Go, Biscuits!

Hey, that was quick! Bis-quick, in fact.

My Montgomery Biscuits paraphernalia arrived today.

Go, Biscuits!

Since I posted on Saturday, I've received a few requests for the recipe for God's Own Buttermilk Biscuits. I posted it in the comments, but people aren't finding it there and I've mailed out several copies...

So, what the heck. We've had everything else at enrevanche, why not recipes?

When I baked these for her recently, my own sainted mother pronounced these as "the best biscuits she ever ate," and she is no slouch in the kitchen herself, to put it mildly. The recipe is based on the "basic rolled biscuits" recipe from the first edition of Joy of Cooking (Rombauer) with a few minor tweaks.

With no further ado...

GOD'S OWN ROLLED BUTTERMILK BISCUITS

Yield: two dozen small (tea-sized) or one dozen large (breakfast-sized) biscuits.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

In large bowl, mix:

2 cups all-purpose flour (extra points for using a Southern biscuit flour like Martha White or White Lily, if you can get it - if you get self-rising, obviously, omit the baking powder.)

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 (0.5) teaspoon baking soda

1/2 (0.5) teaspoon salt

Cut six tablespoons (three-quarters of a standard stick) of *cold*, good-quality butter into small pieces; drop butter pieces into dry mixture and "cut in" with two butter knives clutched in fist like Wolverine's talons (if you are a kitchen gadget fetishist, you may use a pastry blender) until the flour mixture has the consistency of coarse breadcrumbs.

(Cold butter is specified because you don't want the butter to start melting until the biscuits go into the oven. This will create little air pockets in the biscuits and contribute to the overall delightfully fluffy effect you are trying to achieve. Do not substitute margarine or shortening. Won't work.)

Add 3/4 (0.75) cup of fresh buttermilk, and mix until ingredients are just combined (don't beat it; this is more of a toss/mix thing!)

Transfer dough to a lightly floured board and roll out to approximately 1/2 (0.5) inch thickness. For the authentic experience, cut your biscuits out with a small drinking glass, applying a slight twisting motion as you cut to seal the edges.

Place biscuits, well-spaced, on an ungreased, cheap (not double-layer or insulated--you want the bottoms to brown until they are almost but not quite crunchy) baking sheet and bake at 450 until nicely browned, about 10 minutes.

Serve hot with any of the following:

- Strawberry, peach, or apple preserves
- Fried or grilled sausage patties
- Country ham and redeye gravy

etc.

If you're feeding more than three or four hungry people, you're gonna want to double this recipe (at least.)

Leftover biscuits (ha! - but it does occasionally happen) are delightful the next day split, smeared with a little butter and toasted.

Pencil Roving: More on the Great (Strunk and) White Way

Oh. my. Guh.

Last night was the premiere of an operetta based on Strunk and White's classic The Elements of Style.

And Carrie and I, grammar geeks to the core, missed it!

Oh, the humanity!

Eater: Inside Chowhound's Cult of Mina

Are you hip to the Chowhound crowd's devotion to a woman called Mina? She's the Thomas Keller of Queens. And she's opening a new restaurant this week.

Jim Leff stumbled across her in Jackson Heights a few years ago in this little dive in Queens and created a cult around her...

Eater: Inside Chowhound's Cult of Mina

Tempted by blogs, spam becomes 'splog'

[Google's] Blogger blog-creation tool and BlogSpot hosting service, together the most popular free blogging service on the Web, fell victim this past weekend to the biggest splog attack yet--an assault that led to clogged RSS readers and overflowing in-boxes, and that may have manipulated search engine rankings.

'Uh, ladies and gentlemen of the blogosphere, I think we have an emergency on our hands,' Tim Bray, Web technologies director at Sun Microsystems, wrote in his blog in response to what he called the 'splogsplosion.'

"Splog": Portmanteau word, combining "spam" and "blog"; a "splog" is a blog that creates solely to point to a commercial website, thus driving traffic and driving up search engine rankings.

Tempted by blogs, spam becomes 'splog' (CNET News via TechRepublic)

Inadequate, insufficient and insulting

The Supreme Court nomination of Harriet E. Miers suffered another setback on Wednesday when the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee asked her to resubmit parts of her judicial questionnaire, saying various members had found her responses "inadequate," "insufficient" and "insulting."

Miers Is Asked To Redo Replies to Questions (New York Times, October 20, 2005)

You know, this is quite remarkable. The Miers nomination has managed to piss off social/religious conservatives, intellectual/ideological conservatives, most Democrats, and the pro-choice activists, all at the same time. Truly a remarkable achievement in American politics. Is there anyone other than Dubya and Hugh Hewitt still supporting her?

I have searched in vain for an online casino accepting proposition bets on whether Miers will withdraw her nomination, and when.

Right about now, I'd like to put $100 on Aunt Harriet pulling out before the start of the confirmation hearings on Monday, 7 November. (Ladbroke's would take a bet like this in a hot second, but, sadly, they don't open accounts for Americans over the Web. Must remember to pop into the betting shop and set one up next time I'm in London.)

Reasons I love Metafilter...

There's a lot of noise on Metafilter, but there are real gems in the rough.

Like this answer in an Ask Metafilter thread, in which MeFi's resident board-certified neurologist explains just what's happening when the hero in an action movie "takes out" a bad guy with a blow to the back of the head:

It works!

The thing that is happening is cerebral concussion. The sharp blow causes the skull to move rather quickly: the neck anteroflexing and anteriorly-subluxing somewhat for a total overall forward motion. The brain, being a squishy jello brain tightly fit inside a rigid bony jello mold, lags behind owing to inertia. In lagging, it gets squashed, first against the occiput; rebounds and begins to travel forward; and, then, when the skull decelerates at the end of its travel, it gets squashed against the frontal bone...

I love this stuff. Excellent example of medical writing for a general audience, by the way.

Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems - The Register

Encouraging signs from the Wikipedia project, where co-founder and überpedian Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online work.

Criticism of the project from within the inner sanctum has been very rare so far, although fellow co-founder Larry Sanger, who is no longer associated with the project, pleaded with the management to improve its content by befriending, and not alienating, established sources of expertise. (i.e., people who know what they're talking about.)

Meanwhile, criticism from outside the Wikipedia camp has been rebuffed with a ferocious blend of irrationality and vigor that's almost unprecedented in our experience: if you thought Apple, Amiga, Mozilla or OS/2 fans were er, ... passionate, you haven't met a wiki-fiddler. For them, it's a religious crusade.

A cautionary note that bears repeating - Wikipedia is fine as a starting point for investigating a topic that's new to you, but never ever rely on it as a sole (or even primary) source of information. This article contains a lot of needless snark (pointing out that the articles on "Ayn Rand" and "the Klingon language" are excellent, as if there isn't excellent coverage of non-geekly topics in Wikipedia as well) but it makes some very valid points.

Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems - The Register

Top 20 Search Engine Helpers - Lifehacker

Lifehacker brings us a very useful article called "Top 20 Search Engine Helpers." Unlike many of these sorts of things, it isn't specific to one search engine (Google), but covers the all of the Big Four: Google, Yahoo, AskJeeves, and MSN Search.

I knew most of this stuff already; my Google-fu is strong. But here's a nifty trick I wasn't aware of, and I bet you might not know either - searching by date range:

12. Search within a specific date range: You can narrow you search to only a very specific window of time, i.e., you’re looking for Macromedia Dreamweaver information only between August and October 2005.

AskJeeves: macromedia dreamweaver betweendate:200508,200510

MSN: somewhat confusing to do; MSN has provided a Search Builder pull-down below the main search query box that allows you to stack your results from “updated very recently” to “static” (page hasn’t been updated in a while).

Yahoo: on the Yahoo Advanced page there is a drop-down menu titled “Updated.” You have four choices: search for content “anytime”, “within the past three months”, “within the past six months”, “within a year.”

Google: macromedia dreamweaver daterange:200508-200510

Bonus: There's a downloadable PDF Cheat Sheet containing all the tips.

