mercredi 30 avril 2003

Night flights Today was tough in the office, dear. There's the oil hostage crisis in Nigeria, the presidential handover in Burundi which just might gradually help that poor country's people out of deep shit, and more out of Africa than I can even remember tonight... (I'm linking to AFP on Yahoo now we're there too, curious about how long these stories get archived for). Karin, bless her, seems to have improved the state of my insides with Poly-Karaya, which tastes absolutely foul. It may be on a hitlist of probably inefficacious drugs for the Sécu, but my favourite chemist also said it's good stuff. zzz And yeah, those elections! Union ones. A royal mess at AFP, now that the polling was supposed to be over agency-wide and the ballots counted by "category", until it was found that for the first time, the number of votes cast in the "collège journalistes was a few dozen short of a quorum. All hope of getting a consensus among the unions over what to do next were rapidly dashed, which meant going to Madame l'Inspecteur du Travail, lawyers and all that. DS will explain the next steps at his growing batch of special pages accessible via ASAP, just as soon as the situation is clear: that's all I can say here tonight to help keep people in far-flung bureaux informed.) zzz So tomorrow it's May Day, street marches for all those divided unions, but otherwise dead city time, one of the very few in the year when absolutely everything but essential services (and news agencies) close down. Untold millions of bunches of lily of the valley get bought and given. Underground it's not dead at all, since May 1 is the annual field day for the ticket inspectors in the Métro, who turn out in hordes to slap fines on everybody they can catch without a valid one. We'll see about the accordion players. In the past couple of years, the rise in immigration from eastern Europe has brought dozens of them to Paris; this morning, when I got on the train at Plaisance, there were five of them on the platform and at Invalides I recently counted 11! Fortunately, none of them boarded the train because I think that the next time I hear 'Those were the days, my friend', which they all play, I shall probably scream or simply kill... On a different note, for the bandit in my heart, those transport demons remind me to remind you about 'Au-delà de cette limite votre ticket n'est plus valable' by Romain Gary, the feller who won the Prix Goncourt twice, under different names in one of the finest stunts ever pulled on the community of critics. I began at the end, with 'Les Cerfs-volants', the first novel in French I really enjoyed, even if in those days it was with the book in one hand and a dictionary in the other. Oh, and there was never anything wrong with that ticket of yours... Spin a coin on a dead loss and it becomes an open door. Sometimes you just have to go underground to come out in the right place. Orpheus looked back. Silly man. 11:58:08 PM  link   your views? []

mardi 29 avril 2003

Lowdown on the music store (for some) So it's out, and Steve's announcement on Apple's online music service was pretty much what the rumour sites anticipated. With it comes iTunes 4: "...new in iTunes 4 is support for burning data CDs or DVDs. It's not entirely clear how a data CD differs from an MP3 CD, but iTunes 4 now offers both options in the Burning pane in its Preferences dialog. This capability is particularly useful for people who have Macs with SuperDrives, since they can easily burn backup DVDs of their entire music collection. Not surprisingly, given the file format used for the iTunes Music Store, iTunes 4 can now import music from your CDs in AAC format along with MP3, AIFF, and WAV. To import music using AAC, you must have QuickTime 6.2, which is available as a manual download from Apple's QuickTime Web page; it isn't yet available in Software Update." (This and plenty more from TidBITS.) At MacMinute, they explain how it's all supposed to work. The Register details the "new, slimmer" 30 GB iPod. I've seen more and more iPods around in the Métro, but 30 gigabytes? Chuck Toporek at O'Reilly took a few notes during the announcement. And that's one of the places where some of the less than awed have begun to post their comments. The technology has been unleashed. Now what about the choice and the quality? Oh, and as Petra points out at TechSurvivors, what about people outside the US? That little hole in the "service" is right at the bottom of Apple announcement page. Update: Reax to all this hoo-hah are pouring in. At Blogcritics, Eric Olsen warns: "Diabetics beware: Devin Leonard's feature (at Fortune) on the new Apple iTunes Music Store is so larded with sugar and honey it might induce seizures..." while adding elsewhere on the same site: "let us not forget a service that people actually seem to use and like: EMusic, whose only problem seems to be that its catalogue is largely confined to the indie label world". On that downloads outside the US business, the Guardian Online doesn't reckon Brits, for instance, "shouldn't hold (their) breath ... it appears possible that Windows users in the US will get the iTunes store before Mac users in the rest of the world, which would hold a certain irony." Me, I'll be sticking to CDs for a good while yet, though I found Apple's note on mp3 vs AAC codecs interesting (never having heard of the latter till this morning...). 11:20:24 AM  link   your views? []

