Month of April , 2003

The playing cards issued to service members in Iraq, with the pictures of the baddest of Ba'athist bad men, have been something of a joke since their introduction. But here's someone that's found a good way to use a silly idea: playing cards with pictures of looted museum pieces. One of the big problems in recovering the material stolen from Iraqi museums has been that few outside of Iraq know what these works look like--as noted last week, law enforcement in the US doesn't know what to look for, auction houses don't know what to look for, customs doesn't know what to look for. Doc Searls' "barnraising" is a great idea, but in the meantime, any way that information about these pieces can get out into the public is good. From the website, it appears that they will be selling these cards, as soon as they can get enough images.

After you've had a look, you can visit an Iraqi National Museum website, which doesn't appear to be an official site, but rather the work of a devoted museum fan (apparently an Austrian one). Another good look at the works now slipping out of public grasp forever...

LinktoComments('93434462')
Old Comments

I would like to suggest a new word to be entered into the English vocabulary: "to fleischer". Fleischering is to avoid answering a question by making a statement that is formally an answer but actually does not even address the topic of the question. For example, when asked if the president's lack of comment on Sen. Santorum's equation of homosexuality with incest and bestiality (and reference to priestly pedophilia as consensual homosexual intercourse) represented " a conscious decision to just keep clear of this one?" on the part of the administration, fleischering's namesake said:

Let me put it to you this way. The President typically never does comment on anything involving a Supreme Court case, a Supreme Court ruling or a Supreme Court finding -- typically.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few of the stories I've been meaning to blog but just haven't found the energy for:

• First, a Retraction: My post yesterday should have referred to the Dog Run, not the Dog Pound. I don't know what I was thinking--I was looking straight at the site when I was writing the post...
• Looted Art News: Some of the looted pieces from Iraq are already turning up in the US. The FBI has already started receiving tips from customs agents, collectors, and auction-house agents about suspicious pieces. Unfortunately, there is as of yet no comprehensive source for identifying these artworks.
• A Barn-Raising for Civilization:: Doc Searls' suggestions might go some ways towards remedying the difficulties in identifying and recovering looted artworks. Among other things (such as creating an all-looted-artwork, all-the-time Iraqi network to inform Iraqis and encourage looters, at least looters of conscience, to return stolen works) Searls recommends
  

  Create an .iq Web site devoted entirely to aggregating and displaying photographs of Baghdad museum properties, and of lost or damaged Iraqi antiquities. Perhaps the British Museum (which has already pledged help) or British Petroleum (its Web site sponsor) could run this thing--or fund somebody else willing to run the thing.

  This is a great idea, and might I suggest, especially given the number of folks surfing the blogosphere that are involved in high-tech industries, that they initiate efforts in their companies to donate equipment, expertise, and funding to such a project? I know that Intel is especially eager to invest in cultural uses of the Internet, and is a frequent sponsor of museum exhibitions and programs, and I assume other companies might be similarly inclined. That's great PR, too--what company doesn't want to save civilization? This isn't something that the Garner team is going to push for on their own, but if a team of techs with a truckload of servers, scanners and digital cameras, and free software were to be put into their laps...