Seek and Ye Shall Find: Top 20 Search Engine Helpers - Lifehacker

WWJD (What Would Jakob Do?)

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen weighs in on the Top 10 Weblog Design Mistakes.

Aside from the fact that my articles are way too long and the subject matter is all over the place, I think enrevanche comes out okay by these heuristics.

Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

CommonCensus

The CommonCensus Map Project is redrawing the map of the United States based on Internet users' voting, to show how the country is organized culturally, as opposed to traditional political boundaries. It shows how the country is divided into 'spheres of influence' between different cities at the national, regional, and local levels.

This information will finally settle the question over where disputed cultural boundaries lie (like between New York City and Upstate New York), contribute to the national debate over Congressional redistricting, and educate people everywhere as to the true layout of the American people that they've never seen on any map before.

Participation takes just 12 clicks. Take a look and participate at: http://www.commoncensus.org

Initial CommonCensus Map effort (after 8000 votes)

I wonder if the CommonCensus people would be open to the idea of sharing their code.

I would *love* to create a "barbecue spheres of influence" demographic and psychographic map of the lower 48, or perhaps a very detailed map of the Southeastern United States. (See post below.) This would finally settle the question over where disputed gastronomic and cultural boundaries lie (like between Western, Lexington, and Eastern-style Carolina barbecue, not to mention the South Carolina abomination with the mustard-based sauce)

Take a ride down the barbecue highway

The (Raleigh, NC) News and Observer ran a wonderful article over the weekend: "Barbecue highway," by Fred Thompson, takes us from Western North Carolina to Eastern, and samples a baker's dozen of the best barbecue joints in the state (which means, the best in the world.)

I've eaten at about half of these places over the years, and Mr. Thompson's taste is impeccable. Here's his entry for the transcendent Allen and Son on Highway 86 just outside Chapel Hill:

Allen and Son, Orange County

Turning west along I-40, approaching that invisible line somewhere between Burlington and Greensboro and separates Eastern from Lexington-style, we find Allen and Son on N.C. 86 between Chapel Hill and Hillsborough.

Allen and Son seems lost in time. Here, an artisanal approach to barbecue takes place. The hickory wood is split with ax and maul, the charcoal made from those logs added at the perfect time. The barbecue is hand- chopped with its dark, deep golden brown outside meat mixed in to perfect proportions. Keith Allen likes it this way. Pure, simple. Even after exposure in Bon Appetit Magazine, little has changed, and the barbecue is first-rate. While his sauce is more Eastern style, his methods have a Piedmont take. With Lexington- style red slaw his 'cue could be perfect.

Barbecue highway (News and Observer, Oct. 16, 2005)

Oh, snap!

From this week's New Yorker, here's the Contributors Page cartoon:

Any caption of mine would be superfluous.

I want to party with *this* guy

Must-read Op-Ed in today's Los Angeles Times:

Sometimes people in law enforcement will hear it whispered that I'm a former cop who favors decriminalization of marijuana laws, and they'll approach me the way they might a traitor or snitch. So let me set the record straight.

Yes, I was a cop for 34 years, the last six of which I spent as chief of Seattle's police department.

But no, I don't favor decriminalization. I favor legalization, and not just of pot but of all drugs, including heroin, cocaine, meth, psychotropics, mushrooms and LSD.

Okay, my flippant half-awake headline aside, Norm Stamper, the author of this op-ed piece, has some very good points to make, from the point of view of a man who has spent his life in the trenches trying to enforce the drug laws.

For instance:

It's not a stretch to conclude that our draconian approach to drug use is the most injurious domestic policy since slavery. Want to cut back on prison overcrowding and save a bundle on the construction of new facilities? Open the doors, let the nonviolent drug offenders go. The huge increases in federal and state prison populations during the 1980s and '90s (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 482 per 100,000 in 2003) were mainly for drug convictions. In 1980, 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges. By 2003, that figure had ballooned to 1,678,200. We're making more arrests for drug offenses than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault combined. Feel safer?

LA Times Op-Ed: "Let those dopers be" (October 17, 2005)

Hat tip: Hit and Run (Reason magazine)

Carnival of the Cats #82...

...is now up, over at Where the Dolphins Play.

Meet the Life Hackers - New York Times Magazine (October 16, 2005)

Lots of people complain that office multitasking drives them nuts. But Mark is a scientist of "human-computer interactions" who studies how high-tech devices affect our behavior, so she was able to do more than complain: she set out to measure precisely how nuts we've all become. Beginning in 2004, she persuaded two West Coast high-tech firms to let her study their cubicle dwellers as they surfed the chaos of modern office life. One of her grad students, Victor Gonzalez, sat looking over the shoulder of various employees all day long, for a total of more than 1,000 hours. He noted how many times the employees were interrupted and how long each employee was able to work on any individual task.

When Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, "far worse than I could ever have imagined." Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What's more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.

Meet the Life Hackers - New York Times Magazine (October 16, 2005)

Hat tip: Kottke.

Seven things

A tip of the enrevanche chapeau to Kimberly at Music and Cats, from whom this meme is lifted.

Seven things I plan to do before I die:

1. Take a trip to Antarctica with Carrie.
   
2. Raise another couple generations (at least) of Chow Chows, and maintain at least one cat on domestic staff at all times.
   
3. Write a book worth reading.
   
4. Finally learn a little something about wine.
   
5. Read the unabridged version of "Remembrance of Things Past."
   
6. And at least try one more time to make it all the way through "Finnegans Wake," dammit.
   
7. Get a copy of every recording Ella Fitzgerald ever made.
   

Seven things I can do:

1. Cook (except see #3 under "things I can't do," below.)
   
2. Write.
   
3. Sing.
   
4. Gas on endlessly about things I really don't know much about. (The word "gas" is used advisedly... my discourse expands to fill all available volume.)
   
5. Listen attentively to someone describing a personal problem, and at least two times out of three determine accurately whether they want advice, sympathy, both, or neither.
   
6. Listen attentively to someone describing a business or design problem, and help them figure a way out of it.
   
7. Hear the backbeat... that is, snap my fingers, tap my feet, or clap my hands appreciatively on the "correct" beats (that would be 2 and 4 in 4/4 time) when listening to jazz, live or recorded.
   

Seven things I cannot do:

1. Fold a freshly laundered men's dress shirt. Bright, patient people have tried to teach me this. It's hopeless.
2. Dance in a way that does not resemble a vertical grand mal seizure.
   
3. Make Indian Pudding that sets properly.
   
4. Speak any language fluently other than English, to my shame.
   
5. Reliably know when to quit.
   
6. Reliably know when to butt out.
   
7. Closely related to numbers 5 and 6: Keep my foot out of my mouth. To paraphrase the great New Yorker writer Joe Mitchell: When I enter a room, if there's something that absolutely should not be said to someone in that room, I always say it; I never miss.
   

Seven things that attract me to the opposite sex:

1. Intelligence
   
2. Wit
   
3. Highly developed sense of the absurd
   
4. Willingness to indulge one's appetites (take that however you want)
   
5. Sense of adventure
   
6. Sound notion of fair play
   
7. A nice smile
   

Seven things that I say most often:

1. "I love you."
   
2. "Aw, who's the (buddy/good girl/good boy/good Chow/good kitty)?"
   
3. (expletive deleted) (hey, I'm a New Yorker.)
   
4. "Coffee. Must have more coffee."
   
5. (in imitation of C. Montgomery Burns, while tenting fingers): "Excellent."
   
6. "Um, are you sure about that?"
   
7. "Don't get me started."
   

Seven celebrity crushes (in alphabetical order)

1. Anne Bancroft
   
2. Anne Parillaud
   
3. Audrey Hepburn
   
4. Bridget Fonda
   
5. Christiane Amanpour
   
6. Molly Ringwald (John Hughes era only, no offense, Molly; "Pump Up The Volume"-era Samantha Mathis will be an acceptable substitute.)
   
