randomWalks: May 2001

When I finally came in, Debbie was home from work. I told her everything about my dinner with Andre.

The camera has shaped all of our sensibilities. Sympathetic to a pagan rather than a Christian appreciation of the world, the camera sees but doesn't think; it cares only for the sensation of the moment, for any tide of emotion strong enough to draw a paying crowd. A plane crash in the mountains of Peru commands the same slack-jawed respect as Mick Jagger in a divorce court, Monica Lewinsky eating Belgian chocolate, cruise missiles falling on Baghdad, Cameron Diaz in gold lame. Because the camera doesn't know how to make distinctions—between treason and fellatio, between the moral and the amoral, between an important senator and an important ape—its insouciance works against the operative principle of a democratic republic.

Someday, when you spend more than $300 on patio furniture -- made of wood or wrought iron, into which you've put considerable thought about cushion color and pattern -- you will know that you've left a certain part of your old life behind, the salad days, the plastic chair days, when it was still possible that you would meet new lifelong friends, instead of just shaking hands with people and making small talk and getting by with nanoglimpses at the peekaboo flesh on somebody else's spouse.

It was just a certain inclination to meet people. And as far as possible, to change something in the other, but also to let me be changed by him.

Grandpa Rex's Allen was the oldest living cat in the world when he died at age 34 (the equivalent of being over 150 years old in human years!). The hairless cat, belonging to Jake Perry of Austin, Texas, was fond of broccoli. He was also known to eat asparagus on occasion.

Una Escuela Separada

On April 15, the same weekend the film premiered to glowing reviews in New York, Panahi was given a graphic, firsthand example of what Iranian men face in the underbelly of John F. Kennedy International Airport when they arrive in the United States without a visa: He was arrested by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, handcuffed and chained to a bench overnight in leg irons before being unceremoniously expelled the next day.

On crab-walking in the tunnels under Colorado Springs.

Australia has Anzac Day (April 25) and Remembrance Day (November 11).

On Anzac Day, some people march.

"A lot of us were standing outside watching the planes flying overhead. But you don't see Japanese-Americans or other Hawaiians in the film. Maybe it was just the base they were showing? It's hard to tell. But it doesn't show us." The movie spends 40 minutes on the Japanese attack without showing that the Japanese not only bombed battleships, killing more than 2,000 sailors, but also bombed and strafed all over Oahu, this island where Pearl Harbor is situated, causing fires and reducing buildings to rubble. And the movie does not give even a glancing reference to the scores of Hawaiian civilians — the youngest a 3-month-old girl — who were killed in the attack, most of them from friendly fire as antiaircraft rounds missed their targets and landed several miles away in Honolulu.

"There's no reason that we would expect any acute reactions. What we're more concerned about is if people consume this over their lifetime, will it eventually catch up with them?" said an F.D.A. food safety official.

No Dog or Cat Feces in the Garden

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From suggested lesson plans for John Ashcroft's Dept. of Justice Bible study group:

MATTHEW 5:38-39 - "Ye have heard that it hath been said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." Discuss the implications of this passage on the use of force by federal law enforcement officers.

The show came off with amazing presentation, but at some risk. What if one of the artists featured in the show decided that they didn't like the connotation attributed to a piece of work? Do they have any say? Have artists become screenwriters, handing over their art to be misread by directors and actors as well as by the audience?
But Art will always be safe, as long as we slap around the policitians once and a while. Art grows and evolves and inspires into other movements. Music trends often change out of disgust for the trend that came before, but even if an artist completely rewrites the scene, you'll never hear any art student of Art say: "F**k minimalism" (at least not publicly). Art never turns on itself. Art at it's worst never sank to the level music did through disco in the 70's. "Open Ends" as a term suggests the types of timeless, universal catalysts, themes, and movements embodied by the categories in this show, the type that don't intend on dying. Art responds to questions society needs answered, the kind that doesn't go out of fashion.

