It came from the sewers of Raleigh, NC

It looks like blob of wriggling pudding staring out through a single, puckered eye. You can see it caught on camera, clinging to the concrete pipes below Raleigh's Cameron Village: the Sewer Monster.

It's really a colony of prehistoric creatures known either as bryozoans or moss animacules, thousands of wormlike animals, biologists report. Clustered together in a glistening mass, they feed through tentacles on whatever floats past. More common in ponds, they have turned up in a set of sanitary sewer pipes under one of the country's oldest shopping centers.

Shacked up in a six-inch sewer main, the clusters of worms are about the size of a golf ball, estimates Ed Buchan, an environmental coordinator with the city. But the video footage, captured with a tiny, snakelike camera, makes the monster appear at man-eating size to viewers watching at home.

Don't be alarmed, but it is alive! Sewer Monster found in Raleigh (News and Observer)

Related:

Java is pretty important

Tarus points us to a couple of good posts on Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems:

While I thought Sun paid too much for MySQL, I think Oracle got this one right. The best analysis I’ve seen so far is from Larry Augustin, so if you’re interested in such things be sure to check it out.

UPDATE: Monty weighs in.

Adventures in Open Source: Oracle Buys Sun (20 Apr 2009)

Chronic call

This is the year, y'all... we're gonna see a lot of this:

Signaling the newspaper industry's deterioration from malaise to crisis, Hearst Corp. said it may close the San Francisco Chronicle unless it can quickly slash costs at the money-losing daily.

Hearst said it will seek "critical cost-saving measures," including a steep reduction in the Chronicle's work force, which numbers about 1,500. If it can't reach its cost-saving target "within weeks," Hearst said it will seek a new owner for the Chronicle. And -- at a time when few investors are willing to shell out money for large newspapers -- the company said it will close the paper if it can't find a buyer.

The possible closure of the Chronicle, the 12th-largest U.S. paper and Northern California's largest daily, illustrates the accelerating decline across the newspaper industry.

Advertising revenue is dropping faster than publishers can slash staff, stock dividends and other costs. Department stores, auto dealers and other local businesses have further curtailed ad spending after the holidays, pushing already struggling papers closer to the edge. Two publishers filed for bankruptcy protection last weekend, and few metropolitan dailies are on a healthy footing.

Observers have been waiting to see which major U.S. city will be the first to go without a major daily newspaper, and San Francisco is a front-runner for the role. Unlike many big newspaper chains, Hearst has a healthy balance sheet, but the privately owned company says the Chronicle has posted significant losses since 2001, including a loss of more than $50 million last year.

Hearst Plans To Slash, Sell or Shut Paper in Bay Area (Wall Street Journal, 25 Feb 2009)

Of course, the San Francisco Bay area is also one of the most wired places on the planet...

Alternative career paths for journalists

Carrie notes: Don't disrespect the Bing.

(For non-fans of The Sopranos, explanation for "disrespecting the Bing": The BaDa Bing! is the fictional North Jersey strip club that serves as the headquarters for Tony Soprano's crime family. In one memorable episode, a particularly psychotic member of the crew gets mad and murders an employee of the strip club, on club property. He is punished rather thoroughly for this egregious lapse of etiquette. Committing second-degree murder was bad enough, but "disrespecting the Bing" by doing so on Bing property was almost unforgivable.)

He could tell you what your parents were thinking!

Bunny Smedley, writing at Fugitive Ink, on John Updike:

For me, however, Updike’s passing speeds the end of an era — not my own era, but that of my parents, born 1925 and 1930 respectively, and their contemporaries. Probably, I read more Updike before I turned 18 than I ever have thereafter. The point about Updike, for a bookish child growing up in the South in the 1970s, was that his writing had the reputation of being dangerously, enticingly risqué. He used swear-words (is there anyone alive who’ll believe that the first time I ever encountered the word ‘fuck’ was while taking surreptitious peeps, aged 9 or so, at Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying?), he wrote about sex, his books were full of adultery and divorce and self-doubt. His subject, in other words, was adults and what they did.

And this, more than anything else, was what was both dangerous and enticing in his work. Truly, Updike’s prose (I’m thinking here of the Rabbit books, Couples and also the short stories then available in book form) functioned as the lexicon that rendered a succession of otherwise unintelligible, mysterious events taking place around me all at least a little bit comprehensible. Apparently one can buy, these days, books that purport to tell you what your cat is thinking. Updike, even more miraculously, could tell you what your parents were thinking!

A few thoughts about John Updike (Fugitive Ink, 28 Jan 2009)

Go and read the whole thing.

And: Yes.

