The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,Happy New Year, one and all, and here's hoping for better days in 2005.
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
[T]he neighborhood's dogs know the shop, because Jon Vie saves broken cookies for them. One dog that ran away from its owner a year ago was soon found inside the shop, drooling over the cookie case.I'm in North Carolina visiting family at the moment, but I'll be back in NYC in time to make one final visit before Jon Vie closes for good, I hope.
OH NO!!! I feel like we should buy up all the cookies, like Larry David did with the sponge cakes in Curb Your Enthusiasm!An excellent plan.
At a time when the [Palestinian] authority was starved for funds, Arafat's money managers placed bets from Tel Aviv to Silicon Valley on venture capital funds, software startups and telecommunications companies.
[...]
Arafat made the investments abroad with tax money that he "diverted" from the Palestinian finance ministry, according to a September 2003 International Monetary Fund report on the Palestinian economy. Israel collected import taxes for goods destined for the territories and then passed the funds to the authority.
"It is part of the A.C.L.U.'s mandate, part of its mission, to protect consumer privacy," said Wendy Kaminer, a writer and A.C.L.U. board member. "It goes against A.C.L.U. values to engage in data-mining on people without informing them. It's not illegal, but it is a violation of our values. It is hypocrisy."Now New York's publicity-loving Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer (safety tip: try never to be positioned between Mr. Spitzer and a camera) is getting into the act, questioning whether the ACLU has violated their own stated privacy policies.
I have been living and working in NYC for about ten years now, and it may interest you to learn that there has been, in the last few years, a real vogue for "authentic" barbecue in Manhattan.
Several would-be barbecue joints have opened up in town, despite logistical obstacles like emission control laws that make operating an old-school barbecue pit nearly impossible, with quality ranging from so-awful-it-will-stunt-your-growth to actually pretty good.
None of them can hold a candle to a gastronomic temple like Allen and Son, of course, but up here, barbecue-wise, you take what you can get.
In fact, at the end of June, there was a two-day Barbecue Block Party in Madison Square Park, at which pitmasters from around the country (NC, Texas, St. Louis, Kansas City) came to ply their trade and feed hungry Manhattanites. Ed Mitchell of Mitchell's Barbecue represented North Carolina, and by general consensus was the big hit of the weekend. People waited in line up to two hours for a plate of his barbecue, and despite his best planning efforts he ran out of pig early, both days.
Even though I am now surrounded by barbecue-cooking wannabees in my adopted hometown, every time I visit family and friends back in North Carolina I bring an empty Coleman cooler with me... and on the return trip, it's groaning with 'cue. My foodie friends in the city always clamor for dinner invitations when they know I'm coming back from a Carolina run...
Nine out of 10 payday loans are made to repeat borrowers with more than five payday loans per year, according to the Center for Responsible Lending, a group in Durham, North Carolina, that assists consumers in financial difficulty.And they're backed by some of the biggest names in the banking business.
The average borrower spends $600 in fees annually on a $300 loan, says a 2004 report in the Yale Journal on Regulation, a law journal published by Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
Most payday lenders earn gross profit margins of 30 percent to 45 percent, the report says.
"That's the dirty little secret,'' says Georgia Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner John Oxendine, whose office has investigated payday lenders. "Payday lending is structured so you just pay the interest every two weeks. They never want you to pay back the principal.''
America has no better than a 10 percent chance of avoiding economic "armageddon." ... Roach sees a 30 percent chance of a slump soon and a 60 percent chance that "we'll muddle through for a while and delay the eventual armageddon." The chance we'll get through OK: one in 10. Maybe.The reasons? A record trade deficit, a crushing debt load, a cratering dollar...
Am I the only one that wondered how “Fat Idiot Fans” (FIF) ended up in those courtside VIP seats? Isn’t that where Detroit’s versions of Jack Nicholson should be sitting? Maybe the Vice Pres of Chrome Bumpers for General Motors or Berry Gordy’s 6th wife’s personal trainer? … you’d think after buying $250 replica jerseys that “FIF” would be tapped out for $500 seats.I say that's a valid question.