Asked if the Yankees do anything against him that other teams do not, he said: "Not really. They're not scoring that many runs. They go one or two. If they beat me with that, I tip my hat. They're not doing much. How many other teams do you see scoring three or fewer runs?"
He didn't say "three or less runs," as many people would say, incorrectly. He said "three or fewer runs." The man can do it all.

Wiccan icon Fairuza Balk appeared in the Sopranos finale.

It turns out that tying a tie is equivalent to a so-called persistent random walk on a triangular lattice. Using this model, the number of all possible knots is calculated. The optimal knot is determined by the aesthetic conditions of symmetry and balance. Of the 85 tie knots found, our model duly predicts the four knots in widespread use and further introduces nine new aesthetic ones.

Is it just me, or has this been the slowest-moving weather front you've ever seen come across North America? We're having crazy storms over here. Are we drastically changing our climate?

How many people will increase their chance of getting skin cancer this weekend? By how much? Will you please put on some sunscreen?

He has been totally dependent on his father ... a spoiled brat.

Taking note of: "3 color" q u i d d i t y. Very nice. Thanks ghost rocket.

Black Loyalists: Our History, Our People - "This new online exhibit from Canada's Digital Collections Program documents an often overlooked group who fought for the British in the Revolutionary War: freed and escaped slaves. After the British government offered freedom to any slaves who fought on Britain's behalf, as many as 30,000 people of African descent escaped to aid the British war effort. When the war ended in an American victory, these free blacks were evacuated to Nova Scotia with the other Loyalists who left the former colonies. Although they had been promised land and a new life in Canada, black emigrants found harsh living and working conditions, prompting many to leave for Sierra Leone. This site tells the story of the black Loyalists with numerous illustrated vignettes, short biographies, a timeline, and descriptions and maps of black Loyalist communities." - The Scout Report via wood s lot.

If you tune in to WFMU this weekend, you can hear DJ Glen Jones try to break the Guinness World's Record for consecutive DJing: 73 hours, 33 minutes. And he's not allowed to play any songs that exceed six minutes in length, so it's no fair to play Beethoven's 9th or the "Atom Heart Mother Suite," and he can't one song over and over, either. Amazing. Insane. But he is determined.

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay haven't made a movie out of the Japanese bombing raid that commenced America's involvement in World War II so much as they've made a glossy, supercilious, hardcover tabletop picture book for your sitting room. Actually, they've done both: Pearl Harbor: The Movie and the Moment will set you back $35, but at least you can use it, four or five weeks from now, to prop up the sofa with the broken leg. Pearl Harbor the movie (sans moment) can be had more cheaply, but the only aspect of it that will still be with you next month is the crick in your neck from falling asleep waiting for things to start exploding.

I ask you this: If you knew [there was] a pile of dog shit sitting on the ground would you still pick it up and eat it? NO! If you KNOW fire burns, would you still reach into the flame to test it to see if it still burns? NO! You’re not a fuckin idiot!....DO NOT SEE THIS FILM! DO NOT let films like this continue to be made! This is NOT "supporting the arts!" Go see MEMENTO! Go see SHREK! Go see THE DISH! Hell, go see THE MUMMY RETURNS if you HAVE to see mindless entertainment! Make a fuckin stand NOW!

You emerge from "Pearl Harbor" numbed and dazzled, but not especially moved or enlightened. It is not a terrible movie, but rather a defiantly, extravagantly average one. May 25, 2001, is hardly a date that will live in infamy. The Allied leader to paraphrase is not Roosevelt, but Churchill: never have so many spent so much on so little.

Everything you know is wrong. (Another example.)

Yow! This from Pitchforkmedia.com (but I added the links):

Brandon Dameshek reports:
Superfreak of the 21st century, Beck, will be featured on radio station KCRW on May 26th with a taped performance from 12:00p.m. to 2:00p.m. The first hour will feature exclusively Beck at the DJ decks, spinning tracks of his choosing. The second hour will mix a live performance with new tracks from Air and the Moulin Rouge soundtrack. The show can be heard online at Kcrw.org during its initial airing, but if once isn't enough-- and for Beck, it often times is not-- Spinner.com will continue to feature the performance in archived form from May 30th until June 4th.