As I read Bunny's remembrance of Mr. Updike, the thought occurred to me: one of the reasons that so many Gen X "serious" fiction writers held writers of Mr. Updike's generation in more-or-less veiled contempt might have been that, as the literary avatars of suburban adultery, Updike and his contemporaries were chronicling (if not precisely celebrating) the kind of parental behavior that was causing them direct suffering as children.

In this case, certainly

A friend sends:

Sometimes... the mugshot kinda tells the whole story

Sometimes there IS a glider pilot in the house when you need one

I got a lot of calls, texts, and emails from friends and even some family members yesterday who know that I travel back and forth to North Carolina often, and were worried that I might have been on the US Airways plane that was en route to Charlotte but had to ditch in the Hudson River shortly after takeoff.  How lucky were those passengers that the captain at the controls of the Airbus was, among other things, a certified glider pilot instructor?  I mean, talk about being in the right place at the right time... he, and the flight crew, are absolute heroes.

Y'all are lovely folks; thank you for your concern.  For the record, we travel between NYC-area airports (LGA, JFK, EWR) and RDU typically on American, Continental or JetBlue.

We are all fine, except for everyday annoyances; a localized (area of a couple of blocks) broadband outage last night rendered us temporarily Amish, at least Internet-wise; all I had for connectivity was the iPhone. 

And this morning, we woke up to a plumbing leak through the ceiling - apparently a pipe burst in the apartment directly above us.

Just minor annoyances in the grand scheme of things - nothing, compared to going for a brief swim in the Hudson when it's 11 degrees outside.

Israel/Gaza news

Top of the pops at my place for breaking news:

• #gaza on Twitter
• Jerusalem Post
• Al Jazeera English
• CNN
• BBC
  

Background articles in rough chronological order:

• British Mandate of Palestine
• Partition of Palestine
• State of Israel
• 1948 Arab-Israeli War
• Six-Day War (1967)
  
• Gaza Strip
  
• Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)
• Yom Kippur War (1973)
• First Lebanon War (1982)
• First Intifada (1987)
  
• Oslo Accords (1992)
• Second Lebanon War (2006)
• December 2008 Gaza Strip Airstrikes and Ground Offensive
  

See also:

• Hezbollah
• Hamas
• Fatah

Also you misspelled "quiet," but that's minor, really

Forced sterilization is rightly regarded as a crime against humanity.

Still, sometimes one understands its appeal:

CHICAGO (AP) — The robber's threatening note made a Chicago bank job easy to solve: The FBI says the suspect wrote it on his pay stub. An FBI affidavit said the man walked into a Fifth Third Bank on Friday and handed a teller a note that read "Be Quick Be Quit (sic). Give your cash or I'll shoot."

The robber got about $400 but left half of his note. Investigators found the other half outside the bank's front doors. Authorities say that part of the man's October pay stub had his name and address.

The suspect was arrested at his Cary home. A judge ordered him held without bond Monday. If convicted of bank robbery, he faces 20 years in prison.

Why no news scan is complete without Wikipedia

So there's a minor flap (that might break bigger) about a parody song, "Barack the Magic Negro," that was written in 2007 but gained popularity after being aired on Rush Limbaugh's show, and how it was later used by a candidate for RNC chairmanship.

OK, now here's why I love reading the news with Wikipedia open in one window.

None of the mainstream media coverage I've seen (so far) has mentioned the concept of the literary stock character of "the magic negro." I was an English Lit major; I noticed this right away. Others must have too.

Anyway, others did. Wikipedia links to the relevant article in the second sentence of coverage.

Examples of magical negroes as published by social commentators include:

• Uncle Remus (James Baskett) in the film Song of the South (1946) ^[10]
• Noah Cullen (Sidney Poitier) in the film The Defiant Ones (1958)^[2]
• The magical negro is a recurring archetype Stephen King's novels as well as some adaptations of his work:
  
  
  
  • Dick Hallorann in The Shining (1977), and in both the 1980 film adaptation (Scatman Crothers) and the 1997 TV miniseries (Melvin Van Peebles)^[2]
  • Mother Abagail in The Stand (1978), and the 1994 TV adaptation (Ruby Dee)^[2]
  • John Coffey in The Green Mile (1996), and the 1999 film adaptation (Michael Clarke Duncan)^[2][5]
• Moses the Clock Man (Bill Cobbs) in the film The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) ^[11]
• Cash (Don Cheadle) in the film The Family Man (2000)^[3][5]
• Bagger Vance (Will Smith) in the film The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000)^{[2][3][5][12]}
• Gloria Dump (Cicely Tyson) in the film Because of Winn-Dixie (2005)^[13]
• God (Morgan Freeman) in the film Bruce Almighty/Evan Almighty.^[14]
• Eddie "Scrap Iron" Dupris (Morgan Freeman) in Million Dollar Baby^[15]
• Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) in The Matrix.^[5]
• Oracle (Gloria Foster) in The Matrix.^[5]
• Lamont (Guy Torry) in the film American History X.^[16]