lundi 28 avril 2003

Beating a bad bout of the blues When I was a kid, I found this famous picture by Edvard Munch immensely disturbing. Nobody could satisfactorily tell me what it was "about" and World War II was sufficiently close a memory in the minds of adults I knew for some to equate it with the Holocaust almost in the same breath, when they talked about that at all. For Susanne Meyer, a Hamburg-born student of art and natural philosophy who runs her own website, "no other picture (...) has such an authentic way of expressing so directly the phenomenon of FEAR as an existential human condition" (Cyberinstitut.de). At mystudios.com, "dedicated to the advancement of arts on the web," they reckon it "perfectly sums up all the horrors that mankind has visited upon himself all throughout our checkered history" (review). The Norwegian National Gallery notes that the "work has gained enormously in popularity, especially since World War II. Perhaps the existential fear here rendered by the artist has become more widespread in recent decades?" They, like Meyer, quote Munch's diary entry for January 22, 1982: "I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun was setting. I felt a breath of melancholy - Suddenly the sky turned blood-red. I stopped, and leaned against the railing, deathly tired - looking out across the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and town. My friends walked on - I stood there, trembling with fear. And I sensed a great, infinite scream pass through nature." (Article at a site by Museumnet Norway.) One of the bravest people I've read wrote in the early '90s -- I shall introduce her later -- that "Munch, hospitalised on several occasions for his psychiatric illness, remarked: 'A German once said to me: "But you could rid yourself of many of your troubles." To which I replied: "They are part of me and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and it would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings".' This is a common concern." A common concern, indeed. And one which -- fortunately to a far lesser degree -- I long shared, at times destructively. Until one of the wiser mind-doctors I've consulted on occasion, told me that I was unlucky, or lucky, enough to be "cyclothymic". I had almost no idea what cyclothymia was. For me, there simply was a jumble of "things that needed sorting out": the "highs" and the "lows"; a quite unreasonable sensitivity to the weather and even phases of the moon and the tides; periods of great creativity and others where even on the most glorious of days, I felt shrouded in my own dark night of the soul, a place where F. Scott Fitzgerald said "it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day" (thanks to the Sprezzatura weblog for reminding where that one came from.) These were among "symptoms", I swiftly learned, of cyclothymia, which gets a more clinical definition at Mental-Health-Matters. At an interesting 'Depression and Bipolar Web' created by a writer and journalist named John McManamy, who has battled "bipolar disorder" himself, others have stepped forward to contribute their own experiences (scroll down for the comments). Somebody else to address the disease is Dr Robert Hsiung, associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Chicago, who maintains 'Psycho-Babble' (and calls himself Dr. Bob). Times were that I was as confused as "andrewb", who once left queries there about mood stabilisers and got a host of responses. For me, no treatment could really begin until I gave up the booze, which I did six years ago (with more help from my employer than ever I'd have imagined). Then came the psychiatric sessions and the drugs, in doses which have come down quite considerably since, coupled with a diagnosis of seasonal affective disorder and starting to tackle that too! Well, I still have my bad days, like everybody else, though they're not the horror they used to be. One of my first girlfriends used to spend hers in bed, simple as that, and re-emerge when the black bout was over. I still know enough people who do something similar to be writing this post partly for them. As for the "nature or nurture debate" currently being revisited (that recent article by geneticist Dr Kevin Davies comes from NOVA Online), when I think I've got problems, I wish there was more I could do for a close relative whose "uppers" and "downers" come in four-monthly cycles which have proved singularly hard to deal with. Yesterday was a bad day, triggered by a range of things from a minor tummy bug I'd been nursing for a week to an overdose of fatigue and a sudden weather shift to bleak and grey. The day itself was a "write-off", left me uncommunicative, lethargic, depressed and unable to raise much interest in anything apart from a half-hearted bid to learn a bit more about HTML. But it passed. It's gone. And most important, I knew life was going to brighten up. For one of the most debilitating features of "manic depression" and even the milder variants of such disorders is the fear when you're down that you are going to stay down, the loss of self-confidence and sense of powerless, the feeling that it's never going to end. And when it does finally finish, the affective changes -- or mood swing -- can be so intense that in the elation of being "up", you forget what it was to be "down", as if it had been part of somebody else's life. Far worse is a reluctance to talk about it and an inability to seek help, which can easily be disastrously misunderstood by the people closest to you. I've seen too many instances of this among families and in friendships to feel that it matters to write about it here. Looking back on my years polarised in an uneasy mental "marriage of heaven and hell", I remember at least two things that long prevented me from doing anything about it. One was the fear of being considered an "invalid" or "nutcase" by workmates and by friends, written off as weak or "sick in the head". In fact, it wasn't like that at all. Once I faced up to my condition, one side-effect was pretty soon finding out who my friends really were. The other was the fear that tackling cyclothymia, even once I knew it for what it was, would cost me the creativity along with the "highs". For more than two years, it did. I managed at work okay, but otherwise lost both the desire and ability to write, didn't even want to listen to music or read poetry. I felt dulled, the loser in a "conflict between reason and the imagination" (here admirably dealt with in a study of William Blake and Carl Jung). Of all the people who pulled me through, top of the list is that courageous woman: somebody I've never met. Her name is Kay Redfield Jamison, the American clinical psychiatrist who has won a "genius award" for some pioneering work on mood disorders and helping people with them. Kay Jamison knows a great deal about Blake, Byron and any number of artists who have been 'Touched With Fire'. This book on 'Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament' is a masterpiece, not only recognised as such by her peers, but immensely readable. It's one of the only books I can say changed my life; chancing on it was like having an intimate conversation with somebody who really understood where I was at. Afterwards, I read Jamison's memoir, 'An Unquiet Mind', an equally astonishing achievement in which she recounts her own personal experience of manic depression. It's a very moving tale of the many battles she fought to save herself and take the treatment she feared, while bringing a new understanding of mental illness to her own profession. Both books are tremendously helpful for anybody facing any form of bipolar disorder, whether they're living with it or know people who do. This entry began with Munch and ends back in Norway. I've stumbled across a site strangely known as the Windsor Castle Online Archives. Where on earth Windsor Castle comes into it, I have yet to discern. And in this surprising repository of "wisdom, wit and humour," I might have a hard time finding out. There are more than 680 pages of it! 11:53:41 PM  link   your views? []