• Economies of Now: Jason Kottke has a short post describing a study on NYC MetroCard usage. MetroCards, for non-New Yorkers, fully replaced tokens for subway and bus travel a couple of years ago, and are available (as of last June, anyway) in one-day unlimited ($4), one-week unlimited ($17), or one-month unlimited ($63) varieties, or you can fill them with any number of individual fares for $1.50 per ride ($1.35 for everything you buy over $15.00). If you use the subway system or busses regularly (back and forth to work, plus a few more rides a week) the $63 monthly card is the best value, but the weekly cards are much more popular. I myself never bought a monthly card, despite being a regular subeway and bus user for several years since they were introduced. According to the study, one of the reasons people don't buy monthly cards is that, though in the long run it saves them money, in the short run, they can't afford it. Many people--especially in expensive NYC--live paycheck to paycheck, and $63 is a big chunk to take out of the budget all at once. The study's author suggests setting up a "MetroCard fund", where commuters can pay a couple of dollars in a day towards their next monthly card--the thing is, NYC already has a fund like that, called "MetroCheck". Employees can use MetroCheck not only to have a portion of their paycheck applied towards their MetroCard, but to have it come out of their pre-tax income, meaning that they save even more (if only a few dollars a month). The problem is that employers either don't understand the program or are not willing to implement it, or they don't explain it well when they do implement it. It's like direct deposit was a few years ago--in theory, all you had to do was ask, but in practice, it was too much bother for employers. Today, most employers prefer to pay via direct deposit, and I imagine that as empoyers "get it" in NYC, they will realize how far their involvement in their employees commuting life can go for them. At the minimum, assuring that every employee has a valid MetroCard at any given time means that late employees will not be able to say "Sorry I'm late--my MetroCard expired and I didn't have enough money on me to buy a new one."
• Sugar's good for you. Really!: The World Health Organization (WHO) is compiling a report on healthy diets, with a set of recommendations similar to the American "food pyramid", only based on reality instead of industry PR. Or is it? Not if the sugar industry has it's way, apparently. Seems that the Sugar Association, a coalition of sugar companies and growers "committed to integrity and sound scientific principles" (code for "deceptive research and industry PR"; see Trust Us We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future for a key to sound-science advocacy/PR shilling) is very upset by the WHO's suggestion that sugar should be consumed in moderation, composing at most 10% of your daily caloric intake, complaining that "We remain adamant that any scientific report that affects world health policies and global implementation strategies must be based on the preponderance of scientific evidence." The Who report is, admittedly, based on the recommendations of 30 independant experts, who arrived at the 10% figure by as the average recommendation of 23 separate national studies of sugar intake--but none of those studies was sponsored by the sugar industry, and none of the experts are on Big Sugar's payroll, and so their results are clearly "unscientific".

  Now, here's where it gets ugly: to prevent the release of this report, the sugar industry, backed by big sugar-peddlers like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, is threatening to demand that Congress withdraw American funding of the WHO unless the recommendation in the report is raised to 25% (what's worse is that the recommendation is, as far as I can make out, for added sugar--that is, soda pop, candy, and the sugar you sprinkle on your morning cereal, and doesn't include naturally-occuring sugars already in many foods). This is no idle threat--the food lobby is the most powerful and influential lobby on the United States, outweighing--in terms of financial resources and personnel--both the oil lobby and the tobacco lobby. And, as the world's largest economy, the US contributes the largest part of the financial support to international organizations: $406 million in the WHO's case. Lest it be forgotten, as fallible as the WHO can be sometimes, it is the only world-wide organization capable of even beginning to deal with and somewhat controlling tuberculosis, AIDS, SARS, malaria, and any number of other dangerous and virulent diseases, in addition to providing basic medical care to millions around the world. The fact that they are willing to hold the world's health hostage to insure their market share is not only sad, it's a travesty. Alas, given the high ethical standards of our Congresspersons, Big Sugar will probably prevail, one way or another.

• Sorry, that's secret: The Pentagon has forwarded a list of regular reports to Congress that they feel are unnecessary. While reducing paperwork is good for both government efficiency and for the environment, I suspect different motives behind some ofthese requests. Many of the reports do seem superfluous, but Daniel Cornwall, Librarian, has compiled a list of 35 reports of "Special Concern", including reports on the cost of maintaining overseas military stations, the protection of nuclear material, special operations forces training with foreign military forces, humanitarian assistance, military housing, and various reports on expenditures and commercial activities. Now, leaving aside that I don't trust the Pentagon any further than I could throw it (if I could get close enough), most of these reports seem like the kind of thing we'd want our lawmakers to know about. The Pentagon cites either national security concerns or internal oversight as their reason for wanting to get rid of most of the reports, but a) I think--I hope!--that our elected leaders can be trusted not to release sensitive information to the public, and 2) "internal oversight" means "if we do something you wouldn't approve of, we'll tell you. Trust us." We have checks and balances for a reason, and if Congress is to be an effective check against administrative power, this information is crucial.

LinktoComments('93146035')
Old Comments

The Talking Dog added me to the Dog Pound, his collection of "sites approved for romping and reading". What separates this event from other blogrolling instances is not only that the Talking Dog is a fellow Brooklynite (though I am currently in exile) who specializes in performing name change operations for transsexuals (nice work, if you can get it), but the review:

Eyeteeth has a great interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Anarchist in the Library (which is now at the top of my "to-read" list). Vaidhyanathan discusses the ways that sharing networks--be they local communities like church groups or jam sessions or transnational structures like the Internet of global corporations--work as the medium for cultural growth and development.

Ella Shohat is a professor of Women's Studies and Cultural Studies at CUNY, and is one of the co-founders of Ivri-NASAWI, an organization devoted to the cultural life of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewry. I know of her indirectly, as one of my partner's professors and as the author of an incredible essay on Sephardic second-class status in Israel, "Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims," in Dangerous Liaisons, which she co-edited.