DON'T LET DISNEY TEACH YOU ABOUT HISTORY!

1. Pearl Harbor Was Not a Surprise Attack
   
   President Roosevelt, General George C. Marshall, General Leonard T.
   Gerow, Admiral Harold R. Stark, and Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner
   received several messages warning them of the attack.
   
   
   
   • Three days before the attack the Australian Intelligence service sent
     a message to the US military that the Japanese fleet had been spotted en
     route to Hawaii.
     
   • A British double agent working in Germany sent numerous messages
     warning of the attack.
     
   • 24 hours before the attack, the US Navy intercepted and decoded a
     message from Tokyo to the Japanese Embassy in Washington. It made
     explicitly clear what would happen on December 7th.
     
   
   
2. The Attack Was Not Unprovoked.
   
   In October of 1940 Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum wrote a memo
   to FDR that began, "The United States desires that Japan commit the
   first overt act". The memo described an eight step plan for provoking
   Japan into attacking The United States. The steps mostly constituted
   the building of bases that would encroach on Japan's borders and making
   alliances with the Chinese to help fight Japanese expansion. Each step
   on the list was undertaken by FDR and in 1941 the last and most
   provocative of the eight steps was instituted. An embargo, cutting
   Japan off from all supplies of rubber, jute, tin, oil and iron was
   instituted. When FDR tried to pass this embargo Congress warned him
   that he would surely provoke an attack from Japan. A few weeks later
   they were proven right.

3. Why Would America Deliberately Sacrifice its Soldiers at Pearl
   Harbor?
   
   There is no simple answer, but there are some simple facts. Before
   Pearl Harbor the American public was resistant to the idea of entering
   the war, but afterward support was plentiful. America entered the war
   in the midst of a severe economic depression and exited the war as the
   world's richest and most powerful nation. American corporate profits,
   as measured by Lawrence Wittner, rose from $6.4 billion in 1940 to 10.8
   billion in 1944.

4. Assessing the Damage
   
   2,400 American soldiers died at Pearl Harbor. However over 100,000
   innocent Japanese civilians died with the dropping of the first atomic
   bomb. As if this wasn't already frightening overkill, the US dropped a
   second bomb killing another 80,000 civilians. In addition, the US
   imprisoned 110,000 innocent American citizens of Japanese descent in
   internment camps in California, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado,
   Arkansas and Utah.

5. Don't Let Disney Teach Our Children History
   
   Disney likes to make things simple and easy to digest. They create for
   us good guys and bad guys and situations where choices are either right
   or wrong. The world doesn't work this way. World Wars One and Two were
   complex and tragic events that destroyed millions of lives. They are
   nothing to be proud of, or nostalgic for.

6. Suggested Reading
   
   Day of Deceit by Robert B Stinnet, Betrayal At Pearl Harbor by James
   Rusbridger & Eric Nave, Pearl Harbor The Continuing Controversy by Hans
   Trefousse
   

If you, like the expected millions of others, are going to see Pearl Harbor this weekend, why not root for the Japanese? (thanks Chaz)


Disney maintains that the movie is a love story "like Titanic" (just what we need, right?) not a patriotic, white supremacist piece of propaganda. If that's true, then why is there a different cut for Japan and Germany? A Disney insider says "Most of the changes have been made with an eye for consideration for those countries... Words that would be culturally insensitive to the country where the film is playing have been altered or deleted." riiiight.


Unfortunately it's gone now, but Page Six's Cindy Adams quoted star Alec Baldwin a few weeks ago as saying "The movie [Pearl Harbor] is extremely rah-rah patriotic. Once it's out, there won't be a sushi restaraunt left in this country." He then continued "Make sure you print that I'm joking!" That and every other racist joke, you fuck.


