This book is not for the faint of heart, or for neophytes. If you are a practicing Southwestern archaeologist with hypertension problems, stop. Read something safe.
The warning that accompanies the The Chaco Meridian: Centers of Political Power in the Ancient Southwest by Steve Lekson, an archaeologist from the University of Colorado, in which Dr. Lekson argues that "for centuries the Anasazi leaders, reckoning by the stars, aligned their principal settlements along this north-south axis — the 108th meridian of longitude," according to today's New York Times.
The New York Times also cites David Phillips, curator of archaeology at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, on the controversial Chaco Meridian theory:
Steve is possibly the best writer in Southwest archaeology. Our academic writing has this inherent gift of taking something interesting and making it dull and boring. And Steve doesn’t have that problem. He thinks outside the box, and the rest of us comb through his ideas.
Having said all that, I personally think that the Chaco meridian is a crock.
The model starts by assuming that everyone cares about two dimensions on any policy issue: getting an outcome as close to what they want as possible, and getting credit for being essential in putting a deal together -- or preventing a deal.
The model estimates the way in which individual decision-makers trade off between credit and policy outcomes. Some are prepared to go down in a blaze of glory seeking the outcome they want, knowing they will lose. Others have their finger in the wind, trying to figure out what position is likely to win and then attach themselves to that position in the hope of getting credit for promoting the final agreement.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, the Julius Silver Professor of Politics at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, explaining the computer model he's created, based on game theory, that can predict the outcomes of international conflicts. His interview with Sara Forrest appears in the 22 June issue of Computer World.
Torture is a felony, and is sometimes treated as a capital crime. The Convention Against Torture, which America ratified in 1994, requires a government to prosecute all acts of torture; failure to do so is considered a breach of international law.
I may have mentioned that I make mostly -- make that only -- fruit tarts. Never pies. Somewhere I got it into my head that pie crusts are impossibly difficult to make. Somehow I never found tart crusts difficult, but they're a little more sturdy than pie crusts, because they have to stand on their own.
I planned to take the old school route for this piecrust, which was my first, and after consulting with C on her renowned Crisco-crust I pulled out the Joy of Cooking to figure how to create a sweet enough filling from the perfectly ripe sour Michigan pie cherries that I picked up at the farmers' market yesterday.
And then I made of the mistake of checking Saveur to see what they had going on.
Their crust, based on one from The Pie and Pastry Bible which I've heard raves about elsewhere, calls for butter and cream cheese. And vinegar.
No Crisco.
This, as you can imagine, is suspect. Plus there's the issue of the tablespoon of whole cream that's called out as an ingredient but not incorporated anywhere else.
But I went for it, mostly because Saveur has never, not ever, let me down (outside of their website redesign which makes it impossible to find and share recipes but who knows: maybe that's their strategy?) (If it is it's a bad one).
After some three hours of crust making and cherry macerating the pie is now in the oven.
The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack. As a result, for about 25 minutes [on June 25th], when some people searched Google News they saw a "We're sorry" page before finding the articles they were looking for.
It’s the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest in amateur radio. It’s possible, but only barely possible.
Nobel Prize winner and retired Princeton physics professor Joseph H. Taylor Jr. commenting in today's New York Times on the ability for amateur radio ham operators to bounce a signal off the moon.
Giant parabolic antenna radio telescopes have been assembled worldwide to facilitate a global moonbounce today in honor the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20.
Saw In the Heat of the Night, the 1967 Academy Award Winner for Best Motion Picture, for the first time tonight. Am embarrassed to admit that it took me this long, but somehow I managed to miss the memo that it may be one of the best movies ever made.
Pitch perfect every step of the way.
Each shot is so luscious in its composition that I couldn't bear to take my eyes off the screen. Each plot point is essential, of course, in the unraveling of the mystery, which the script unravels so brilliantly, but it's the performance of the actors that makes the movie unforgettable. The intensity of their engagement, the depth of their character portrayals. Sweet god in heaven why don't they make movies like this anymore?
If you've never seen it, see it soon. If you've already seen it, see it again.
And if you don't want to know anything about it before you watch it DON'T WATCH THE TRAILER.
Although I really must share with you that it's true what they say: They call him Mr. Tibbs.
Rimbaud (dead) Lautréamont (dead) Breton (gone to America) Marx Brothers (forbidden) English cigarettes (too expensive) American cigarettes (see English cigarettes) Jazz (no phonographs or recordings) Getting out of here (no papers, too expensive) Whiskey (too expensive) Picasso Cocteau
Text from a postcard from the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont to Paul Éluard written on 26 May 1942 from Nazi occupied Paris detailing what could and could no longer be had in the city under the occupation.
The ground floor exhibit features artifacts from artists and writers in France under the occupation -- the program from the first production of Anouilh's Antigone is here, as is a pseudonymous review of Sartre's Les Mouches. There are film posters and still shots of films made under the occupation including Marcel Carné's luminous Children of Paradise.