7. Queen Latifah
   

Note: While looking up those links, I was amused to realize that Anne Parillaud and Bridget Fonda both played the same female assassin character in two versions of the same movie, Luc Besson's exquisite "La Femme Nikita" (sadly inferior US version: "Point of No Return.") And Queen Latifah is certainly a lyrical assassin. Looking at that list, I seem to have a bad thing for smart, tough women. No surprises there.

Review: "Take Control of Your Wi-Fi Security" (E-book)

Look, let's face it: Wi-Fi (wireless Internet) security is a godawful mess.

It's incredibly confusing, and yet at the same time it's terribly important. You've got a little radio transmitter and receiver in your laptop (that's what wireless is, after all) and unless you secure it, every time you make a wireless connection you are broadcasting all of your private data in the clear to anyone within range.

(And, psst! Anyone who can use Google can find freely available programs that will help them eavesdrop on you.)

Don't believe me? Here, just go read the official security statement from the Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry group.

And consider that WEP, the kind of security that most of the people with "secured" home networks are currently using has become such a complete joke that the Wi-Fi Alliance is too sheepish to even mention it on their site. In fact, their attorneys have probably advised them against it.

Like a lot of you, I guess, I am the designated System Administrator for my network of friends and my extended family. I'm the guy they call when the computer eats their homework, or they get infected with spyware from surfing porn sites ("I have no idea how this happened!") or iTunes suddenly stops working on them.

I achieved this honor by having worked in the computer industry for the last 20 years and being a general propellerhead, but I have never made my living in the realm of PC security technology.

I have managed to secure my home wireless network pretty well, using the much stronger WPA standard; when I take my corporate laptop on the road with me, the IT staff of the big multinational consulting firm that sends me regular paychecks has thoughtfully provided me with Virtual Private Network (VPN) software and a SafeWord card that allows me to log in securely from almost anywhere, whether it's a wired connection in a hotel room or a wireless connection in a random airport somewhere.

So until recently, I haven't spent too much time worrying about wireless security. I've either been able to handle it on my own, or I've had some very smart and well-educated security folks handling it for me.

Then my wife and I bought a new "family" laptop with built-in wireless.

And we started using it occasionally from public access points, like coffee shops, or branches of the New York City Public Library.

I've been realizing, in the back of my mind, that I ought to do something about securing our new wireless laptop. I can't use the corporate VPN, for obvious reasons.

What I really needed, I figured, was some kind of *personal* VPN service that we could subscribe to... a service that, for a few bucks a month, would let us create a secure connection (that couldn't be eavesdropped on) from anywhere we happened to be.

In the course of searching out information on such a service, I stumbled upon something simply wonderful.

It's a $10 electronic book (e-book) called "Take Control of Your Wi-Fi Security." And if you're at all concerned with the issue, it'll be the best $10 you've spent in a long long time.

The authors, two guys with enormous geek credibility (one is the editor of the consensus-best Wi-Fi news and info website, the other has been writing and editing the Macintosh tech newsletter TidBITS since 1990), take the confusing tangle of Wi-Fi security issues and break it down for you in plain language.

The book is a marvel of excellent technical writing for a general audience, and I say this as a technical writer of some 20 years experience. It is completely current and up-to-date as of this writing (published exactly one month ago today: September 15, 2005) and packs a ton of information into a brief (115-page PDF) package; it's full of links to resources on the Web, too, and every link I've tried works: click it in Adobe Reader, and your browser goes right to the site.

(The links alone are worth $10; compared to what you'd have to pay at the local bookstore for an already outdated print copy of Teach Yourself To Be A Wireless Dummy in 15 Days, the e-book is an incredible bargain.)

Look, there are plenty of good, free Wi-Fi information sites on the Web. I'm going to list some of them at the bottom of this post, in case you're too cheap to shell out $10 to a couple of guys who have done all the skull-sweat for you.

And you can Google around and discover that there are, indeed, private VPN services like the ones I was describing above. Your choices include:

• PublicVPN - Works on Windows (Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP), Mac OS X (10.2 or later) $5.95 per month, $59.95 per year
  
  
• HotSpotVPN - Ranges from $8.88/mo. to $13.88/mo, depending on encryption strength; multiply by 10 to get annual cost. (Has a day or week-priced option for infrequent travellers.)
  
  
• WiTopia personal VPN (Windows XP) - Regularly:$79.00; currently priced at $39.50

All well and good.

But it took me over an hour to sort all of that out, my friends. (I signed up for a couple months of PublicVPN service and am currently testing it out; if it works out, I will point all the users in my "support community" to it.)

And then when I stumbled on the book, I saw... grrrrrr!... that the authors had already figured this out for me!

Oh, the time I could have saved myself.
Dammit.

Okay, here are the free resources I mentioned. But go buy that book, really.

• WiFi Networking News
• Daily Wireless
• Unstrung
• MuniWireless - About municipal wireless efforts worldwide
• TechDirt Wireless
• Reiter's Wireless Data Weblog
• Om Malik's Broadband Blog - "Unwired" topic

DISCLAIMER: Although I must sound like the worst corporate shill ever, I discovered "Take Control of Your Wi-Fi Security" on my own, bought it with my own money, have never met either of the authors and have no business relationship (or any relationship whatsoever) with them.

Odd search strings in the site logs

If you've ever run a blog or a web site of your own, you know that you can glean a lot of information by reading and analyzing your site logs:

• Where your visitors are physically located.
  
  Unsurprisingly, the US, UK and Canada combined account for close to 80% of our traffic, but we get visitors from all over. The current top ten, in order: US, UK, Spain, Canada, Brazil, Peru, Portugal, Chile, Mexico and Singapore. (Hi, Fiona!)
  
  
• Which sites are sending you the most visitors.
  
  Right now, The Modulator, Chapomatic, and Bill in Exile are sending the most new visitors our way... thanks, guys!
  
  
• For visitors who find you through search engines like Google or Yahoo, the searches they ran that brought them to your site.
  

And therein lies our tale.

Lately, I have seen some very amusing and occasionally puzzling search strings.

For instance, we have a number of visitors from the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking parts of the world who find us by doing an image search for "gatos." Yep... if you're on the Iberian peninsula or anywhere in Latin America and you've gone looking for cat pictures recently, chances are you've met Mister Gato.

I have learned that there are a bunch of you out there who have no idea how to light a pilot light, and you ask Google, or MSN, or Yahoo about it (and find this post, which I doubt is all that helpful.)

I now know that many of you have problems with your Westell Versalink 327W DSL router/modems. Sigh. Me, too.

But every now and then I run across one that's completely inexplicable.

One of the interesting things about being an "eclectic blogger" (meaning that I write about whatever the hell I feel like on any given day) is that over time, your archives accumulate some unusual combinations of words.

And so it was, just the other day, that some Rhodes Scholar, some miscreant from the shallow end of the gene pool, surfed in to enrevanche after entering this search string into Yahoo:

"Using IAMS dog food for cooking meth."

Words fail me.

Rah, rah! Go, you fighting....Biscuits?!

enrevanche reader, fellow-blogger, spouse and general partner in crime Carrie calls our attention to a minor-league baseball team with a really tasty mascot.

Meet the Montgomery (Alabama) Biscuits, a AA farm team for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

Oh, man. I gotta get me a T-shirt and a ball cap, right now.

It'll go so well with my Albuquerque Isotopes gear.

I don't know if you can make it out in the picture, but the Biscuit mascot has a little pat of butter for a tongue.

Perfect.

The Montgomery Biscuits (AA Southern League)

(Note to my non-US readers: what you probably think of as a "biscuit," we call a "cracker" or a "cookie" over here. In Southern American English, a "biscuit" is "a small quick bread made from dough that has been rolled out and cut or dropped from a spoon." It is a staple breakfast food item, especially when slathered with butter and jam, or filled with sausage or country ham. I have God's Own Recipe for rolled buttermilk biscuits, if anybody wants it.)

A.J. Jacobs, Esquire Magazine: My Outsourced Life

Esquire writer A.J. Jacobs outsources the grottier parts of his reporting job, like, you know, researching articles before writing them, to India. And then he completely loses his mind and starts outsourcing tasks like his weekly telephone call to his parents, and apologetic notes to his wife...

