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Bad news for trees.
- alex 10-04-2002 5:42 pm [link] [add a comment]

i was lucky enough to be at the museum today when a few people from the library got to go on a tour of the beetle collection, and i tagged along. the museum has about 17 million insect specimens and over a million are beetles. pretty amazing. the scientist who showed us around just finished a 2,000 page paper on one particular beetle. and back in his office we got to see one (with a microscope) which is the only known specimen of its kind.

back in the fifties (or sixties maybe) a very large african beetle was found in a shipment of bananas at one of the ports, and was sent over to the museum to be checked out. turned out to be harmles, so the entomology people kept him as a pet. when he died the times ran an obit -- with a photo.

did you know that fireflies are a type of beetle?
- linda 9-28-2002 4:21 am [link] [3 comments]

anybody needs to watch the first four episodes of the sopranos can download them with kazaa by searching for "Sopranos pre-air." not a broadcast quality picture but not terrible either.
- dave 9-27-2002 8:39 pm [link] [1 ref] [add a comment]

Anybody know more about this:

The FBI insists there was no military plane in the area but at 9.22am a sonic boom - caused by a supersonic jet - was picked up by an earthquake monitor in southern Pennsylvania, 60 miles away from Shanksville.
This could be very big. It's certainly a verifiable claim (unlike almost every other claim.) And if it's true then either the administration is caught in a very big lie, or some extra governmental force has supersonic aircraft operating in our airspace. To put it mildly, the latter seems highly unlikely.

FWIW, I personally have always believed we shot down that plane. And it may well have been justified. I don't really have a problem with that. It's the lying about it afterwards. This points to a larger pattern of deceit that really needs to be uncovered.

Any more links on the sonic boom? Anybody remember mention of this before?
- jim 9-25-2002 7:40 pm [link] [3 comments]

go Al!!!
- big jimmy 9-24-2002 6:59 pm [link] [add a comment]

anyone know about these mutants?
- big jimmy 9-21-2002 12:05 am [link] [1 ref] [add a comment]

I booked the Austria trip on Expedia, and accepted a blind flight, based on the Wheel's sage advice. Here's a take on online travel from the Voice's tech column.
- alex 9-20-2002 12:06 am [link] [1 comment]

You're a real gem.
- alex 9-19-2002 10:36 pm [link] [add a comment]

Flexcar's fleet of rent by the hour vehicles includes Toyota's gas-electric hybrid Prius. I rented one ($6.50 per hour, flexible rates) for a test spin. Cute, comfortable, quiet, clean and peppy off the line.
.
- steve 9-19-2002 5:49 am [link] [1 ref] [1 comment]

They're heeeere......er..almost..
- steve 9-19-2002 5:25 am [link] [6 comments]

Re-zoning?
- steve 9-18-2002 6:31 pm [link] [add a comment]

Some interesting 9/11 fallout, so to speak. I heard from a Parsons classmate I hadn't been in touch with since back in the day. She spent the anniversary reading accounts on the web, and in the course of searching for old acquaintances found our site by looking up Steve DiBenedetto (as a relatively unusual name). First such contact I've had here. I guess she got something out of it, and she'd had the same memory of Larry Rivers and the pope that I recounted. I suggested that this was the sort of connectivity the internet was supposed to foster, and a positive thing to bring out of the remembrance of an awful event.
Meanwhile, in the Park, I met a woman who said she's only recently begun to really get over the whole thing, and it seems bird-watching is helping her. Trying to be helpful, I proceeded to find a rare Connecticut Warbler, which thrilled her no end.
Sometimes I think I talk it better than I walk it, so it was nice to feel like my insular activities might actually be of some use to others.