Allright, I Lied...

Once I got started, the remodeling work went remarkably fast. So, without any further ado, I bring you OneMansOpinion.org, Mark III. It might still be a little rough around the edges, especially the search engine (Atomz free search engine only allows you to use one image in your search results pages, and I need 8 to make up the new menu...), but for the most part it's done. I hope it's liked.

In other news, Squawkbox's comments service has been down all day. I assume that they'll be back on-line soon--they've never had an outage of this magnitude before, and tend to be on top of things, so far as I can tell.

After only a few weeks of serious blogging here, I've decided to redo my site template, mostly in an effort to force myself to learn some coding skills. But also because there's a lot of things I just don't like about the current template. So if things get screwy around here, that's me, "learning" (read: "making mistakes").

What I like about the current template

• The "newspaper" style: I got the idea for this after seeing a Fark photoshop contest calling on users to redesign Slashdot. One of the entries was Slashdot, redone as an old newspaper, and it was, in my opinion, the best of the lot. So I stole the idea, although mine has more of an "Old West" feel than I remember the Fark entry having. I like the connection between old-style, "craft" printing and blogging. Since its inception, printing has been a tool of democracy and egalitarianism. The frontier printer (as I imagine him) was someone who culled the news from the Eastern newspapers and the telegraph and from travellers passing through and put it together for his local audience, mostly people he knew, with a healthy dollop of his own editorial commentary. He was a point of contact between his community and the wider world, as well as a shaper of his local world. In a social environment defined by the cattle trade, mining, railroad speculation, and farming, he devoted himself to intellectual pursuits, to feeding his neighbor's need for information and connection. I'd like to think, as abstracted and idealized as this portrait is, that blogging partakes of some of these qualities.
• The domain name:When I decided to do this, in the last days before the 2000 election, I tried my hand at a number of domain names, all of which were taken, before arriving at onemansopinion.org". That's what the site is, the opinions of one man (me, of course). The domain name describes exactly what the site is.
• The logo: Once I settled on the domain name, I got to thinking. There's an old joke, that opinions are like assholes--everybody's got one. So I thought a good logo would be the asshole doodle from Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, which is really just a bunch of lines crossing at the center. But I also wanted to avoid all the implications of the "One Man"--I hoped that readers would comment, disagree, argue, and send me nasty e-mails (only 2 have, so far, and they weren't really all that nasty). So I wanted the site to have a slogan to go along with the logo, and thought of the "Got Milk?" campaign, so along with the asshole logo I would put "Got One?"--as in both "got an asshole?" and "got an opinion?" Also, I didn't want to throw it in your face but just subtly suggest that, by the very fact of running a site devoted to my own opinions, I was sort of an asshole, as well.
• The coding: There's nothing fancy in the coding of the site. All of my own code is straight out of besic HTML. The only javascript on the isite is where outside services like bloggrolling.com or squawkbox.tv use it to integrate their content into my site--there's no javascript in any of the critical areas, where a non-javascript browser would be unable to use the essential functions of the site. There's no mouseovers or pop-ups or drop-downs. I did use server-side includes, notably for the archive menu and the copyright notice, but these are invisible to the end-user. I am a big fan of the simple in web design, of avoiding bells and whistles as much as possible, especially in layout and presentation. All of the places I've broken from this are content-related--links to sites I enjoy, the Iraqi Death Count counter, etc., all of which contribute to the meaning of the site without detracting from the structure of it.