At 6:30 AM on Nov 2 I awoke as "a greedy country club Republican with my Halliburton portfolio and my tax cut (for the wealthy dontchaknow)” … 13 hours later, as the polls closed … I had somehow morphed into [an] “Ignorant Southern Redneck Religious Zealot”.Preach, brother. I was tempted to invite some of my Blue State colleagues to come to church with me for some snake-handling my own self.
This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.Take that, you... you... godless secular rationalists!
This textbook suggests that the earth is spherical. The shape of the earth is a controversial topic, and not all people accept the theory. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.There are even stickers for astronomy textbooks that will help us guard against the onslaught of filthy pagan heliocentrism (the theory that the Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way around.)
This textbook contains material on gravity. Gravity is a theory, not a fact, regarding a force that cannot be directly seen...
Six million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators in the Shoah. Yad Vashem undertook to retrieve the names of the Jewish victims and to preserve their memory.This is the moral duty of the Jewish People; our last respects to the victims. The computerized database prepared by Yad Vashem, with the assistance of other institutions, now includes the names of approximately half of these victims. We make their names accessible here, in reverence and awe, determined to persevere until the last name is retrieved.
They drew a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Gilded gold, fixed what wasn't broke, paved paradise and put up a parking lot. They went and changed the Atlantic Coast Conference basketball schedule.In other distressing ACC-related news, my Tarheels took an egregious pratfall in their season-opening game, losing to noted basketball powerhouse... Santa Clara University???
Now I live in New York... but that is because when I am in the South, I wander around wondering where I can get a copy of the New York Times, and when I am in the North, I wander around wondering where I can get some okra, and I'd rather think about some okra than the New York Times. -- Roy Blount, Jr.
I haven't had time to take more than a cursory look at this yet, but it's certainly interesting and even provocative.It is well known that people don't always 'speak their minds', and it is suspected that people don't always 'know their minds'. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology.
This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. This new method is called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short.
Last month, Helen Chenoweth-Hage attempted to board a United Airlines flight from Boise to Reno when she was pulled aside by airline personnel for additional screening, including a pat-down search for weapons or unauthorized materials.
Chenoweth-Hage, an ultra-conservative former Congresswoman (R-ID), requested a copy of the regulation that authorizes such pat-downs.
"She said she wanted to see the regulation that required the additional procedure for secondary screening and she was told that she couldn't see it," local TSA security director Julian Gonzales told the Idaho Statesman (10/10/04).
"She refused to go through additional screening [without seeing the regulation], and she was not allowed to fly," he said. "It's pretty simple."
Chenoweth-Hage wasn't seeking disclosure of the internal criteria used for screening passengers, only the legal authorization for passenger pat-downs. Why couldn't they at least let her see that? asked Statesman commentator Dan Popkey.
"Because we don't have to," Mr. Gonzales replied crisply.
Ah, there's an answer that would've done an old-school Soviet apparatchik proud. Fourth Amendment? What Fourth Amendment? You're acting mighty damned uppity there, citizen.
Secrecy News is well worth your time. There's something interesting and thought-provoking in almost every issue. Last week, they broke the news about, and even provided a copy of, the Army's new Interim Field Manual on counterinsurgency operations (PDF file, approximately 3 MB.)The nation's 115 million home computers are brimming over with personal treasures - millions of photographs, music of every genre, college papers, the great American novel and, of course, mountains of e-mail messages.Most of us who have been using personal computers for a while have already had to deal with the problem of conversion... from one platform to another, from one application to another, and so on. I've got a less-than-a-year-old Windows XP box on my desk at home, but the hard drive's document archive contains stuff that I wrote in the late 80s on a Macintosh SE... from that point forward, I have backed up and transferred my hard drive contents every time I buy a new machine.
Yet no one has figured out how to preserve these electronic materials for the next decade, much less for the ages. Like junk e-mail, the problem of digital archiving, which seems straightforward, confounds even the experts.
