Archive for March, 2004

Not flowers in Fallujah. Today was perhaps the saddest and most gruesome day in Iraq since the U.S. invasion. Canada’s CTV provides video from the scene on their website– the only media outlet in North America to do so.

Tokyo geek, Marcos Weskamp, has made the way-cool Newsmap. It visually displays newsheadlines pulled from google news in a treemap, a space-constrained visualization of information.

Google gets personal.

It is 99.8% air and invented by NASA to capture comet particles that move six-times faster than a speeding bullet. It’s also the coolest looking stuff ever.

Hundreds of students protest at Karl Rove’s home. The crowd surrounded Rove’s house, tracking him through the many windows, waving signs that read “Say Yes to DREAM” and pounding on the glass. At one point, Rove rushed to a window, pointed a finger and yelled something inaudible.

Hmmm, it’s the same $2,000/month mortgage payment. Should you go for the 17th century manor house and farm in France or the stucco dump in the ghetto? Real estate is strange.

Oh man, don’t go padlocking newspapers. US authorities shut down a Baghdad newspaper after it was accused of printing lies that incited violence. Omar Jassem, a freelance reporter, said he thought that democracy meant many viewpoints and many newspapers. “I guess this is the Bush edition of democracy,” he said.

Here’s the most comprehensive site for learning new ways to tie your shoes. I’m going to be trying out the Ladder Lacing technique this week.

Even Noam Chomsky.

Unfortunate breaking news splitscreen less than gracefully undermines the message of Vice President Cheney’s speech.

For developing his pot-in-pot refrigeration system to keep perishable foods fresh without electricity, Mohammed Bah Abba of Dutse, Nigeria, has won the Rolex Award for Enterprise.

Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid wins This year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize. Her first bulding in the U.S. is Cinicinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center

With his warm dulcet voice and his passion for music, J.J. Jackson helped to define what a “VJ” was during the formative years of MTV. For the five of us, he was the wise DJ, said fellow early 80’s MTV VJ Mark Goodman. He was the guy who had been through it all and was able to always put a mature perspective to things. He wound up handling the spotlight that was thrust on us better than any of us. Jackson died Wednesday night in Los Angeles while driving home from dinner. He was 62.

Take a look at this list of humorous names people have found while doing genealogical research.

The American Newspaper Repository has a huge collection of old newspapers from all over the world. And they’ve got a great gallery of art and illustration from American papers available online.

More than 70% of Vegetarian Times readers aren’t vegetarian. They’re flexitarians, folks who are motivated less by animal rights than by a growing body of medical data that suggests health benefits from eating more vegetarian foods.

British citizen Ronald Fiddler tells how he went from Manchester to Guantanamo and spent 2 years in jail there. Yes, I travelled to Pakistan in October 2001, he said. But if that’s my crime then you would have to arrest whole planeloads of people. He also described the torture given to him and other prisoners held in Gitmo. These are American prisons? whoa.

Well nobody in the mainstream press is writing about this doozie -yet. Kentucky Congressman Ron Lewis has sponsored the Congressional Accountability for Judicial Activism Act of 2004 to allow Congress to reverse the judgments of the United States Supreme Court! That law has to be unconstitutional, but then the ruling could just be reversed by Congress and then ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and then reversed by Congress and then…

Bob Zangas, a former helicopter pilot and lieutenant colonel in the Marines who was working as a civilian employee of the Coalition Provisional Authority, was killed last week south of Baghdad when gunmen wearing Iraqi police uniforms stopped him at a makeshift checkpoint and shot him to death along with another American and an Iraqi translator. His blog is still online. Read his last entry or offer condolences.

In case you’ve got an extra long lunch hour to kill, checkout the complete works of George Orwell.