Hilarious.

Excerpt:

Honey has completed her first project for me: research on the person Esquire has chosen as the Sexiest Woman Alive. (See page 232.) I've been assigned to write a profile of this woman, and I really don't want to have to slog through all the heavy-breathing fan Web sites about her. When I open Honey's file, I have this reaction: America is fucked. There are charts. There are section headers. There is a well-organized breakdown of her pets, measurements, and favorite foods (e.g., swordfish). If all Bangalorians are like Honey, I pity Americans about to graduate college. They're up against a hungry, polite, Excel-proficient Indian army. Put it this way: Honey ends her emails with 'Right time for right action, starts now!' Your average American assistant believes the 'right time for right action' starts after a Starbucks venti latte and a discussion of last night's Amazing Race 8.

Smartmoney.com: Esquire Magazine: My Outsourced Life

Remember The Milk

Remember The Milk is a very full-featured web-based tracking system for your business and personal To-Do lists.

Plan ahead, assign and track due dates, share and publish your lists... and reminders, they've got reminders: by e-mail, by Instant Message (AIM, GoogleTalk, ICQ and MSN) and by SMS text to your cellphone.

This is a really nice piece of work. I'm more or less married to the Outlook Tasks on PC/Pocket Informant on Windows Mobile combination for to-do-list management, but this web-based system is slick enough to make me give it a second, and even third, look. I've signed up for a (free) account and plan to test it out.

Remember The Milk - Learn More

nedwolf - Best Free Web Applications

They're free, and they run in any web browser! Check out nedwolf's short list of the Best Free Web Applications, just updated this week.

Smug Kitty

Smug Kitty
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

Friend Scott, former NYC neighbor and now Seattle resident and proprietor of the entertainingly filthy and incredibly not-safe-for-work blog Bill In Exile, writes us to ask:

Is there a reason that Mr. Gato always seems so self-satisfied when you photograph him? He's positively the G.W. Bush of smug facial expressions of the feline world.

Scott, thanks for writing in.

You're quite right, Mister G. does have a certain ineffable smugness about him.

(That's *all* that he has in common with Dubya, though... as nice a man as our veterinarian is, Mister Gato would never, say, nominate him to the Supreme Court on the basis of proximity and friendship. I'm betting Gato would look for a strict constructionist, or possibly a Law and Economics guy like Posner.)

I have thought long and hard about why this is... my cat's smugness, I mean, and not his preference for libertarian-conservative intellectual judges.

I think I know.

Like many NYC media figures, Mister Gato came up on the mean streets of the City... when the animal rescue folks finally managed to snare him, he had been living on the street in Brooklyn for his entire life.

He was pure sinew and scar tissue when we got him, and over the last year and a half has morphed into a fat, sleek, purring engine of absolute contentment. He knows that he has only to twitch a whisker, and we will rush to fill his dish with fishy nuggets, or pet him or scratch him or play with him or whatever the hell else he might want. The Chows are completely subservient to him as well.

So that look on his face? It's the same one Mike Tyson wore for a while.

He's looking out at the world and thinking, "You're all my bitches. Heh."

All best,

Barry

Thrillist fires a blank

The ordinarily perspicacious Thrillist.com misses badly today by recommending the Circle Line's "Bear Mountain Oktoberfest" cruise.

It sounds perfectly grand. You take a boat from a midtown Hudson River pier, ride up the river a few hours to Bear Mountain State Park, walk around, admire the changing leaves, go drink some beer and eat some food and dance to some oompah music, and then ride the boat home.

DON'T DO IT. Danger, Will Robinson.

Carrie and I got suckered into this deal last year. Autumn leaves! Beer! Outdoor dining! Three of our most favorite things ever.

We signed up and paid the high ticket prices happily, bucolic visions of dunkelsbier and fall colors dancing in our heads.

OK, there's a few things wrong with this rosy picture. Ready?

First, everybody and his brother and his brother's dog thought this was a good idea. The boat is small, ridiculously overcrowded, slow, and stinky.

Got it?

Second, once you actually *get* to Bear Mountain, which is lovely at other times of year, you'll find that "Oktoberfest" involves long lines for mediocre food and worse beer, with incredibly craptastic "music" playing in the background. Which you have to climb a steep incline and take a long walk to get to. (Some of the more geriatric folks in our party looked as if they might be in imminent danger of a coronary, and I must admit that I was breathing pretty hard myself.)

Thankfully, Carrie and I had packed a small picnic lunch as a backup (Faicco's cold cuts, fresh fruit and cheese) which took the curse off of the poor offerings at the "festival." But as soon as we were off that damned boat, did some deep-breathing exercises to calm down and got to a place where we could raise a faint cell-phone signal, we found out where the nearest Metro North station was, arranged emergency taxi evacuation from the Bear Mountain Lodge to said railroad stop, and drank several stiff ones in the tavern by the station as we waited for the train that would carry us home to Manhattan.

On the way back down to our own little Island of Misfit Toys (the tracks run parallel to the river) we passed Old Stinkpot, the Circle Line boat, on its way home.

Rapidly.

You've been warned.

4,000 year old lo mein

Archeologists have discovered the remains of the oldest noodles known to mankind. They were made with millet, not wheat, and they're at least four thousand years old. This may settle once and for all the question, "who invented pasta?"

Read on: BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Oldest noodles unearthed in China

This still leaves a very important question unanswered, however.

According to the Jewish calendar, this is the year 5766. According to the way that the Chinese count time, it is the 22nd year in the 78th 60-year cycle, or the year 4693.

So, for 1073 years... what did all of those Jews do without Chinese food?

No wonder they were wandering in the desert. They were looking for takeout!

(We wish all of our Jewish friends and neighbors a serene and peaceful fast and a blessed Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, today.)

A lovely lede

Ledes like this are one of the biggest reasons I enjoy The Economist every single week:

Half of all Americans either don't know or don't believe that living creatures evolved. And now a Pennsylvania school board is trying to keep its pupils ignorant. It is the kind of story about America that makes secular Europeans chortle smugly before turning to the horoscope page...

Ouch. That's gonna leave a mark.

Right after that off-handed pimp-slap, the Economist's American correspondent goes on to deliver a well-reasoned, thorough analysis of the Intelligent Design movement and the implications of the Pennsylvania trial, dubbed "Scopes 2005" by some.

Evolution and intelligent design | Life is a cup of tea | Economist.com

Look who's blogging now

My lovely and talented wife, over at the brand-new blog Pencil Roving.

Carrie is a much better writer than I am, and I've been after her to do this, like, forever now. (What's that blog name all about? She explains.)

Her blog promises to be eclectic and fun, particularly if you're into travel, pop culture, or knitting. And we'll be dividing up the catblogging duties, so, Mister Gato fans, you're going to have a new destination to check out occasionally...

Indian outsourcing profits soar

BANGALORE, India, Oct. 11 - India's two largest outsourcing companies, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys Technologies, announced healthy growth in quarterly profits on Tuesday, indicating that Western corporations continued to vigorously outsource technology and back office operations.

India's $17.2 billion outsourcing industry is flourishing as companies hire skilled yet inexpensive English-speaking programmers and call center workers to carry out technology projects and provide customer support for their American and European clients.

Western Outsourcing Lifts Profits at Two Indian Companies - New York Times

All hail King Mike!

JERILDERIE, Australia (AFP) - If Australian forklift operator Mike Hastings is, as genealogists contend, the rightful heir to the British throne, then he really needs to brush up on his tea-making skills.

[...]

"I reckon I might send Lizzie (Queen Elizabeth II) a bill for back rent, the old girl's family have been living in my bloody castle for the last 500 years" [Hastings said.]

The documentary's historian Michael Jones found documents in Rouen Cathedral he believes show that Edward IV, who ruled from 1461 to 1483, was illegitimate because when he was conceived his parents were 200 kilometres (124 miles) apart.