After President Bush's sweep of the South, some commentators have wondered aloud about this "uneducated" region and its propensity to vote against its own interests: After all, it sends the most soldiers to die in battle, yet exhibits the most gung-ho patriotism; it's the poorest pocket of the country, yet it voted against a candidate promising a big expansion of government health insurance.Enjoy.
But if intelligence is measured by capability for abstract thought and grasp of paradox, Mark Pierce, a Lizard Lick contractor, is a Rhodes scholar...
In a Reclaim the Streets style demonstration late last night about 100 anarchists marched down Hillsborough Street in Raleigh North Carolina, behind several anarchist, anti-capitalist, and revolutionary banners.Anarchists on Hillsborough Street? Wow, Raleigh has changed. (There used to be some punks and wannabees over by the university, which come to think of it is on Hillsborough Street, but this is new stuff.)
Hearing a commotion, John Robbins and a neighbor captured and detained three protesters until police arrived.
"I found them between the garages taking off their black clothes," Robbins said, adding that one of the female protesters bit him on the shoulder.
Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.
In the first place, there is an immense diversity of opinion within regions, towns and families. Second, the values divide is a complex layering of conflicting views about faith, leadership, individualism, American exceptionalism, suburbia, Wal-Mart, decorum, economic opportunity, natural law, manliness, bourgeois virtues and a zillion other issues.Read the whole thing.
But the same insularity that caused many liberals to lose touch with the rest of the country now causes them to simplify, misunderstand and condescend to the people who voted for Bush. If you want to understand why Democrats keep losing elections, just listen to some coastal and university town liberals talk about how conformist and intolerant people in Red America are. It makes you wonder: why is it that people who are completely closed-minded talk endlessly about how open-minded they are?
Don't you see? The rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing Communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers. I think of us that way, sometimes, and I live here.My efforts in defense of my fellow Manhattanites, however, get a lot tougher when the New York Times runs a story like this. Here's an excerpt:
"I'm saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a good part of the country - the heartland," Dr. Joseph said. "This kind of redneck, shoot-from-the-hip mentality and a very concrete interpretation of religion is prevalent in Bush country - in the heartland."Ahem.
"New Yorkers are more sophisticated and at a level of consciousness where we realize we have to think of globalization, of one mankind, that what's going to injure masses of people is not good for us," he said.
His friend, Ms. Cohn, a native of Wisconsin who deals in art, contended that New Yorkers were not as fooled by Mr. Bush's statements as other Americans might be. "New Yorkers are savvy," she said. "We have street smarts. Whereas people in the Midwest are more influenced by what their friends say."
"They're very 1950's," she said of Midwesterners. "When I go back there, I feel I'm in a time warp."
Dr. Joseph acknowledged that such attitudes could feed into the perception that New Yorkers are cultural elitists, but he didn't apologize for it.
"People who are more competitive and proficient at what they do tend to gravitate toward cities," he said.
After the election results are in, I promise to:Though Jeff and I are coming at this from different directions on the political axis, I think this is a fine idea.
- Support the President, even if I didn't vote for him.
- Criticize the President, even if I did vote for him.
- Uphold standards of civilized discourse in blogs and in media while pushing both to be better.
- Unite as a nation, putting country over party, even as we work together to make America better.
Please visit and consider signing up as a supporter. They're doing fine work, and as they are entirely self-financing they don't want your money, just your moral support.Plain English Campaign is an independent pressure group fighting for public information to be written in plain English. We have more than 7500 registered supporters in 80 countries.
'Public information' means anything people have to read to get by in their daily lives.
'Plain English' is language that the intended audience can understand and act upon from a single reading.
"As a POW in Vietnam, I was kept in the dark and fed scraps. Why would I want to do that again?"
I have been to Fort Worth
I have been to Spain
I have been too proud
To come in out of the rain
I have seen the David
I've seen the Mona Lisa too
I have heard Doc Watson
Play "Columbus Stockade Blues"
