Ruminatrix
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Tuesday, May 13, 2003
"No Disincentive Not To"
The NYT's Paul Krugman is not the first to note that this country privately-owned media often behave like "state-run outlets", whereas the state-owned BBC (or the Israeli press) feel obliged to question their governments' policies to prove their editorial independence. Why? The US government rewards such compliance by weakening existing regulations on "cross-ownership" and other oligopolistic practises.
One media group wrote to [FTC Chairman Michael] Powell, dropping its opposition to part of his plan "in return for favorable commission action" on another matter. That was indiscreet, but you'd have to be very naïve not to imagine that there are a lot of implicit quid pro quos out there.And Fox News' parent News Corp, fearlesslessly censors stories to appease the government in Beijing.
And the implicit trading surely extends to news content. Imagine a TV news executive considering whether to run a major story that might damage the Bush administration — say, a follow-up on Senator Bob Graham's charge that a Congressional report on Sept. 11 has been kept classified because it would raise embarrassing questions about the administration's performance. Surely it would occur to that executive that the administration could punish any network running that story.
Meanwhile, both the formal rules and the codes of ethics that formerly prevented blatant partisanship are gone or ignored. Neil Cavuto of Fox News is an anchor, not a commentator. Yet after Baghdad's fall he told "those who opposed the liberation of Iraq" — a large minority — that "you were sickening then; you are sickening now." Fair and balanced.
We don't have censorship in this country; it's still possible to find different points of view. But we do have a system in which the major media companies have strong incentives to present the news in a way that pleases the party in power, and no incentive not to.
Monday, May 12, 2003
Twiggy
A new twig on the tree will be posting from the same machine as me. The third member of our household prefers to go unwired and unquoted. Theo's looking forward to posting and feedback and soon we will put some images up too. We went over some basic HTML tags on the subway to school today.
We have been taught to login and out (thanks Jim), but anyway I'm sure that at some point one of us will forget to log in/out properly and inadvertently post as the other. Thought I'd let you know ahead of time....
Sunday, May 11, 2003
More Research Required
One of my favorite album covers ever was the chimp sitting at an old-fashioned Remington typewriter on The Mekons' 1979 album The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen. So I'm very disheartened by this story from BBC News:
A bizarre experiment by a group of students has found monkeys cannot write Shakespeare. Lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth wanted to test the claim that an infinite number of monkeys given typewriters would create the works of The Bard.
A single computer was placed in a monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo to monitor the literary output of six primates. But after a month, the Sulawesi crested macaques had only succeeded in partially destroying the machine, using it as a lavatory, and mostly typing the letter "s".
Read the rest of this post...
Surveillance 'bots
A remote correspondent (hi dad!) sends a clipping entitled Were Shadowy Figure in a Spooky Government Facility Perusuing My Weblog?. Independent (UK) columnist Chris Gulker described finding searches from a 'bot supposedly at "homeland.fbi.gov/Watchlists/suspect/view.jsp" in his weblog referrer log and wondering what was going on. It turned out to be a "referrer spam" artist trawling for reverse hits. Not being much of a log user, I don't know whether this phenomenon is new or not. Anyone? What advertisers -- other than the usual suspects -- want to target the weblog-writing market anyway?
The article is now in a pay-per view archive so I won't link it. But its author's site has some cool stuff on 'bots (especially music industry ones looking for mp3s and so forth) and logs: "Heh, Web server access logs are the medium I read most often lately... they even have ads and spam in them..."
Another Dead Soldier
The SOG CRK77 Vino is the comando corkscrew, it's what the SEALs would use for a hypothetical beach-party, the pocket-tool of special forces tactical oenologists. It rocks.
Graceful as a fine Merlot, yet strong and hearty like a robust Cabernet, the SOG Vino®will handle any corkage with finesse and ease.....Available for even less elsewhere. I heard about Vino from a friend, and it's the only product SOG makes that couldn't kill something. But it's beautiful to (be)hold.
Saturday, May 10, 2003
Baghdad bank job
A lot of money went missing in the last days of the ancien regime in Baghdad. Tuesday's NYT reported that Qusay Hussein and Abid al Hasmid Masood -- assistant to the Iraqi president -- made a large withdrawal around 4 am on March 18th, hours before the first bombs struck Baghdad.