Edward's "father" Richard of York was fighting the French at Pontoise, while his mother Cecily was five days' march away at Rouen, allegedly enjoying the attentions of an archer, according to Jones' research.

If true, the claim means the crown should have passed on to Richard's second son George, Hastings' direct ancestor.

That's a beautiful response. I love Australians. Just heed my advice, and don't ever try to outdrink one... I wound up with a tattoo that way (long story.)

(Incidentally, Hastings is originally from England, and in fact is the 14th Earl of Loudoun; he emigrated to Australia in 1960, and clearly he has taken to the place.)

HRH Mike, the man who should be king, prefers Aussie bush to Buck Palace (Agence France Press via Yahoo! News)

The Daily WTF

This is great stuff, in a deeply geeky sort of way: new enrevanche reader John V. points us to The Daily WTF, a site that highlights truly heinous code examples, interface excrescences, and other techno-embarrassments that are guaranteed to produce a WTF? reaction in those of us with experience toiling in the IT vineyards.

Most of the posts involve actual code examples, and may be hard to follow if you've never done any programming; some of them, however, will generate a WTF? reaction in just about anyone.

See, e.g.:

BRUSSELS - The Dexia Bank ATM machines are experiencing a curious problem. The machines stop functioning when someone enters the number 7, making it impossible for people with a 7 in their pin (personal identification number) code to perform a cash withdrawal.

Oops.

The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

G.O.P. Aides Add Voices to Resistance Over Nominee - New York Times

If this report is accurate, the Miers nomination is in even bigger trouble than I thought:

As the White House seeks to rally senators behind the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet E. Miers, lawyers for the Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee are expressing dissatisfaction with the choice and pushing back against her, aides to 6 of the 10 Republican committee members said yesterday.

"Everybody is hoping that something will happen on Miers, either that the president would withdraw her or she would realize she is not up to it and pull out while she has some dignity intact," a lawyer to a Republican committee member said.

That dignity thing? Too late already, probably.

G.O.P. Aides Add Voices to Resistance Over Nominee - New York Times

Oh my God! You killed Sully! (You bastards!)

Looks like Andrew Sullivan's blog is temporarily off-line (as of 7 AM EDT this morning):

You killed Sully! You bastards!

Sadly, the Geocities-hosted image in the middle isn't displaying.

Oh, Andy. You're pwned!

Any bets on what the ASFAS level will be later today?

Happy 60th Birthday, IBM Research!

You brought us everything from DRAM to the relational database, and some cool stuff like fractals besides.

And now, hey, you get the senior citizen discount on coffee at Dunkin' Donuts! (The AARP invite is in the mail.)

Originally housed in a renovated fraternity house at Columbia University, the then-named Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory has become one of the pre-eminent technological research centers in the world--and it has given IBM an edge over competitors in many fields.

Five IBM employees have won Nobel Prizes for, among other achievements, the discovery of electron tunneling and the invention of a microscope that captures images of individual atoms. Add to that seven National Medals of Technology, five National Medals of Science and four A.M. Turing Awards.

IBM Research turns 60 (TechRepublic/CNET News)

Karl Rove's Ringside Boasts

In which Turd Blossom/Boy Genius channels for The Greatest Of All Time:

I done wrassled with an atheist, I done tussled with McCain, handcuffed abortion, sabotaged your campaign. Only last week I murdered the environment, injured the U.N., hospitalized the liberal machine—I’m so low I make Nixon look clean.

Yankee Pot Roast: Karl Rove's Ringside Boasts (Michael Rottman, October 10, 2005)

Who is JT LeRoy? (New York magazine, Oct 17 2005)

Editor Ian Philips of Suspect Thoughts Press says, “Every time I’m alone with another San Francisco publisher, editor, author, reviewer, bookseller, I get asked one of three questions: Who does your distribution? What do you think of Dave Eggers? And who writes as JT LeRoy really? And no matter which question we start with, we always end up on the third—and the conspiracy theories fly.”

Who is JT LeRoy? The True Identity of a Great Literary Hustler - New York magazine, October 17, 2005

RINOs at a Carnival

The Carnival of the RINOs is up over at Environmental Republican.

Google Reader

Google Reader is the new RSS reader from Google.

Obviously.

And may I just say, it is plenty spiffy. Those guys do "web interface" better than anybody. Simple, clean, and fast.

Famous in France

The Knowledge Worker Free/Open-Source Toolbox is starting to get noticed.

Here, a kindred spirit in France notes the availability of the resource for her readers:

Barry Campbell nous propose une liste régulièrement actualisée des logiciels Open Source qui sont particulièrement utiles aux « knowledge worker » -travailleur de la connaissance -

Despite my snazzy blog-name, I only speak survival-level, heavily accented "menu French," but I am reasonably certain that Sylvie's post means something close to:

"Barry Campbell offers us a regularly updated list of Open Source software that is particularly useful for a 'knowledge worker' - a person who works with knowledge."

Sylvie, I'm glad that you found it useful!

Um... "Je suis heureux vous l'ai trouvé utile." Or something close to that.

The French Terror Alert System

Color-coding the French response to terror.

(From ¡No Pasarán!)

Hat tip: Chap.

A street named "Ed"

I'm getting ready to fly back to New York City tomorrow morning, having spent the week working from Raleigh and hovering anxiously over my parents.

Mom, bunking temporarily at a Skilled Care Facility (nursing home), is doing well with physical therapy, and may be back home as early as next month; Dad, under Hospice care at home, is resting comfortably for the most part.

As I pack my bags, I thought that I would list, in no particular order, a few things I particularly enjoy about Raleigh, North Carolina:

• Barbecue. There is just an embarrassment of riches here in Piedmont North Carolina in terms of places to get great pork barbecue. If there's no time to drive to Chapel Hill for Allen and Son's pig, which gets my vote for "best barbecue on the planet," we usually go to Don Murray's or to Clyde Cooper's in Raleigh. On this trip an old friend convinced me to drive all the way to the tiny town of Creedmoor, North Carolina to try a place called Bob's. (The satellite view appears to include a big cloud of hickory smoke.)
  
  And it was mighty fine.
  
  
• Bumper stickers. In my NYC neighborhood, the bumper stickers have a certain earnest, humorless sameness about them; they say things like "Hate is not a family value," or "Visualize world peace," or "Don't blame me, I voted for [name of most recent Democratic loser]" -- the poor folks in this last group have to change their sticker every four years, I guess.
  
  Here in Raleigh, I saw several bumper stickers that I wanted to buy immediately, even though I don't own a car. One, a neat riff on the "it's not worth robbing me" genre of signs affixed to pizza delivery vehicles, read: "Warning: Driver carries only $20.00 worth of ammunition." Yet another: "PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals."
  
  But probably my favorite of the bunch: "Stop repeat offenders: don't re-elect them."
  
  
• Street names. They run the gamut from the ridiculous to the sublime.
  
  In one of the more pretentious new subdivisions, I actually spotted a street that was not a street, a drive, a circle, or a road... it was, brace yourself, a "Wynd." I shit you not. And it wasn't the only "Wynd" in the vicinity, either. (In case you're wondering, and I had to look it up, a "wynd" is a Scots word for a narrow lane connecting two main roads. Any Scotsman faced with a "Wynd" in a Raleigh McMansion subdivision would undoubtedly piss himself laughing, however.)
  
  Contrast this with the homely and comfortably named street that I drove past on my way to visit Mom in the nursing home. As I cruised down Blue Ridge Road, I saw the sign, right there...Ed Drive.
  
  The beauty part is that "Ed Drive" is only a stone's throw from that ridiculous tangle of Wynds.

Diabetes Mine - a blog about diabetes

Special note to my blood-glucose-measuring, A1c-obsessing, pill-popping, insulin-shooting, carb-counting, dieting-and-exercising, hoping-to-stave-off-dialysis-as-long-as-possible fellow diabetics:

Amy Tenderich's "Diabetes Mine" blog is a must-read.