And then, in a list of examples of real-world people who commentators have referred to as "magic negros",

• Barack Obama-- Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party and winner of the 2008 general election.^[17] Usage of the title,"Obama the Magic Negro" for a Los Angeles Times piece later inspired the satirical song "Barack the Magic Negro", written by parodist Paul Shanklin and popularized through Rush Limbaugh's radio show.^[18]

I'm telling you, Wikipedia is a great place to follow breaking news stories.

Not for the facts of the matter, but for the connections and analysis of the hive mind.

(We're back from holiday travels. Happy [&Winter Holiday. where Winter Holiday="Eid al-Adha"; "Hanukkah"; "Christmas"; "Kwanzaa"; "Solstice"; "Festivus" and season as appropriate]... and a happy and prosperous 2009 to all.)

That's what I pay him for

One man's military-industrial complex:

In the spring of 2007 a tiny military contractor with a slender track record went shopping for a precious Beltway commodity.

The company, Defense Solutions, sought the services of a retired general with national stature, someone who could open doors at the highest levels of government and help it win a huge prize: the right to supply Iraq with thousands of armored vehicles.

Access like this does not come cheap, but it was an opportunity potentially worth billions in sales, and Defense Solutions soon found its man. The company signed Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star army general and military analyst for NBC News, to a consulting contract starting June 15, 2007.

Four days later the general swung into action. He sent a personal note and 15-page briefing packet to David Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, strongly recommending Defense Solutions and its offer to supply Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles from Eastern Europe. "No other proposal is quicker, less costly, or more certain to succeed," he said.

Thus, within days of hiring McCaffrey, the Defense Solutions sales pitch was in the hands of the American commander with the greatest influence over Iraq's expanding military.

"That's what I pay him for," Timothy Ringgold, chief executive of Defense Solutions, said in an interview.

One man's military-industrial complex (International Herald Tribune, 30 November 2008)

Pakistan will find itself in a nutcracker

I hope they're wrong, but I think they're right:

We will begin by assuming that the attackers are Islamist militant groups operating in India, possibly with some level of outside support from Pakistan. We can also see quite clearly that this was a carefully planned, well-executed attack.

Given this, the Indian government has two choices. First, it can simply say that the perpetrators are a domestic group. In that case, it will be held accountable for a failure of enormous proportions in security and law enforcement. It will be charged with being unable to protect the public. On the other hand, it can link the attack to an outside power: Pakistan. In that case it can hold a nation-state responsible for the attack, and can use the crisis atmosphere to strengthen the government’s internal position by invoking nationalism. Politically this is a much preferable outcome for the Indian government, and so it is the most likely course of action. This is not to say that there are no outside powers involved — simply that, regardless of the ground truth, the Indian government will claim there were.

That, in turn, will plunge India and Pakistan into the worst crisis they have had since 2002. If the Pakistanis are understood to be responsible for the attack, then the Indians must hold them responsible, and that means they will have to take action in retaliation — otherwise, the Indian government’s domestic credibility will plunge. The shape of the crisis, then, will consist of demands that the Pakistanis take immediate steps to suppress Islamist radicals across the board, but particularly in Kashmir. New Delhi will demand that this action be immediate and public. This demand will come parallel to U.S. demands for the same actions, and threats by incoming U.S. President Barack Obama to force greater cooperation from Pakistan.

If that happens, Pakistan will find itself in a nutcracker. On the one side, the Indians will be threatening action — deliberately vague but menacing — along with the Americans. This will be even more intense if it turns out, as currently seems likely, that Americans and Europeans were being held hostage (or worse) in the two hotels that were attacked. If the attacks are traced to Pakistan, American demands will escalate well in advance of inauguration day.

Red Alert: Possible geopolitical consequences of the Mumbai Attacks -- Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (stratfor.com)

Also, monkeys might fly out of my butt

Bruce Schneier is not impressed with recent warnings about attacks on the NYC transit system:

I have no specific details, but I want to warn everybody today that fiery rain might fall from the sky. Terrorists may have discussed this sort of tactic, and while there is no evidence yet that it's in the process of being carried out, I want to be extra-cautious this holiday season. Ho ho ho.

Related: "Feds warn of terror plotting against NYC subways" (Associated Press, 26 Nov 2008)

Wikipedia for breaking news

The footnotes and references are a treasure trove.