That's $900 million, plus Euros 100m -- or $1bn in cash.
So why was there so much specie floating around the Central Bank? Part of the answer is the Kirkuk-Banias pipeline. Re-opened in 1997, this conduit from the Northern Iraq fields to the Syrian port of Banias (or Baniyas) was used by Iraq to smuggle between 100,000 and 200,000 barrels of oil per day in circumvention of the UN oil-for-food program. Syria pretended the oil was from its own fields and paid the Iraqis off in cash to the tune of $6.6bn between 1997 and 2001. Its existence is not exactly secret: Google turns up 60-odd hits for "Kirkuk-Banias," mostly in oil-industry sources.
The best-known spigot suspected of filling Mr. Hussein's personal coffers was Iraq's oldest oil pipeline, from the northern oil fields around Kirkuk to Syria's Mediterranean port, Baniyas.Question: Why did it take the American press until 2003 to find out about the smuggling? This smuggling can't exactly have been a secret to US intelligence agencies, can it?
The pipeline pumped oil that was sold at cut-rate prices to Syria in return for kickbacks to the Hussein government, according to oil analysts and American officials.
Although American officials complained that the pipeline circumvented economic sanctions, it remained open until United States forces closed it last month.
"Syria continually denied doing it, they said they were testing the line," said James Placke, an oil analyst with Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "Well, they tested the line for two and a half years at the rate of about 150,000 to 200,000 barrels a day."
Since 1996, the United Nations has had official control of all Iraqi oil profits, which were to be used to purchase food and other relief supplies for Iraqi civilians.
While the United Nations has defended its oversight of the program, the General Accounting Office estimated last year that oil smuggling and other kickbacks linked to the United Nations program allowed Mr. Hussein to steal about $6.6 billion between 1997 and 2001.
Diving for dollars
So early last night I serve two groups at the bar. They're asking for wines-by-the-glass suggestions and it goes really well. I'm batting 100% -- in both cases they love the wines I'm steering them towards. They're not connoisseurs, but not total novices either. The labels aren't what's important here -- it's just fun when you see the "I really like this glass" light go on in someone's eyes. Or when they write down the name so they can look for it at the store.
Anyway, both parties ask for their checks at the same time, we do the credit card thing and I hand off the slips to the other bartender at the service station to ring in the charge tips. It's getting busy, so maybe ten or fifteen minutes go by before I think to look at those charge slips. There's only one slip -- we can't find the other. Without the slip we won't get the tip -- we don't know how much they left, but I'm guessing it was pretty decent.
I know I can't stop the show to hunt down a piece of paper. Patience is required -- several hours' worth. But for about five hours I'm pissed off at myself for not putting the slip in a safe place. (One of us probably threw it away the slip, figuring it was a duplicate copy of the other check). Still, eventually we isolate the trash can at his station and set it aside.
Five hours later, well after midnight, I take the can back to the kitchen, take off my dress shirt -- no sense in getting that dirty -- and start trash-diving in my undershirt. The Senegalese dishwasher, gives me some rubber gloves to wear, bless him. Now it's good old-fashioned up-to-the-forearms diving for a couple of three-inch slips among a midden of coffee-grounds and lemon wedges and other food-industry sludge, bulked up with maybe a hundred time-printed of paper slips -- drink and coffee orders and all the rest. Watch out for broken glass on the way down. It's like an archaeological dig: in each stratum the printout times get earlier. Look, here are some handwritten notes on the chef's cheese selections of the day, there are the little cans of juice we opened near the start of the shift. We're back in the right epoch, circa 7pm, let's see what we've got.
After ten minutes I retrieve two scrunched bits of espresso-tanned and wine-stained paper and yes, I feel like Schliemann at Troy. As I wave them in triumph, the sommelier walks into the kitchen --impeccably dressed as usual -- and looks at me like I've lost my mind. Here's $28 more for the tip pool. I'll get about three of those dolllars, but it's the finding the damn thing that makes my day -- because I knew those people had had a good time...Another day, another dollar.