This movie is total trash. Don't see it. If you must, buy a ticket for "Shrek" or "Spy Kids" instead and then switch theaters. Thanks.

Lord of the Rings wows Cannes

I like big dogs and i cannot lie.

No one could find an obituary. One person called the newspaper in Kaycee's small town and they said that they had not heard of any girl with leukemia.

"Wrestling is fiction, too," Mankind explained. In wrestling, he said, "you establish your character, get sympathy for him." Wrestling has a story line and plot twists as well. "You want the match to be like a roller coaster, so you can't predict it," he said.

Smithsonian Oral and Video Histories: Steve Jobs.

Throughout college and for two years in Portland, the opening of drive-in movie season was another reason to count down to the days of spring. We may owe the Memphis Drive-In 150-200 dollars for all of the people we smuggled in under blankets or in the trunk.

Snot nosed kids like us are the reason a lot of drive-ins are closing down, but I will never forget the night me and two friends giggled in the back of a station wagon while our friend Katie Russell lamented to the ticket taker how alone she was and all she needed was a good movie by herself.


What are the best drive-ins near NYC?

``For us, Pearl Harbor is more than just an event in history,'' said John Tateishi, national director for the Japanese American Citizens League in San Francisco. ``It's the moment when everything changed. We suddenly became in the eyes of the American public the enemy, even though we were American citizens.''

Part of the apprehension, Aoki said, stems from the fact that people still have difficulty understanding that men and women with Asian faces can be American, too. Even if the movie is balanced, he is concerned that audiences still may not understand the distinction between Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans.

``People have been trained to look at our faces and think foreign, despite the fact we don't know the language or may never had left the country,'' he said.

thanks, allaboutgeorge

Amazon Listmania: Picture Books About Interracial Families.

A gallery of photos from Brooklyn Kings: New York City's Black Bikers.

IRON CHEF SHOWDOWN IN LAS VEGAS Actor William Shatner will host two one-hour specials of IRON CHEF SHOWDOWN IN LAS VEGAS, UPN's all-new Americanized version of the phenomenally successful Japanese culinary show "Iron Chef." Staged like a sporting event, IRON CHEF SHOWDOWN IN LAS VEGAS features frenetic culinary battles between the world's top chefs who race against the clock to create outstanding original cuisine. William Shatner contributes his trademark sense of humor and entertaining style to his role as "Chairman."

In each show, a Challenger (chef) is sent into the Chairman's "Kitchen Stadium," a giant cooking arena, where he or she competes against one of four Iron Chefs who specialize in American, Italian, French and Asian cooking. The competing chefs are given one hour to prepare an exotic meal in which each course must feature a secret ingredient that is revealed only moments before the battle begins. A panel of four celebrity judges taste and critique the food before determining whose cuisine will reign supreme. Based on format rights of Fuji TV, IRON CHEF SHOWDOWN IN LAS VEGAS is produced by the Larry Thompson Organization and Lions Gate Entertainment. Larry Thompson ("And the Beat Goes On: The Sonny and Cher Story," "Lucy and Desi: Before the Laughter") is executive producer.

Why wasn't I told before? Aren't my so called friends supposed to alert me to
this

kind
of
thing?

My computer literacy is zero. It's partly because it wasn't easy to learn, so I just gave up.

The news organization has to elevate the significance of stories about communities of color. Those stories have to be seen as part of the path to success and not part of the path to obscurity.

The boxes are supposed to help you focus your attention on one post at a time. The prominent dates floating to the left ought to help you see what's new since your last visit. The thin border around the list of links is similarly intended to help you isolate that part of the page mentally as you scan for information. The title is supposed to be murmured more often than shouted, and the strip is just for fun. What works and what doesn't?

"Where the hell did they get these kids?"
"It doesn't matter."

"It could have been better. It could have been a lot better" - Ewan McGregor at Cannes, on the George Lucas-penned script of "The Phantom Menace"

You'll probably enjoy this.