A recent post about the "nation of Diabetica" will give you a feel for Amy's style:

Last night my husband said: "There are more diabetics in this country than there are people in The Netherlands." Now this may not mean that much to you, but we lived in that country for nearly three years. My second child was born there. And I'm picturing all of the 16.5 million bike-riding, cheese-eating masses pressing buttons on their insulin pumps and priming their pen needles, toting monitors and counting carbs.

No, really. Imagine, an ENTIRE COUNTRY of us. Mind-blowing.

Even more mind-blowing is the Economic Force this represents. If roughly equivalent to The Netherlands, "Diabetica" would be:

- the 61st most populous country in the world
- with a labor force of 7.53 Million
- and GDP of $482 Billion
- with nearly 2 Million people over the age of 65
- nearly 9 Million Internet users
- reading over 300 newspapers
-- AND: the 20th most affluent country in the world, with a per capita income of $29,500

I've added it to the blogroll, and if you're at all interested in the topic, you'll enjoy reading it regularly, as I do.

Diabetes Mine - a blog about diabetes

Chapomatic: Prine vs. Yon

Some interesting MSM v. Blogs kerfuffle over at Chapomatic, in the text and comments of these two posts:

• Michael Yon and Carl Prine (10/6/2005)
  

In which Chap takes journalist Carl Prine to task for slagging blogger Michael Yon in a public forum. Chap cc's both Prine and Yon on the article, and Prine (among others, myself included) responds in the comments.


• Welcome to the Back End of the Blogosphere (10/7/2005)
  

In which Chap responds to Carl Prine's lengthy response to the comments in the first post.

My take on the situation is more or less as follows:

Prine is a fine journalist, and writes good stuff that (a) I'd be proud to write and (b) enjoy reading, now that it has been called to my attention.

Yon is an excellent blogger who is offering a valuable perspective from Iraq that no one else, MSM or otherwise, is currently offering, and I not only look forward to each dispatch, I have supported him financially in the past and intend to do so in the future.

Despite Prine's skills and journalistic "credibility," he does not get what Yon is trying to do over there, and his criticisms betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what weblogging is and how it works. Prine seems to be arguing that there is one absolute standard for what good writing and reporting should look like, and that's nonsense.

I give Prine points for both grace and courage, however. Courage, in that he has answered a call from the Pennsylvania National Guard and is headed for Iraq himself in the coming months; grace, in that he came immediately to eloquently defend himself in the comments over at Chap's blog.

I *really* look forward to seeing Yon's response, if such is forthcoming.

It's Wonderful

The text for today's lesson comes from the late 1930s... it's Ella Fitzgerald and her Savoy Eight performing "It's Wonderful."

It's wonderful to look into your eyes
And realize you care a little bit
It's wonderful to know that you love me

It's glorious to feel that I'm a part of you sweetheart
To share your happiness
It's marvelous how lovely love can be

Who dreamed that I'd be allowed
Through the doorway of heaven
I'm drifting high on a cloud
You're an angel and this is heaven

It's wonderful to have your lips divine combined with mine
And dream forever more
It's wonderful to know that you love me

Free Download: "It's Wonderful" - Amazon.com

The return of Wallace and Gromit

Carrie and I are huge fans of Nick Park and Aardman Animation Studios... and I'm not ashamed to say that we've been counting the days until the release of the first feature-length Wallace and Gromit film, "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit."

So you can imagine how delighted I was when Carrie e-mailed me a link to A.O. Scott's rave review of the new W&G movie, which includes this rather incredible statment:

[Gromit the Dog's] feature film debut, after appearances in three sublime half-hour shorts, is thus a solemn occasion (even if the movie itself is utterly silly). His face now enters the pantheon of stars whose charisma transcends speech - Keaton, Chaplin, Garbo - let them now make room for Gromit.

Welcome to the pantheon.
(Can a knighthood be far behind?)

The film has just opened in New York and Los Angeles, and goes into wide release October 25th.

I think I have plans for Sunday afternoon... ideally, this sort of film would be seen with a small, giggling child, but as I tend to turn into a small giggling child myself while watching Aardman films, this should present no major logistical problems.

A New Challenge for an Englishman and His Dog (A.O. Scott, New York Times, 5 October 2005)

How Dad is doing these days

Dad is sleeping a lot of the time now; he is increasingly confused and disoriented, unfortunately, and does not always know who we (me, other relatives, his caregivers) are.

We did have a minor victory the other night; he had been struggling for days to tell us the name of some kind of soft-drink that he wanted, but he couldn't come up with the name or even describe it much. We had named every kind of soda and cola that we could think of, including some regional Southern and North Carolina brands like Cheerwine and Sun-Drop, but no, none of them were it.

Finally he remembered. He wanted a Grape NeHi.

Object of desire.

Y'all, if I had had to go to Mars to get him a Grape NeHi I guess I would have. But while you can still order it over the Internet, apparently, they sure don't sell it around here.

So I bought him some grape soda, anyway, and fixed him a glass of it. He got a big smile on his face as he sipped it out of the straw. "Is it good, Pop?" I asked him. 'It's just like I remembered it!" he said happily.

So if you're ever in this situation, I can tell you that Fanta Grape tastes a lot like Grape NeHi, apparently.

Google declares war on Microsoft

The Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Australia): Google declares war on Microsoft [06oct05]

Internet search engine Google has declared war on Microsoft, announcing plans to launch free spreadsheet and word-processing software online.

Google has joined forces with US-based technology giant Sun Microsystems to allow web users to access Sun's OpenOffice from any personal computer.

Sun will offer Google's search toolbar with downloads of its free Java software, which now powers more than 2.5 billion gadgets around the globe, including 700 million PCs."

Disquiet interviews: Kenneth Kirschner

Disquiet: interviews: Kenneth Kirschner

New York-based composer Kenneth Kirschner is a believer. "If I have a religion in life," he says, "it's the iPod." Asked to detail the tenets of this faith, he quotes science-fiction writer William Gibson, who once noted, "The Walkman changed the way we understand cities." Gibson's much-referenced comment touches on how personal technology has allowed music to provide an unprecedented running commentary on everyday life, accompanying us in our heads as we make our way through the physical world, shaping perspective, mood and experience.

If Gibson's futurist fiction is informed by technology, Kirschner's art is enabled by it. In Kirschner's case, that technology is Flash, the ubiquitous multimedia software language that powers countless Internet websites. Kirschner uses Flash to compose ever-changing pieces of music. These compositions generally consist of a set number of MP3s that are randomly layered simultaneously, and that can play for as long as the listener desires. A piece of music that is indeterminate — to borrow a word from John Cage, one of Kirschner's role models — has no inherent end.

Related site: KennethKirschner.com (where you can download many of his "fixed" compositions, as well as listen to Flash streaming audio of his "indeterminate" ones.)

I guess the blog doesn't count

More from the Campbell Archives.

Postcard received from author Madeleine L'Engle, who I dimly remember writing a gushing fan-letter to as a 13 year-old, confessing that I, too, wanted to be a writer when I grew up:

Carter-era Catblogging

We're giving Mister Gato the week off from catblogging. Since I'm in Raleigh this week, and he's back in New York with Carrie and the Chows, his self-appointed duties as "man of the house" leave little time for modeling work.

But never fear, fans of feline-related bitmap graphics. While digging through some boxes of old papers and records the other night at Mom and Dad's house, I discovered, among other things, a huge bundle of unredeemed S&H Green Stamps... and... a treasure trove of family photographs, spanning a time-frame from the early 1950s to the present day. And I got busy with the scanner.

Everybody, meet Tippy. Tippy is the first cat who ever owned me; she joined our family when I was only three or four years old, and she was just about my best friend in the world.

Black cat, dark night, poor contrast.
The headline on the paper she's sitting next to reads "Carter
offers budget to curb U.S. growth," which puts the date around 1978.
(I almost titled this post "Malaise and the bad old days.")

In my childhood and early adolescence, I was a lonely little geek without many friends--the neighborhood consensus seemed to be that I was too weird to make much a of a playmate out of me--and I spent a lot of time sitting around and reading and listening to my parents' records on the stereo.