What I dislike about the current template

• The "newspaper" style: As much as I liked the connection between blogging and printing, I have to admit that I didn't pull it off well. As I added more content to the sidebars, they got too crowded. The Old West theme pretty much demanded I use a serif font, which are somewheat harder on the eyes when reading on screen. Most of all, though, I'm just not a good enough designer to pull it off. The site looks good, I think, but not distinctive. The biggest issue is the contrast of medias, the translation from 19th c. tech to 21st c. A good designer could do this, but I am not a good designer (I'm not a designer at all--my work in IT has been focused around content, not design). While I have some of the designer's skills, I don't have the "eye", the "feel" for what would really work. And I am somewhat constrained by the nature of blogging, too--a newspaper has all kinds of visual cues--typefaces, page position, column width, and so on--to indicate how important a story is, where it fits in the grand scheme of things. A template--and especially one centred around Blogger or a similar content management system--takes all of these visual cues away; templates tend towards uniformity, while print can be designed anew for each application. I don't have stories that are more important than others--I have random thoughts and opinions.
• The domain name: If I had really thought things through, I would have come up with something distinctive, like Turtle Wisdom or The Matter with Me or something. OneMansOpinion.org is what I came to when my first and second choices were all exhausted. It's descriptive, it's functional, but it's not very fun. Maybe that's why I came up with the whole "asshole" connection, to liven it up a bit.
• The logo: I scanned the image in from my copy of Breakfast of Champions, likely committing a grave copyright infringement in the process. But no matter what I did, on-screen it always had these jagged edges, and I never managed to make it look as fluid and off-the-cuff as Vonnegut's original drawing. And I'm pretty sure that only a handful of Vonnegut fans could possibly get the joke.
• The coding: There's nothing fancy in the coding of the site. In fact, most of the code comes out of the degraded HTML 3.2 standard, and doesn't validate well against the current, HTML 4.0 standard. And I use my code sloppily. For instance, I use "font" tags, which are superseded by CSS text attributes. I use tables for layout, instead of for presenting content. I use structural elements like the "h2" tag for text formatting. Content and structure are not clearly distinguished. Basically, I just did not push myself--I relied on what I already knew and made it work, instead of trying new things.

The new template will hopefully address these dislikes while retaining the things I like. It's very simple, much cleaner, much more restrained. I use CSS for all the layout and to define all the text formatting (although I've cheated a little, so I could use the basic HTML commands I know by heart in Blogger without having to refer to the style sheet). I am trying to make an effort to make sure it works in all browsers (at least all that support CSS--there's a limit to how much backwards compatability I'm willing to extend). From my logs, I noticed that about 12% of my viewers use browsers that do not support PNG graphics, which means they never saw my background--although I prefer the PNG format, the graphics on the new site will all be GIFs or JPGs.

I hope to have the new template ready some time next week. I'm trying not to get sucked into it--one can easily waste hours just trying to add one more cool feature--and am devoting a lot of weekday time to job-hunting, so I don't know for sure when it will be ready. And I have to go through my archives and add "/p" tags to all my posts in order for the CSS to work, which is a big project in itself. But I hope the new look will be a major improvement ove rthe current site. And if you've read this far--thanks for caring!

LinktoComments('92901386')
Old Comments

Alas, Dick Cheney, We Hardly Knew Ye

Of course, that's because you hardly let us...

The Smoking Gun managed to get a copy of an obituary mock-up for Dick Cheney accidentally made public on CNN's website a couple days ago. Apparently most news organizations have nearly-ready-to-go obituaries in their files for famous personages, "just in case"--CNN is only unusual in having posted them to a public part of their website (a mistake which has since been remedied).

Alas, Dick Cheney, We Hardly Knew Ye

Of course, that's because you hardly let us...

The Smoking Gun managed to get a copy of an obituary mock-up for Dick Cheney accidentally made public on CNN's website a couple days ago. Apparently most news organizations have nearly-ready-to-go obituaries in their files for famous personages, "just in case"--CNN is only unusual in having posted them to a public part of their website (a mistake which has since been remedied).

But I have a different theory: Cheney's really dead. That's the "undisclosed location"! Look at the obituary CNN posted: the date of Cheney's death is given as 2001, which is precisely when we started hearing that Cheney had been taken to an undisclosed location. And the pull-quote is taken from a statement Cheney made the year before, right after a check-up. Remember, he had these "not-heart-attacks" that put him in the hospital a couple times? Clearly he suffered a massive not-coronary-infraction on hearing about the attacks on 9/11, and died. CNN prepared their obituary and was ready to roll when the cover-up came down. Anyone who has ever read Philip Roth's amazingly vicious portrayal of Nixon's presidency, Our Gang, has a pretty good sense of what went down. Afraid to admit to the American people that Cheney had become collateral damage in the latest fat-food ad campaign, and that the President was sailing without a rudder, the Veep's handlers came down on CNN and other outlets, assuring them that despite what they may have heard or seen, the Veep was still very much alive and that running an obituary would be a breach of national security. When CNN's Eason Jordan revealed that CNN had been covering up stories in Iraq in order to protect their sources and employees working there, someone at CNN let the new-found freedom to speak go to his/her head, and leaked the Cheney obit. S/he was quickly discovered and "neutralized" by DoJ forces, but by then the damage was done.

Which also explains why Powell has been so inneffective these last 20 months--since Cheney's death, Powell has actually been the Vice President. And nobody listens to the Vice President.

LinktoComments('92866482')
Old Comments