The appeal of laissez-faire capitalism, as it spread around the world until it vanquished even the Soviets, was simple: You need neither a change in structures nor a change in human nature. Instead, the bad side of human nature -- the greed, competitiveness, and materialism -- could be counted on to magically produce enough wealth that many people could actually enjoy the easy life that the utopians and commissars could only promise. That is the revolutionary idea of our time, and it has cast into a sepia shadow both Gandhi and Lenin. We distrust moralizing as thoroughly as we distrust government; in a cynical age, our ultimate trust is in the notion that trust is unnecessary, that we should each simply advance our own cause.

If you saw my check, you'd understand.

I love outdoor art. Washingtonpost.com has a small photo gallery depicting murals from throughout the nation's capital. The best murals are probably found in the West and Southwest—Los Angeles (the mural capital of the world), Austin, San Francisco, Tucson and San Diego have some great ones.

Phil Greenspun's online photo-illustrated Travels with Samantha makes me long for the open road and the beautiful countryside my wife and I saw on our honeymoon. Her favorite spot was Yellowstone. I'll never forget skinny-dipping in Lake Powell.

"frontwheeldrive humbly attempts to bring intelligent reporting to emerging sciences such as Artificial Intelligence, Memetics, Complexity, Chaos Theory and the like with a nod toward design and an open eye on new media. Forever forward in the pursuit of positive stimuli. Information in formation." It does a good job, and boasts some big names.

"PliNkit! is a collection of useful links that work very well, or are designed for viewing on a palmtop computer. It is designed to be a no frills easy to navigate listing of these sites." One day I will have my cell phone hooked up to my Palm III and that day I will come to randomWalks and search for "lynx" and find this post because it has the word lynx in it. Then I will bookmark PliNkit! on my Palm and never think about this post again.

Look here: say you have a disk that can spin, and so you put a pail of milk on it and you make it spin. You will see the milk go up the side of the pail, and fly over and out onto the disk. No big deal, eh? The spin will make a pull. But now what if you said that the pail of milk is your "at rest"? Then you have you and the sky and all that in a big huge spin, and the disk with its pail of milk is the only body that is "at rest", yes? How can you say then why the milk goes up? What can make the at-rest milk fly out of the pail like that?

In pre-Columbian mythology, Aztlan was the homeland and origin place of the Aztecs. Situated north of Mexico City (Tenochtitlan before the Spanish), Aztlan was believed to be an island that the Aztecs departed, by one account, around the 10th-century A.D. The Aztecs saw Aztlan as a primordial place of emergence and gave it sacred symbolism, just as Judeo-Christian cultures did with Eden.

Redefining nations...A New Aztlan?

According to the survey firm NDP Group -- which tracked the everyday habits of thousands of people through the 1990s -- this country is reading printed versions of books, magazines and newspapers less and less. In 1991, more than half of all Americans read a half-hour or more every day. By 1999, that had dropped to 45 percent.

I was hitchhiking around Europe in 1971, when I was 18, with this copy of A Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe. At one point I found myself lying in the middle of a field, a little bit drunk, when it occurred to me that somebody should write a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It didn't occur to me that it might actually be me years later.

rft's photography / Tips and Tricks contains "helpful information for working with digital photos [and especially those] taken with the Nikon Coolpix 950 or Nikon Coolpix 990."

OH. Now I get it!(doing a V-8 head slap)...getting your system to run Myst III is the first puzzle of the game! Ubisoft is pure genius...(where's the cheat?)...

OC Weekly regular Alison M. Rosen is the funniest writer in the history of free papers. Her recent master-works cover phallic Christian vegetables, Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light (tm), and penis duplication kits.

With concern about Mad Cow Disease, McDonald's nearly shut all their British outlets until one exec said: "What're we doing? There's no meat in our burgers."