Tippy, a gentle soul and also a complete lap-baby, liked this just fine. There was always room in the chair for a cat, along with a child and his book(s). We must have passed hundreds, if not thousands, of hours in just such a configuration.

Famous in Moldova

Nations Joining With Nations: Using "Statehood" To Improve Your Position (EuroJournal.org)

Abstract: International agreements are ways to gain advantages in exchange for aspects of sovereignty. Smaller countries employ a variety of methods to band together and compete with larger countries. For the country considering joining a restrictive union, there is more than one option--and in the United States, several independent countries profited from becoming States within the union. The process of becoming a state has sometimes been prolonged, particularly with cultural differences; countries joining the European Union may see similar timelines. This process, and the relative advantages and disadvantages of joining a particular union, can prove useful for a country trying to negotiate optimal entry conditions.

Deadly 1918 Epidemic Linked to Bird Flu, Scientists Say - New York Times

Deadly 1918 Epidemic Linked to Bird Flu, Scientists Say - New York Times:

Two teams of federal and university scientists announced today that they had resurrected the 1918 influenza virus, the cause of one of history's most deadly epidemics, and had found that unlike the viruses that caused more recent flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968, the 1918 virus was actually a bird flu that jumped directly to humans.

The work, being published in the journals Nature and Science, involved getting the complete genetic sequence of the 1918 virus, using techniques of molecular biology to synthesize it, and then using it to infect mice and human lung cells in a specially equipped, secure lab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The findings, the scientists say, reveal a small number of genetic changes that may explain why the virus was so lethal. The work also confirms the legitimacy of worries about the bird flu viruses that are now emerging in Asia.

Great Obituaries

The International Society of Obituarists maintains a running list (and an archive) of great obituraries.

Unsurprisingly, British newspapers are disproportionately over-represented.

Keeping Jews out of Harvard

So it turns out--if you believe Malcolm Gladwell, and he makes a pretty compelling case--that the modern college admissions process, with its emphasis on "character" as well as grades and test scores, was pretty much designed to allow the Ivy Leagues to keep themselves from being overrun by Jewish students:

In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for admission, which meant that virtually any academically gifted high-school senior who could afford a private college had a straightforward shot at attending. By 1908, the freshman class was seven per cent Jewish, nine per cent Catholic, and forty-five per cent from public schools, an astonishing transformation for a school that historically had been the preserve of the New England boarding-school complex known in the admissions world as St. Grottlesex.

As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in “The Chosen” (Houghton Mifflin; $28), his remarkable history of the admissions process at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically.By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school: “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.”

The solution? Read on: Getting In: The Social Logic of Ivy League Admissions (The New Yorker, October 10, 2005)

So what do you have to do to find happiness?

So what do you have to do to find happiness? - Sunday Times - Times Online

Excerpt:

Although most people rate themselves as happy, there is a wealth of evidence to show that negative thinking is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. Experiments show that we remember failures more vividly than successes. We dwell on what went badly, not what went well. When life runs smoothly, we're on autopilot — we're only in a state of true consciousness when we notice the stone in our shoe.

Of the six universal emotions, four — anger, fear, disgust and sadness — are negative and only one, joy, is positive. (The sixth, surprise, is neutral.) According to the psychologist Daniel Nettle, author of Happiness, and one of the Royal Institution lecturers, the negative emotions each tell us 'something bad has happened' and suggest a different course of action. Fear tells us danger is near, so run away. Anger prompts us to deter aggressors. Sadness warns us to be cautious and save energy, while disgust urges us to avoid contamination."

Joy, according to Nettle, simply tells us, "something good has happened, don't change anything". The evolutionary role of pleasure was to encourage activity that was good for survival, such as eating and having sex. But unlike negative emotions, which are often persistent, joy tends to be short-lived. We soon get sick of cream cakes or blasé about our pay rise.

The ruthless evolutionary logic of being a sad-sack. Whew.

I have always thought that Hobbes' description of the life of man in the state of nature--"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short"--would make an excellent name for a law firm.

"Anger, Fear, Disgust and Sadness LLC" gives it a fair run for its money.

I digress. The excerpt quoted above is from a really fascinating article on the subject of happiness: what it is, how it can be measured, and how it can be attained. Happiness seems to have a very sound neurological and biochemical basis, unsurprisingly, and some very bright people seem to be closing in on understanding it.

Here's an irresistible detail on what works, in terms of increasing your happiness:

In one internet study, two interventions increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms for at least six months. One exercise involves writing down three things that went well and why, every day for a week. The other is about identifying your signature strengths and using one of them in a new and different way every day for a week. A third technique involves writing a long letter to someone you're grateful to but have never properly thanked, and visiting them to read it out in person.

My thoughts:

It is glib and reductive, but I have always conceptualized happiness as a rather simple equation (this isn't original, but I'm damned if I can find an authoritative citation for the original source):

Happiness = (reality - expectations)

In other words, the amount of happiness that you are experiencing can be expressed as the "amount" by which the perceived quality of your current situation meets or exceeds what it is that you want. This seems to suggest that you could be happy all the time if you abandon your expectations, which, you know, I think I may have heard somewhere before.

Related site: Dan Kohn's Happiness Page (he also likes the Happiness Equation)

Ning

Ning is a web-based toolkit for building "social applications."

Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for people to build and run social applications. Social "apps" are web applications that enable anyone to match, transact, and communicate with other people.

Our goal with Ning is to see what happens when you open things up and make it easy to create, share, and discover new social apps. These might include for any city, your own take on Craigslist...for any passion, your own take on Match.com...for any interest, your own take on Zagat...for any event, your own take on Flickr...for any school, your own take on the Facebook...for any topic, your own take on del.icio.us...for any mammal, your own take on Hot or Not or Kitten War.

You choose the app, decide for whom it's most relevant, create the categories, define the features, choose the language - or just clone an app that's already up and running on Ning - and be on your way.

All right, then, y'all. Go get yourself a beta developer account, and let us know if you come up with anything really cool. (Check out this prototype for a restaurant review site, with maps thoughtfully provided automagically by Google.)

A perfectly cromulent article

Wikipedia: Made-up Words in The Simpsons

Skittlebrau, n. Skittlebrau is a type of beverage that looks like beer with candy floating in it. It is implied that Homer imagined it by mixing Skittles and beer (brew in German is bräu) in "Bart Star". However, later episodes show Skittlebrau as an actual product being sold at the 33 cent store. Another episode shows Homer asking Apu for some at the Kwik-E-Mart, only for Apu to tell him that it does not exist. It is assumed the combination derives from the known phrase Life is not all beer and skittles from E. Cobham Brewer.

This has been tried in the real world, here among other places.

A real band named Skittlebrau toured in the southeastern U.S. during 2002, composed of Zak Frentz, Ed Dean, Jesse Edgerton, and Ryan Lohbauer.

Hat tip: Screenhead

Seven years

October 4, 1998 was a cool, foggy morning with a hint of drizzle. Carrie and I woke up early and took a quiet walk together from our West Village neighborhood down to the Hudson River, strolling through a yet-to-be gentrified and decidedly unhip Meatpacking District to get there.

We had a pretty crazy, overscheduled day ahead of us, and wanted a little time to ourselves. With cups of deli coffee in our hands, we stood on the bank of the Hudson and watched the sun rise over New Jersey. And shortly thereafter, we saw a rainbow, an actual rainbow.

A good omen.

A little later that morning, we schlepped downtown, signed the ketubah, and then, in front of about seventy-five of our closest friends and loved ones and a pretty good jazz combo, we got hitched. The jazz players, whom we had hired for their facility with Cole Porter and Jimmy Van Heusen standards, actually managed an entirely credible (and unasked-for) "Hava Nagila" in a style that can only be described as Cocktail Lounge Klezmer.

After we did a little drinking and dancing, fed everybody brunch, and sent them off to their respective homes, we went back to our tiny little apartment. A few hours later, having sent our youthful Chows to sleepaway camp and packed our bags for our honeymoon flight to Paris, we were sitting in the living room in our pajamas, eating takeout Chinese and giggling over The Simpsons on cable.