There are letters: one penned by later Marxist critic and then POW Louis Althusser who, en route to his concentration camp wrote of "the train that shakes my pen" before he enfolded his missive into an envelope addressed to his uncle and dropped it through the train's window onto the railroad tracks. It bore no stamp, only a request that it be delivered to his uncle's address in Paris. And it was.
There was another epistolary exchange between Marguerite Duras and her husband Robert Anthelme: his scribbled on a small spare scrap of paper that he has survived the camps; to which her letter replies "You're alive! You're alive!" and in which she writes of her fear that she might not have survived news of his death. Never mind that she had been sleeping with their mutual friend Dionys Mascolo since before the war; never mind that eventually she would throw the former over for the latter. Never mind. He was alive right then when worse was feared.
Photo: Robert Anthelme, Marguerite Duras and Dionys Mascolo
So downstairs there are writers surviving, collaborating and resisting Vichy France, and upstairs, in that lean hallway that runs alongside the Rose Reading Room there's Stonewall. 1967: The Year of Gay Liberation isn't afforded nearly the same real estate as the Vichy show, but like so many of the shows that hang in that hallway it's tightly curated to deliver a full body blow with minimal artifacts, and it's cast in a strong palette of groovy golds that put the yellowing sepias of the Paris show to shame.
Here too there were more print pieces: posters and zines; pamphlets, police reports, newspapers, and letters produced in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots and the Lavender Menace response to Betty Friedan's lesbians-are-a-threat-to-feminism remarks. Ephemera, again. Small voices grasping in the swallowing din for a bullhorn to be heard by; a message in a bottle set upon the sea.
Here I am. Hear me.
I don't know if the NYPL planned these exhibits as complements. It's the first time I've seen such a strong echo between two simultaneously running exhibits in that space. The reverb was made stronger, perhaps, by the shouts coming now from Iran in the wake of the protests following the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was impossible to not be keenly conscious of both the magnanimity and the fragility of the small human voice set against the force and will of a State that does not want to hear it.
The voices of the Green Revolution, as some have called it, are being amplified across the Web through retweets and vias and blog posts that trumpet the injustice and argue for the cause. These posts have and will most likely continue to play a potent and powerful role in spreading the word.
The social network Twitter acted as such an important conduit of information while events were unfolding in Iran that the U.S. State Department suggested that perhaps they should put off their scheduled maintenance and downtime in light of the fact that a revolution was underway. According to the New York Times:
This was just a call to say: ‘It appears Twitter is playing an important role at a crucial time in Iran. Could you keep it going?’” said P.J. Crowley, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs.
Viewing the Vichy France and Stonewall exhibits at NYPL I was reminded that the government cannot always be trusted with preserving public freedom of expression, but I'm still alarmed that online there is no place that is truly public. We are having a public conversation across private enterprise channels.
The power and potency of the social graphs that folks are creating across social networks like Twitter and Flickr and Facebook and their blogs on Wordpress and Blogger ride on corporate dollars. That social networks afford individuals influence across the web and through their network neighborhoods is undeniable; the fact that corporations are bankrolling a dialogue that once upon a time unfolded in the public square or through businesses like newspapers where public interest was the core mission, is hardly being discussed.
I'm not ready to make an argument for government intervention in the online space, but it's a concern that has been gnawing on me since the SxSW conference in March where I heard over and over again folks speaking about using the Interweb as a communication tool for furthering human rights and self-expression -- but no one mentioned the fact that we're doing this on the back of big business.
Which brings us too to the question of the ephemera generated online during events like the Green Revolution: How will we recount the voices that spoke up when these events have passed and history has been written by the winners? Where will we display the green swathed avatars and the tweets that spread like a lightening strike in a dry tinder forest?
You couldn't identify anything anymore. The persistence of durable objects had been solidly defeated.
The poet Jean Follain describing Sant-Lô, Normandy, which was decimated by the allied bombing that accompanied D-Day.
"It's distracting; it's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere."
Ray Bradbury on the Internet in this morning's New York Times, which reports on his admirable defense of public libraries.
But, as someone who makes her living "in the air somewhere" (and is also a great lover of books) I'm left to wonder once again how the Internet became positioned in binary opposition to the paper artifact; how databases are assumed to be reasonable replacements for the hard tackle artifact of the book stack.
They are not.
Nor are digital books suitable replacements for IRL books. Doctorow got it right in *Content* -- the digital copy is for sampling, it's not any kind of equivalent for the real thing, but it's an essential and vital tool for reaching audiences and facilitating discovery.
Positioning digital as a rival and replacement to print digs a big huge cultural hole in which whole histories can be lost because of technological deprecation over time. We need to drop this alpha dog thinking and content ourselves with a world where each method of delivery plays its ever essential and always important role.
Posting by cameraphone from The Market at Larimer Square, Denver, stoked by espresso and a blueberry bran muffin the size of my head (to persist a theme). Apologies for any funky formatting.