November 20o8 Mumbai attack (Wikipedia)

Hat tip: Sepia Mutiny, where I also found this Google Map showing all of the different attack locations.

The horror, in depth and up to the minute

As the latest terrorist atrocity unfolds in Mumbai, some suggested sources for news coverage.

Indian media:

• Times of India
• Economic Times
  
• IBN Live
• IndianExpress.com
• Hindustan Times
• The Hindu
  

Non-Indian media:

• BBC News South Asia
• Reuters India

In the blogosphere, start with Metroblogging in Mumbai.

Also, be sure to take a look at Mumbai coverage on Twitter via Tweetgrid.

Hat tip for Metroblogging and Twitter tips: Carrie (who is picking them up from Metafilter.)

The Urban Jungle Book

From the pages of Rolling Stone:

Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz and Ashlee Simpson welcomed a baby son late Thursday night. The 7 lbs, 11 oz. baby was named Bronx Mowgli Wentz.

Shere Khan, let me rock you, let me rock you, Shere Khan...

Idiom Police, sir. I'm going to have to place you under arrest.

[Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility] said that if Obama cuts Pentagon spending, he will not have to work hard to help the other six agencies [Labor, Housing and Urban Development, veterans Affairs, TSA, EPA and the Social Security Administration in addition to Defense].

"These domestic discretionary programs are peanuts in the grand scale of things," Ruch said. "A small diversion from the Iraq conflict, if they were put into Interior, EPA or NASA, those agencies would be in their salad days. The National Park Service is laboring under a [maintenance] backlog that would be cured by a month and a half of Iraq expenditures."

Source: Obama Wrote Federal Staffers About His Goals (Washington Post, 17 November 2008)

Leaving aside the very interesting questions of budget allocation between and among various bits of the Federal government: with increased funding, the agencies would be in their "salad days"?

No, no... or at least, let's hope not.

"Salad days" is Shakespearean in its elegant origins, and refers to a time when one is "green in judgment" -- in other words, youthful, inexperienced, callow, enthusiastic:

CLEOPATRA: My salad days,
When I was green in judgment: cold in blood,
To say as I said then! But, come, away;
Get me ink and paper:
He shall have every day a several greeting,
Or I'll unpeople Egypt.
(Anthony and Cleopatra - Act I, Scene V)

With enough diverted Federal funding, the career employees of the various Federal agencies would be in fat city, in high cotton, aboard the gravy train, etc.

But not, please, in their salad days.

Tough and rumble

When Jennifer Hudson began experiencing some commercial success, she could have moved her family out of the old neighborhood - Englewood, on the South Side of Chicago.

The neighborhood, and Ms. Hudson's family, are in the spotlight this weekend, as there have been at least two deaths related to a domestic disturbance at the family home.

When neighbors heard gunshots, they didn't bother to call 911:

Paul Ciliano, a former Chicago police officer and CBS News consultant, said the Englewood neighborhood where the crimes were committed is "probably the toughest neighborhood in the city of Chicago."

"This is [a] notoriously violent area, the most shootings and car hijackings and tough-and-rumble place on the South Side of Chicago," he told Early Show anchor Priya David.

Amber Alert for Jennifer Hudson's nephew (CBS News)

At first I thought it was a Spoonerism, and then realized that it must be deliberate: "tough and rumble" is one of the best short descriptions of a bad neighborhood I think I've ever heard.

OK, it's probably in the worst possible taste to extract an interesting phrase from a news report of a family tragedy and post about it. But it grabbed me, this morning.

Rudy Ray Moore, RIP

Most critics refrained from overpraising “Dolemite,” with the possible exception of John Leland, who wrote in The New York Times in 2002 that it “remains the ‘Citizen Kane’ of kung fu pimping movies.”

Rudy Ray Moore, 81, a Precursor of Rap, dies (New York Times, 23 October 2008)

Related: "Dolemite" entry on IMDB

The really right answer is: "What if he is?"

Troubled by conservative whispers that Obama is a Muslim, Powell gave a passionate defense of Obama and Muslim Americans.

"The correct answer. He is not a Muslim," Powell said. "He's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is: 'What if he is?' Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no. That's not America."

He cited a story about a Muslim American solider who died serving in Iraq to argue that Muslim Americans also love and defend America.

Powell cited the economy as the most important issue the next president will have to deal with, and said that he's convinced Obama would better lead the country out of the economic crisis.

"In the case of Mr. McCain, I found that he was a little unsure as to how to deal with the economic problems we're having," he said.

Obama 'Beyond Humbled' as GOP's Powell Says He'd Be 'an Exceptional President' (ABC News)

Related:

• Arlington National Cemetary: Specialist Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan
  
• Specialist Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan @ FindAGrave.com