samedi 26 avril 2003

Polished 'freeware gems' for OS X Nice idea in a Giles Turnbull article at the MacDevCenter: "Owning a computer isn't cheap. There's so much to pay for, on top of the box that does all the work: printer consumables, connectivity, hardware upgrades, maintenance. "Oh, and software. (...) It occurred to us that it would be nice to tell you about some of the lesser-known freeware gems available for Mac OS X. We're talking about neat little apps that you might not have heard of, but that can do the job of something much better-known (and much more expensive) without you having to pay a penny for them." And so they do, right here. I'd only heard of three of them and use only one, but that mi text editor, for instance, looks very interesting... 6:36:52 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 25 avril 2003

Garlic and cod liver oil Yup, cod liver oil and garlic, in capsules. My mother thought it the weirdest Christmas present, but kindly obliged and sent me three of these. Boots wouldn't deliver to France, where such things can cost three times as much! (Subsequently, I've found other places where you can order similar products.) Last summer, I was given good advice and found that this blend works wonders for RSI: repetitive strain (or stress) injury. I don't know why the mixture helps, but this post is partly for N., a journalist who's got RSI so badly she says she'll "try anything!" In the early '90s, many people at AFP brushed off a growing number of RSI cases in the English-language services as the "English disease", just wingeing by a bunch of malcontents. Many British employers also dismissed it, partly because of a notorious court ruling, long since overturned, that it didn't exist outside the complainer's head. The French social security system also takes RSI seriously; when I finally went down with it myself and had to take weeks off work, they put me through some tests, one of which painfully involved sending electric currents up the arms to check out my nervous system's responses. And they concluded by declaring me "four percent handicapped for life". Somebody highly placed in the Sécu leaked me an internal document disclosing that RSI was the number one cause of industrial injury in the greater Paris region ... a paper which I ensured got published and reported in the appropriate journals. It was in the Sécu's own interest: treating RSI, if it gets to the stage of carpal tunnel syndrome, is quite a drain on state resources and they wanted employers to take on their share of the responsibility. When I developed bad RSI for a second time, the Sécu and AFP accepted medical counsel and allowed me to do an odd thing: go on a professional typing course, with the blessing of the state. This corrected some of my worst keyboard habits. I've been getting many RSI-related queries of late, from people with the kinds of symptoms noted on this list. There's no real cure as such and treatments vary, but resting up is essential. One very good site to start looking if you've got "the twinges" is the Typing Injury FAQ page. 11:17:10 PM  link   your views? [] More on Apple's latest 'open secret' "Steve Jobs, chairman and chief executive of Apple Computer Inc. (...), declined to comment on its forthcoming online music service and its reported talks to buy Vivendi's Universal Music label... "'There have been a lot of rumors in the last few weeks,' Jobs said in response to a shareholder question. 'Many of them are not true and some of them are true.'" Yahoo ran a Reuters story. That was after a denial of a Universal buyout a week back. But then, who needs a buyout? Speculation is reaching its peak at MacRumors and MacSlash, with plenty of comment. Answers on a postcard before April 28. 11:23:16 AM  link   your views? []