(Yes, I know, I'm the last of the red-hot lovers. But believe me, just being in the same room with Carrie is pretty blissful, and I'd give just about anything if I could hang out with her and watch stupid cartoons tonight.)

A situation with my parents (I'm in North Carolina at the moment) means we're apart on our anniversary today. But I'm thinking of you, dearest one, and this has been the best seven years of my life, without a shadow of a doubt. I do love you so. And I'll be home Sunday.

The happy couple
San Francisco, summer 2004

My thoughts on the Miers nomination

The Supremes, and the Republic, will survive Harriet Miers if she's confirmed; there have been plenty of mediocrities on the Supreme Court before and we've muddled through.

The sound that you hear from the far-right-wing blogosphere and traditional conservative media commentariat, however, is the sound of a bunch of extremist religious and cultural conservatives finally waking up to the fact that the Bush family has been using them like a cheap whore at a bachelor party.

For years now.

Poor paleocons. They were spoiling for a fight, and now they're all dressed up for Kulturkampf with no place go to. Bush has nominated a cipher, a person whose sole qualifications are a pair of X chromosomes and a demonstrated history of loyalty to Dubya.

I realize that this analogy may offend some, but it's just become too obvious to ignore:

Religious conservatives are to the Republican Party as African Americans are, largely, to the Democrats. The party makes extravagant promises to them, and a big show of caring about them, but rarely delivers anything important or substantial to them; they depend on them to vote as a bloc in their favor, because, you know, what are they gonna do, vote for "the other side?"

For all the noise that the Religious Right makes, and for all the apparent energy and enthusiasm that the GOP leadership devotes to kissing their collective asses, the Republican Party has yet to deliver on one single issue of primary importance to them. Not one.

And they won't, either. They need the scary issues like abortion and gay rights to stay active, so that they can rattle peoples' cages and whip them into a frenzy of check-writing indignation and get out the vote on Election Day.

You know, sooner or later, that's going to stop working.

Can you hear that? The sound of hoofbeats in the near distance?

Harriet Miers's Blog!!!

Fabulous.

Hat tip: John deVille.

The Strata-Sphere » RINO Agents Reporting!

This week's batch of RINO Sightings may be perused at the Strata-Sphere.

I have long suspected that some of us were receiving signals directly from outer space.

John Dvorak:The New Music Download Battle

After finally discovering that money (lots of it) can be made from music downloads, the RIAA and some of its members are rethinking the entire concept, and the iTunes deal in particular. At least a few RIAA members think that Apple is double-dipping, because it makes most of its money selling the iPod and, well, that's not fair! So the music companies are rethinking—uh, complaining about—the whole downloading model.

John Dvorak, PC Magazine: The New Music Download Battle

Hat tip: Rock and Rap Confidential newsletter

Carnival of the Cats #80...

Carnival of the Cats, 80th edition, is up over at Music and Cats.

Winging it to Raleigh...

Winging it to Raleigh in a few hours; I'm going to be telecommuting to my New York City gig from the back bedroom of my parents' house next week.

Here I am, a 38 year-old man, and I've turned the room that I slept in as a child into some kind of scary high-tech IT consultant's treehouse. And now, it seems, I'm taking care of Mom and Dad and making sure nothing bad happens to them, instead of the other way around.

Funny old world.

Have I mentioned that I hate just about everything about air travel these days?

I do not fear flying--I have happily flown in everything from medevac helicopters to single-engine Cessnas to jumbo jets--but I loathe the logistical nightmare that commercial air travel has become.

The process of getting to the airport, clearing Homeland Security/TSA, waiting through the inevitable flight delays, and then finally shoehorning myself into a too-small seat with zero legroom while my seatmate tries to wedge the steamer trunk she's brought on board as carry-on luggage into the overhead bin, and the infant two rows behind me who is going to scream monotonously for the entire duration of the flight begins his warming-up vocalizations, like an opera singer tuning up backstage...

There are not enough minibottles on the drinks cart to get me through it.

(In re the security checks, I think they're doing a great job of preventing the last hijacking. But I do remain speechlessly grateful that, so far, no one has tried to blow up an aircraft with, e.g., explosives taped to his testicles, or we'd all be strip-searched instead of being "urged"--forced, really--to take off our shoes, etc.)

You know, I think that The Simpsons' "Sideshow Bob" really said it best:

"Ah, for the days when aviation was a gentleman's pursuit, back before every Joe Sweatsock could wedge himself behind a lunch-tray and jet off to Raleigh-Durham."

(Simpsons episode 3F08, "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming")

Indeed, indeed.

Joe Sweatsock here, signing off. See y'all in Raleigh around lunchtime.

Excellent man-purse, now with extra Japlish

Even before I moved to New York City, where packing and toting a briefcase or backpack around town is de rigueur and in fact a minor art form, I was on a quest for the perfect shoulder bag.

The amount of stuff that you have to tote around as a working geek in the City is daunting.

Consider the bare necessities:

• Cell phone
• PDA
• USB thumbdrive
  
• Various building passes and login token cards
• Business cards
• Case holding eyeglasses or sunglasses, depending on which you're wearing at the time
• Checkbook, notepad, pens
• Small bottle of water.
  

Now, let's add in a few extras. Like the diabetes-related crap I have to carry with me (glucometer, lancets, test strips, sugar tablets in case I overshoot the runway with the meds and get hypoglycemic), the various fetish objets (e.g., Moleskine notebook, MP3 player) that give meaning to my mundane existence, and the cables to hook all of this gear together. Plus a magazine or two to leaf through in case I have to time to kill in a waiting room or on a subway platform.

And, ever since I read Douglas Adams as a youth, a small clean handtowel. (I always know where my towel is.)

That's quite a set of requirements, and if you're not careful you're going to look like you're attempting an assault on Everest when you leave the house. (By the way, I'm not even mentioning what I've got in my pockets - wallet, cash, keys, small sharp knife, etc.)

My friends, I present to you the aptly named Wise-Walker, from the Nomadic Corporation of Japan.

The Wise-Walker WR-10
"The Brand Talken On The Street" (sic)

It's got pockets, zippers, Velcro, and mesh to beat the band. Lightweight, tough and water-resistant. Like Sophia Loren, it's padded in all the right places, so it nestles the various expensive and fragile electronics I carry around like a custom-designed egg carton.

In short, it is as thoroughly design-workshopped and over-engineered as an iPod.

And at 5700 yen... um, about fifty bucks... a total steal.

I found it in our neighborhood fancy-luggage boutique, Flight 001 on Greenwich Avenue.

I didn't notice the Japlish on the packaging (and sewn into the labels) at the time, but if I had, I might've bought two or three in different colors.

After all, it's "The Brand Talken On The Street," y'all!

Related site: "It's Not a Purse! A Buyer's Guide to Man Bags" (Joe Ganley)

"The Shining," reimagined as romantic comedy

You know, I try pretty hard to avoid "me too" links.

And what I'm about to link to has not only been all over the blogosphere, it even made the New York Times.

It is, however, such a work of pure genius that I can't resist:

Alternative trailer for "The Shining." (Quicktime format, approximately 10 MB)

Things you discover about the person you live with

Further to an earlier post...

Things I didn't know about my wife even after ten years of cohabitation:

At one point in her life, she had a college roommate who was a huge Deadhead.

Honestly, it never came up in conversation before, and although I've got plenty of digital recordings of Dead shows, we don't have any discs or tapes in the house.

But last night, I was playing "Uncle John's Band" from the Garcia tribute show. And I noticed her singing along.

So I switched over to "Franklin's Tower." Ditto.

I whirled around, surprised. "Hey," she protested, "I went to college too."

OK, honey. Sometime tomorrow, we'll cue up one of the fifteen versions or so of New Potato Caboose that I've got kicking around, and we'll see just how hard-core you are.

ThinkFree Office Online

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Did I mention it's free?

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