endorsement for the day. However, over the weekend,…

Since late last year I’ve been meeting once a week with a good friend in a bar or café to do some writing. We encourage each other. It’s a bit like having an “exercise buddy.” If either of us don’t feel like doing it, we can use the fact that the other guy is depending…

“The moon landscape depicted in Petr Ginz’s drawing attests to his aspiration to reach a place from where the earth, which threatened his life, could be seen from a secure range.” (from Holocaust-era Art from Yad Vashem’s Collection sent into space with Israeli Astronaut)

I suppose it was inevitable that the frootbats would crawl out of the woodwork almost immediately with conspiracy theories about the shuttle disaster, in this case claiming that it was a deliberate act of self-sabotage in order to provide distracting news coverage during the ramp-up to war in Iraq. And I thought I was being…

There was no warning of a problem until the explosion, it seems. Columbia was NASA’s oldest shuttle but has been entirely refurbished somewhat recently. This means the cause of the accident is still a mystery. They also seem to be ruling out human error/pilot error. A spokesman for NASA told people who may be in…

I hate getting those calls or email that say, “turn on your TV.” That’s how 9/11 started for me. With all the talk lately about the Challenger disaster it seems cruelly ironic that the Columbia has broken up on reentry. Anything else I was going to post or write about seems trivial right now.

I felt paranoid wondering if there was any chance of sabotage or other hostile actions, but I realize now that I was far from the only person to have this thought, and I flipped to Peter Jennings saying that this has effectively been ruled out, or at least that the accident happened too far up…

Republicans trying to have it both ways on race. Joshua Micah Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo is one of the best political blogs around, has a new column in The Hill. His first column takes on Republican tolerance of intolerance: Critics on the left often wrongly claim that the Republican Party is some hotbed of…

Robert Reich dissects Rove’s Machiavellian chops in “The Rove Machine Rolls On” in The American Prospect, detailing his techniques. Among them: Count on the American public’s (and the media’s) inability to remember anything from one year to the next. The Rove machine gave Bush tough talking points on corporate fraud when the newspapers were full…

Hello, this is your captain speaking.

Stirring the savage breast. A musician friend told me over lunch at LMNOP in Oakland the other day that PornOrchestra had launched. The project involves composing and improvising new soundtracks for existing porn films. There will be several live performances and the project coordinators welcome contributing musicians, composers, and artists. I contacted spokesmodel Shannon Mariemont…