jeudi 24 avril 2003

Stray reflections on Parisian cats In the jungle of the internet, there are some extraordinarily intimate weblogs, places one stumbles across with fascination -- or not! -- via acquaintances who frequent places like that Live Journal community I touched on a couple of weeks back. Places where one wonders where people draw their own boundaries between "reality", fiction and fantasy... What a week it has been: truly Paris in the spring time, some days as bleak and miserable as the leaden grey skies of an adolescence so many of us seem never entirely to escape, others riding the wings of a storm, catching the changes in the wind and maybe, even, learning a few more lessons of the heart... Marianne, being a "normal adolescent" herself, tends to weather adventures with greater aplomb than most of her elders, but when her time comes -- and the past week and more in her company have furnished ample proof that such a time is far, far closer than many parents care to imagine of their offspring -- I shall only hope that she might have managed the well-nigh impossible and learned something from the experience of others; or, at least, remember to come "home" for help when it's needed! But she, too, is bound to feel the heartache waiting on the phone that doesn't ring -- even if nowadays it's a mobile -- and the surge of joy when the feet heard on the stairs are at last the ones you've been longing to hear. Indeed, it has already begun. Now there's nothing like a visitor or two to rouse the mind anew to some of the wonders of the place you live in and take for granted. This is especially true when that place is Paris in April: a favoured month, like high summer when the traffic can mercifully thin for a few weeks almost to nothing. Some find August stifling, but I'm not among them. My legs still ached tonight; they lie to me that they've trekked every "village" between Montparnasse and Montmartre several times, but that's one of the things Paris is for.. Along with decades of warnings from women, including the one I've heard echoed by many an undone friend in one shape or another: "I'm dangerous - don't get involved!" These are usually ignored. That's also one of things Paris is for... When I was young(er) and already fascinated by wolves, one of the sillier things I did was to buy an air ticket for London which I really couldn't afford, in the hope that I'd catch up with her plane in time to persuade her that flying on to California -- in pursuit of somebody else -- was not a wise thing to do. Oh, I caught her all right; and I even proved to be right in the end about the decision she made. But that doesn't stop a friend, then doing duty as a tour guide, preferring to remind me how he of all people came upon me prowling around Heathrow airport until I was almost too drunk to stand up, much to the astonishment of the Japanese tourists he was accompanying. And the following day saw me on the night train straight back to hell. Very much later, I learned that hell, like heaven, is in the heart. And rather than fares I still really don't regret for an instant, too much of today's spare cash goes on the software I'll snatch up, rather like some people might buy superb clothes or first-edition books. Myself, I'll settle for the pair of pyjamas Marianne gave me, as one of the few items where I don't mind the designer label showing! I love the message... For all that I know of kinship with wolves, I'm very fond of cats, the more independent-minded the better. Unless, of course, they're my pet Jaguar. But Paris as "hell"? I didn't feel it that way for long. Not with marvels like the Place des Vosges at its heart. Now there's a place for the heart, as frequented by lovers in spring as the bridges spanning the Seine. It's a place where so many decisions must have been made, for worse or for better, which is scarcely surprising since you can walk right out of one world there into another. A place that Parisians simply haven't allowed to change, not for centuries, though it must and it will, like everything else. I've known three Parisian cats, recently renewed friendship with a fourth, and even gave a home to two of them, though Tom and Cherry have both passed on. Marianne's Kytie, who stays here sometimes, went "home" a couple of days ago, but my body remained trapped in the reflex tonight, carefully opening the door just in case she was in one of those moods to want to be chased halfway down the stairs. Not that it really matters: she's quick enough to come back. Good company when you're learning to play properly. Play is what it comes down to in the end, which is one reason why even for somebody passionate about things African -- the cultures, musics and some of the lifestyles and people -- the 'Book of Changes' would still have to be my desert island read. If I had to choose between the five copies I've got of this particular masterpiece, then Richard Wilhelm's complete version would be it, in a French translation that's the best I've found when it comes to sheer poetry. It just feels right. Ah, decisions, decisions... There are easier places to start, though, for cats who want an introduction in English. So here are a few I like: one account of basics; a thought or two on medicine; an encyclopaedic resource page; and a digression into Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching... Why, even the Franco-Chinese family doctor I'm lucky enough to have is named Yang. And if that isn't serendipity for you, I don't know what is. There's plenty more on synchronicity and one of Wilhelm's friends beginning at the C.G. Jung page. I really miss the cat already. But you can't have everything... 1:23:06 AM  link   your views? []

