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Thursday, May 08, 2003

staggering geniuses

"As for the title of the piece—"The Snarky, Dumbed-Down World of Book Reviewing"—Ms. Julavits said that "you should know that people give you titles, and titles happen to you," she said. "Titles are different from the animal—and you know that."

Perhaps Mr. Eggers wrote the headlines to juice up the cover?

"No," she replied, "all I’m saying is headlines serve a different purpose than the piece."

Finally, she confessed to having written it herself: "I’m guilty of doing it, yes."

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lets go to the hop

hop on over to the pond and lick some frog 'n' blog. and much obliged for the bogrollink to the cowboy.

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Wednesday, May 07, 2003

sub sonic

i thought sub pop wasnt happening after the mid nineties but theyve released alot of good stuff lately which i would label alt.folk. i see theyve called some of it urban folk. maybe its a little bit dream pop too. whatever it is, i like it, especially Fruit Bats, The Shins, Iron and Wine, the Baptist Generals, Beachwood Sparks and Holopaw. Ugly Cassanova an offshoot from Modest Mouse are more straightforward janglepop while Postal Service mix in 80s lofi keyboards with their indiepop but theyre also a pretty good listen. this link heads to a list of the bands but each individual page has at least one mp3 on it. i going to see Fruit Bats and Holopaw at The Mercury Lounge on Sunday if anyone is interested.

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entheogenesis

"What I did that day should not be illegal. Adults seeking solace or insight ought to be allowed to consume psychedelics such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline. U.S. laws now classify them as Schedule 1 drugs, banned for all purposes because of their health risks. But recent studies have shown that psychedelics—which more than 20 million Americans have ingested—can be harmless and even beneficial when taken under appropriate circumstances."

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view from abridged


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Tuesday, May 06, 2003

pearly gates

"In "Health, Wealth, and Bill Gates," a NOW with Bill Moyers special edition, airing Friday, May 9, 2003 at 9 P.M. on PBS (check local listings), NOW provides a fascinating look into the mind, motivations, and philanthropy of Bill Gates. Recorded in front of a live audience at an event presented by Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, the Bill Moyers' interview provides a rarely seen view of Gates and traces the journey of discovery that led him to dedicate his fortune to sharing advances in health with the global community. The 60-minute broadcast features the interview with Gates and includes produced segments that provide context to major public health issues facing the globe."

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uss columbia

"MIAMI -- Opening a new front in the war on terrorism, Colombian soldiers trained by the US military have killed or captured at least six guerrilla leaders as part of a ''decapitation strategy'' to defeat the country's rebel groups and strike a blow against the drug trade, American military and intelligence officials told the Globe.

A new commando unit began tracking rebel commanders in the jungles of Colombia about three weeks ago and carried out some of the attacks in recent weeks. It is the first unit in the Colombian Army to receive US special-forces training under a new program approved by President Bush expanding US military assistance from fighting drug cartels to battling insurgent groups that the administration considers ''narco-terrorists.''

via what really happened


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in blume

excerpts from former clinton aide sidney blumenthals book are posted at salon. worth a look.

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horsing around

"Gen. Georges Boulanger cut a fine figure; he looked splendid in uniform, and magnificent on horseback. So his handlers made sure that he appeared in uniform, astride a horse, as often as possible.

It worked: Boulanger became immensely popular. If he hadn't lost his nerve on the night of the attempted putsch, French democracy might have ended in 1889.

We do things differently here — or we used to. Has "man on horseback" politics come to America?"


"Some background: the Constitution declares the president commander in chief of the armed forces to make it clear that civilians, not the military, hold ultimate authority. That's why American presidents traditionally make a point of avoiding military affectations. Dwight Eisenhower was a victorious general and John Kennedy a genuine war hero, but while in office neither wore anything that resembled military garb.

Given that history, George Bush's "Top Gun" act aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln — c'mon, guys, it wasn't about honoring the troops, it was about showing the president in a flight suit — was as scary as it was funny.

Mind you, it was funny. At first the White House claimed the dramatic tail-hook landing was necessary because the carrier was too far out to use a helicopter. In fact, the ship was so close to shore that, according to The Associated Press, administration officials "acknowledged positioning the massive ship to provide the best TV angle for Bush's speech, with the sea as his background instead of the San Diego coastline."

A U.S.-based British journalist told me that he and his colleagues had laughed through the whole scene. If Tony Blair had tried such a stunt, he said, the press would have demanded to know how many hospital beds could have been provided for the cost of the jet fuel.

But U.S. television coverage ranged from respectful to gushing. Nobody pointed out that Mr. Bush was breaking an important tradition. And nobody seemed bothered that Mr. Bush, who appears to have skipped more than a year of the National Guard service that kept him out of Vietnam, is now emphasizing his flying experience. (Spare me the hate mail. An exhaustive study by The Boston Globe found no evidence that Mr. Bush fulfilled any of his duties during that missing year. And since Mr. Bush has chosen to play up his National Guard career, this can't be shrugged off as old news.)

Anyway, it was quite a show. Luckily for Mr. Bush, the frustrating search for Osama bin Laden somehow morphed into a good old-fashioned war, the kind where you seize the enemy's capital and get to declare victory after a cheering crowd pulls down the tyrant's statue. (It wasn't much of a crowd, and American soldiers actually brought down the statue, but it looked great on TV.)

Let me be frank. Why is the failure to find any evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear weapons program, or vast quantities of chemical and biological weapons (a few drums don't qualify — though we haven't found even that) a big deal? Mainly because it feeds suspicions that the war wasn't waged to eliminate real threats. This suspicion is further fed by the administration's lackadaisical attitude toward those supposed threats once Baghdad fell. For example, Iraq's main nuclear waste dump wasn't secured until a few days ago, by which time it had been thoroughly looted. So was it all about the photo ops?

Well, Mr. Bush got to pose in his flight suit. And given the absence of awkward questions, his handlers surely feel empowered to make even more brazen use of the national security issue in future.

Next year — in early September — the Republican Party will hold its nominating convention in New York. The party will exploit the time and location to the fullest. How many people will dare question the propriety of the proceedings?

And who will ask why, if the administration is so proud of its response to Sept. 11, it has gone to such lengths to prevent a thorough, independent inquiry into what actually happened? (An independent study commission wasn't created until after the 2002 election, and it has been given little time and a ludicrously tiny budget.)

There was a time when patriotic Americans from both parties would have denounced any president who tried to take political advantage of his role as commander in chief. But that, it seems, was another country."


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taking a flyer

"Last week, though, the president all but wore a "Kick Me!" sticker on the back of his flight suit when he decided to land on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in the co-pilot's seat of an S-3B Viking jet.

Imagine the derisive merriment in the columns and on the chat shows if former President Bill Clinton revived the skirt-chasing issue by touring a sorority house or if Gore delivered a lecture to the engineers at Netscape Communications Corp. Think of the snickering and the sardonic rehash of history.

But for Bush in flyboy attire, a discreet silence. The only voices I encountered raising this issue were David Corn in the Nation; Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin, who asked, "Tell me if you ever heard of anybody with as powerful a resistance to shame as Bush..."

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