Friday, May 09, 2003
Having a Google moment
So the other day I'm looking online for more about the artist Noritoshi Hirakawa, who was mentioned here. There's not a whole lot out there about him. One review of his work published in World Art (Melbourne 1996), by the theorist Catherine Lumby, is entitled "Pubic Image". Quite clever, as one of Hirakawa's shows involved photographs of women he met in Tokyo's streets squatting knickerless in public parks and squares.
But I couldn't find the Lumby article, so I Googled
"pubic+image", kinda wondering what rich mix I'd haul in over the transom.
All but three of the first 50-odd results for that search were typos for "public image" (a few about the band PIL, but most not). It doesn't mean anything, but it's not what I would have expected. Maybe this relates to Jim's open question on the way Google will likely change language. Humor is so un-XML-friendly. Or maybe web-searching is so weirdly literal that we'll just see all our typos immortalized like the strange Cambrian forms of the Burgess Shale.
Lapse
I ask J if she can remember the name of the guys who do our vaccuum cleaner's annual service/HEPA filter fix. She too draws a blank, replying: "But if you hadn't asked me, I could have told you." And she would have, too.
Thursday, May 08, 2003
Exterminate All the Brutes
The New York artist Catherine Chalmer's work involves photographing animals eating each other and large prints of cockroaches. In the latest work cockroaches are shown "executed" in a number of ways -- hanged with thread, electrocuted in a tiny wooden chair, burned at the stake. There's a short intro (groan, NYTimes link).
Behind her animal-scene pieces are two opposed impulses: earlier works de-sentimentalized the natural world, showed its inherent eat-and-be-eaten violence; this is about how humans project their fantasies and fears onto species, a project that had its most notable used in the Nazi cinema -- but is also present in American movies (Them, The Fly) or Paul Verhoeven's kinky Riefensthal-inspired Starship Troopers:
In 2001 an Artnews feature about Ms. Chalmers said she was planning some cockroach executions. Irate letters poured in. A few years before that, during a book signing for "Food Chain," which includes pictures of a snake strangling a rat and a mantis chewing off its mate's head, an angry vegetarian came up to Ms. Chalmers and called her a Nazi.Aha, history rears its ugly head! On a personal note, I never saw a cockroach until I moved to America. So while I don't like them exactly, I just don't feel the visceral hatred of them that Chalmers is invoking in this work. Also, thinking about this as a parent reminds me of how much we anthropomorphize animals when talking with children and how the categories into which we divide them -- pets, zoo and farm animals, "food", vermin, etc, inevitably shape our interactions with them.
The upshot, Ms. Chalmers said, was, "I bent over backwards not to hurt anything." With Hollywood movies no one wonders whether people are actually being killed, she noted. But with video, people expect honesty.
That did not stop her from making a video of roaches in a gas chamber. As the video begins, you see the misty gray air inside the chamber. The roaches are dead on their backs. Then a few legs twitch. Soon the air begins to clear. You can see the bricks of the gas chamber and the little pipe through which the gas came in. More and more roach legs and antennae wiggle. The sounds of whispers, giggling and breathing fill the air. Soon the roaches are crawling everywhere. It is the cockroach equivalent of Martin Amis's Holocaust novel, "Time's Arrow," in which time runs backward.
While making this video, Ms. Chalmers said, she got very upset, not because of the Holocaust parallel but because she thought she had actually put the roaches through an agonizing death. Previously she had always knocked her roaches out by chilling them. But Betty Faber, an entomologist, told her to try carbon dioxide. So she put the roaches in the chamber and with a pipe pumped in the gas from dry ice, which is frozen carbon dioxide. The roaches went into "dramatic convulsions," she said. "They tossed themselves all over the place, threw themselves against the walls. Then they all fell on their backs."
She thought: "I can't show this. It's visually too disturbing." But then, as the videotape kept rolling and the dry ice cleared, the cockroaches rose from the dead. Their legs started kicking. "The most beautiful part is their getting up," Ms. Chalmers said. She decided to show the uncut video from this point on. It shows the cockroaches as survivors. "I wanted to show their character," Ms. Chalmers says. "They keep coming back."
You might think that Ms. Chalmers would have been upset because she had, by effectively reversing the gassing process, given her Holocaust a happy ending. Or you might think that she would have worried that she had compared vermin and Jews, which is what the Nazis did. (Her photographs of lynchings bring up the same problem. She seems to be comparing African-Americans and insects.)