- alex 9-17-2002 9:33 pm [link] [2 comments]

Reality TV is finally getting interesting. The point is not individuals and their "realness", but polling, which abstracts them. Polling has transformed politics in the last century, and now Argentina is going to choose a presidential candidate through a TV contest. This may start out as a species of joke, but who knows where it could lead?
(NY Post story in comments)

- alex 9-17-2002 6:17 pm [link] [4 comments]

Duh!
- steve 9-17-2002 5:36 pm [link] [add a comment]

Treehomeless
- steve 9-17-2002 5:32 pm [link] [1 comment]

Here, I will attempt to relate to you the realities of homelessness. But there is certainly more to a homeless person than being homeless, and this may be the best thing this blog could accomplish - a greater awareness about the whole-ness of homeless people. Not every post will be about homelessness, but they will all be about a homeless person, me. For some people it will be their first experience with the "me" identity within a homeless person. Welcome to My world, a subsidiary of Our world.

- dave 9-16-2002 1:37 am [link] [add a comment]

strange wind on 9-11 , hope it cleanzed nyc....
- Skinny 9-12-2002 8:49 pm [
link] [1 comment]

I thought it was an ecstatic measurement but it turns out

The Rapture Index has two functions: one is to factor together a number of related end time components into a cohesive indicator, and the other is to standardize those components to eliminate the wide variance that currently exists with prophecy reporting.

- alex 9-12-2002 7:57 pm [link] [1 ref] [add a comment]

I'm an advocate of mourning, but I can't say I've really mourned. Well, maybe a bit, at the beginning. The anniversary brings it back; I did feel something, but I hate to say, a year later, that the overriding experience has been that of alienation. It's worse than the early Reagan years. I define alienation as the inability to achieve ecstasy via accepted cultural modes. Tears are the ecstasy of grief, and I don't think I ever cried over it. But I did share in a deep sorrow for the people who died, and for the wound made in our city. Beyond that I find little focus, and now the ecstasy of grief channels into the ecstasy of war-making, and I am sickened. Circumstance has granted the countering voice but little force, and the ecstasy of peace seems far away. This species often displays together its best and its most terrible faces. But these are just expressions, alternating on the same face. Prayers are not to ease the past, but to work eternity into a shape that may explain what is done to us, and what we do to ourselves. If we are finished now with mourning, let us pray for the living.
Pray for peace.
Then work for it.

- alex 9-11-2002 6:21 pm [link] [3 comments]

Ash Wednesday
- alex 9-11-2002 5:34 pm [link] [add a comment]

this may have been previously reported but a pal told me today that last year right before 9/11 there were raids on small records store and bootlegs were confiscated, all the evidence was lost in the twin towers, so no arrests....
- Skinny 9-11-2002 4:15 am [link] [add a comment]

This one should be interesting. Imagine if the person they are going to have to intimidate into not making the sworn confession turns out to have some stubborn ethics? Or it doesn't even have to be that. Maybe the person is just a democrat.

Let the wriggling commence!
- jim 9-10-2002 6:47 pm [link] [1 ref] [2 comments]

This Saturday September 7th, The Lonely Samoans needs you! Please help us fill the air with your love! Please bring your loved ones and touch each other so I can watch you make out from the stage. Saturday, September 7th. 9pm @the Cutting Room 19 W. 24th Street. $5 cover Tel:212.691.1900 Also I made a music video for "Mr. Corporation" over the weekend. out. check it out http://www.lonelysamoans.com/video/mr_corp_2.mov \
- bill 9-06-2002 5:42 pm [link] [1 ref] [add a comment]

I was wondering about "billy-oh", a term my dad used to use. He would say "it's going to rain like billy-oh". Or maybe it was billy-ho; I was never quite sure, and I don't remember hearing the phrase elsewhere. I don't know where he picked it up, but it turns out to be of British idiom. What surprised me is that "billy-oh" is considered synonymous with the American "all get out". Go figure.
- alex 9-05-2002 7:27 pm [link] [add a comment]

slate navelgazing w/andrew sullivan and kurt andersen -- Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture?
- dave 9-05-2002 1:38 am [link] [add a comment]