It was 100 years ago today that the character Leopold Bloom walked the streets of Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses. While Dublin seems like the place to be today, there are still plenty of Bloomsday activities in San Fran and a reading broadcast live from Symphony Space in NYC starting at 4pm. (PDT)
Through benevolent decrees and broad-shouldered political muscle, Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley is trying to make Chicago the greenest city in America. My belief is that environmental initiatives should not just be out on the West Coast, in Alaska, or by the ocean, but in cities. If we don
The Lord Almight is a firm supporter of global free trade, it seems. The Roman Catholic in the U.S., Canada and Europe is now oursourcing prayers to India. In Kerala’s churches, memorial and thanksgiving prayers conducted for local residents are said for a donation of 40 rupees (90 cents), whereas a prayer request from the United States typically comes with $5, says an article in the New York Times (not the Onion).
Granted, it is a hard word. Thirteen-year-old Akshay Buddiga still gets alopecoid right.
Terrific line drawings of the Manhattan skyline by Matteo Pericoli.
Everyone’s got a blog these days, even The Son of Sam.
In an effort to reduce the number of fights and violent outbreaks at the upcoming Euro2004 soccer games, Portugese police will be cracking down on drinking, but will fully allow fans to smoke dope. Apparently, the police in Portugal believe that a stoned crowd is easier to control than a drunk one, says an article in England’s Guardian newspaper. A spokeswoman for the Portuguese police said busting people for sparkin’ a j will be a low priority. If people are smoking but not kicking each other, not beating each other, and not making a problem, why on earth would an officer go and ask ‘Is that cannabis?’
Mike Skinner, the 20-something Birmingham, England-native who’s known as The Streets, has outdone himself with his second album. A Grand Don’t Come for Free is probably even better than his first album. And that’s something. Watch the video for Fit But You Know It and Dry Your Eyes– which Skinner calls the weepy one on the album that you lot sung along to at the shows.
Works by Sean Starwars are on view at Kevin Quandt Fine Art, Minneapolis. Including this work, Sober Up.
Paris considers banning SUVs. We have no interest in having SUVs in the city. They’re dangerous to others and take up too much space, says Paris Deputy Major Denis Baupin
After years of denial, TIA officials have confirmed the hasty exodus from the United States in the days immediately after 9/11 of members of the Saudi royal family and relatives of Osama bin Laden. The manifest for a 09/13/2001 Boeing 727 flight to London from Lexington, Kentucky lists eight Saudis, two Sudan nationals, one Tunisian, one Philippine citizen, one Egyptian and two British subjects.
Arizona artist Mark Newport likes to mixes his needle craft artistry and his love for comics. His hand-knitted superhero costumes and hand-knotted comic book covers will be on view this August at the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle.
So I went to a wedding this past weekend. And I probably had a little too much to drink at the reception. I just rambled on and on about the lucky couple getting married. I’m just glad there was no one there with a video camera. Only in ‘Merica
A story in today’s Wall Street Journal says the Defense Department’s general counsel wrote a detailed report for Donald Rumsfeld that provided a series of legal justifications for limiting or disregarding antitorture laws and proposed legal defenses that government officials could use if they were accused of torture. (subscription required — or check comments section below for a copy of the article). Apparently, the advice was part of a classified report on interrogation methods prepared after commanders at Guantanamo griped they weren’t getting enough information from prisoners using legal torture methods.
No one alive has ever seen it happen. Starting Tuesday at 5:00am UTC Venus will travel between the Earth and Sun for about six hours. While no one on the U.S. west coast will be able to see it, you can see a live webcast from the Worth Hill Observatory, Dorset, U.K. In California the show starts at 9pm Monday night.
The National Library of Scotland has put online a collection of 1,800 broadsides that lets you see for yourself what ‘the word on the street’ was in Scotland between 1650 and 1910. Crime, politics, romance, emigration, humour, tragedy, royalty and superstitions. All the actual documents have been reproduced as pdfs and are exceptionally easy to browse and read.
A nice profile by Mark Glaser in the OJR says Craig’s List is eating into newspapers’ classifieds business. It’s so freaking wonderful. Newspapers’ Web sites are unspeakably awful by comparison. They have too many masters to serve and virtually all of them don’t understand how to make a Web site work, says new media consultant Barry Parr about the phenominal success of Craig’s List.
Serously, $28 million has been added to the 2004 Selective Service System (SSS) budget to prepare for a military draft that could start as early as June 15, 2005, reports Congress.org. In case you’re already checking Craigslist for apartments in Vancouver, the man’s one step ahead of you. Canada and the U.S. signed a “smart border declaration” in 2001 that would make draft-dodging much harder than it was in the Vietnam era. (Although, this 2BR/2BA loft in Yaletown w/10ft ceilings and gym membership included for US$1,000/mo. does sound pretty sweet.) Go Canucks, eh.
It was becoming clearer: No single person had to have engineered this. First came a rumor about Kerry, then a small-time blogger wrote about it, and his posting was read by journalists. They started looking into it, a detail that was picked up by Drudge
Cinema ushers in England are patroling the aisles with nightvision goggles in order to thwart videotape pirating of the new Harry Potter movie.