I think everyone has pages they look at religiously and feel guilty about. At least I hope they do, because otherwise I'd feel very guilty. Anyway, I love the New York Posts' gossip page, Page 6. And today they posted the above tidbit. There's nothing more to the story, but I'm enamored by the possibility that their french fries aren't vegetarian but their hamburgers are.

Read CNN.com without the ads. You can thank me later. Also, Nic's tricks filter Salon and Slate, stripping out the tables and graphics with a short perl script and serving up the articles like it's 1994. Dig it. This page of lookups looks handy too. I wonder when I'll get around to making one of my own.

I usually really like Rob Neyer. He's one of the few baseball columnists that doesn't just take things at face value and doesn't just bow down to "conventional wisdom" when trying to understand the game. Today his ESPN column tread on interesting ground and it seems like he struggled quite a bit to try to get his ideas across without offending anyone. I'm not sure what I think of this piece, but maybe some of you have some thoughts Neyer's answers to the questions "Was Babe Ruth black? More important, should we care?"

Washington women prepare their casseroles with tears streaming into their saucepans. They begin to sniffle at the first strains of "Che gelida manina" and sob right through to the final curtain of "La Boheme." How can they cook without Puccini and Verdi and Mozart?

Things in nature often move in complicated ways. You have probably watched the way a butterfly moves. The molecules of the air that you are breathing move in a similar way. This type of motion we call a random walk. You can also take a random walk.

Hot pepper burning remedies. Ouch!

Suppose the Earth is all one big single living organism, with all the elements of it connected like cells in a body. Suppose the goal of evolution is to link up individual human minds, bringing an explosion of intelligence and even global consciousness to this mammoth being.

Who was Jeremy Bentham? What is utilitarianism? (Why am I asking?)

Put down that Coke! So-called President Bush, hypocritical Congressmen, and greedy soft drink companies are contributing to slavery and famine in Sudan. Nat Hentoff tells you how.

"There are a number of excellent sites out there for people wanting to shave their heads, or just connect to others who share the hairstyle," and Head Shaver's Information and FAQ is probably the best of them.

On Alt-log: Apparently Baltimore City Paper has a regular
column called Funny Paper in which they humorously deconstruct the comics. It reminds me of a less straightforward version of the wonderful "Comics
I Don't Understand."

If you have seen the remarkable photos in The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated (A Library of Congress Exhibition), you will certainly not begrudge me the sharing of them with anyone else. (In the early 1900s, Russian photographer Prokudin-Gorskii created color images by shooting simultaneously with three black and white cameras fitted with red, green, and blue filters. The resulting images were projected back through colored filters onto a screen for display.) The photos are technically marvelous, but more striking is the dissonance between the "modern" medium and "historic" subject matter, if you take my meaning. Have a look!

Finally! A sighting of the Scary Movie 2 trailer.

Huntley Meadows lies in a wet lowland that was carved out by an ancient meander of the Potomac River. The resulting freshwater wetland is one of the rarest habitats left in Fairfax County. Acre for acre, a healthy wetland supports more life than almost any other habitat. Wetlands also purify polluted waters and control the destructive power of floods and storms.

Eric of Kestrel's Nest, how does your garden grow?

Why do you think there have been so few chronicles about the realities of working at Wal-Mart or Comfort Inn, which employ more people than the dot-coms did even at their height?

The question that comes up over and over again, and I don't really have an answer still -- really, I don't know any other people who have answers to them -- is, "It's terrible, awful, getting worse. What do we do? Tell me the answer." The trouble is, there has not in history ever been any answer other than, "Get to work on it."

listen missy has the longest list of DC area bloggers that I've seen. Inexplicably, randomWalks is not included.

They say billions and billions served. I say billions and billions deceived," said Harish Bharti, who filed the lawsuit earlier this week on behalf of the two Hindus and a third, non-Hindu vegetarian.

The goats have been bred with a spider gene so their milk provides a unique protein. The company then plans to extract the protein from the milk to produce fibers — called BioSteel — for bulletproof vests, aerospace and medical supplies.