lundi 21 avril 2003

Cigars with Kofi? Humbug! After Nigeria's parliamentary election on March 12, a "seasoned" British diplomat in the country rated the poll on a scale for a friend in Lagos. He said that if 10 was perfectly transparent and fair and 1 was chaos, he'd give the voting 6/10 across much of the nation, but just 2/10 in the tormented southeastern oil states. Since I'm not back in 'the factory' quite yet, I've not heard any such "verdict" on Saturday's presidential election. One can simply hope that this isn't the beginning of more trouble in a country where democracy remains a very big experiment. I wonder what that diplomat would make of developments in Baghdad, where for 'Today' on the BBC, James Naughtie an hour or two ago interviewed Ahmed Chalabi, the controversial, returned exile groomed by the hawks in Washington. How assidiously Chalabi denied having any political ambitions at all! The man has several times said he wants to see US troops stay on for a couple of years, though he changed his tune in an interview last week for Time. In blatant disagreement with many others in and outside the country, he foresaw only a very minimal role for the United Nations, which has "no credibility in Iraq". This he justified with an attack on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, claiming that: "he smoked a cigar with Saddam Hussein -- he smoked six cigars with Saddam Hussein..." Apart from the colourful cultural imagery of a phrase to be assimilated with the much-televised habit of hitting things with shoes, the alleged puffing that has earned Annan the "derision" of the Iraqis, according to Chalabi, further divested the smooth-talking, would-be Iraqi leader of any credibility of his own. At 'The American Prospect', Robert Dreyfuss -- with whom I'd beg to differ about T.E. Lawrence, to the extent that the latter was outmanoeuvred by politicians and was scarcely a 'British imperial spy" -- has an interesting angle on "Chalabi's long and winding road from (and to?) Baghdad". The Beeb has another profile, while at National Review, Max Singer last week thought poor Dr Chalabi is much slandered. Take your pick. I have, but will the Iraqis get a chance? This morning's fuss, as Jay Garner arrived in Iraq -- in another apparent Rumsfeld victory over Colin Powell and with a whole website devoted to "stopping" the general -- has put me in mind less of "British imperialism" than, once again, the good old-fashioned Roman way of running growing empires. With a difference: "...it will take someone with serious business know-how to 'introduce a capitalist system where there's been central-control socialism since the 1960s,' says Ariel Cohen, a foreign-policy expert at the Heritage Foundation. Garner has that too," reckons Fortune magazine, rubbing revoltingly grubby paws with glee. zzz On the US home front, there's clamouring for ... democracy: "Bush wants all people to be liberated and live in freedom. I suppose that includes the US. So take him at his word and demand freedom now. Democratic and fair elections now!" proposes one entertaining entry at Heli's Heaven and Hell Radio blog. Thank heaven and Heli that it's not all devoted to Dubya. 11:31:10 AM  link   your views? []

dimanche 20 avril 2003

A touch of passion In a less than golden youth as red-ribboned choirboy and dangerous church organist, I developed an unquenchable thirst for ... requiems and passions. My religious or spiritual -- whatever... -- outlook on life has since seen a radical overhaul, but I'll never forget the Easter that I discovered Bach's St Matthew Passion conducted by Otto Klemperer in a magnificently spacious 1962 recording by Walter Legge. I've heard many another performance, and I know a few of today's purists who've tried to sell me on Philippe Herreweghe's account. It's wonderful, but for me Klemperer's remains the most magistral of all recordings. Losing my simple Christian beliefs never stopped me buying such music, including far more recent brushes with the faith, such as Arvo Pärt's Passio and Gyorgy Ligeti's Requiem. Like many people, I discovered Ligeti via Kubrick's '2001'. That could well have been the spark that fired me up into several happy years as a reviewer of "contemporary" musics, among things I did for the Beeb. I also still have a very soft spot for David Fanshawe's 'African Sanctus'. The woman who played a decisive part in my coming to Paris at all introduced me to Rossini's 'Stabat Mater', where I'd be hard pressed to choose between Carlo Maria Giulini and Semyon Bychkov and the fabulous Cecilia Bartoli. Ghyslaine also forever opened my ears to Gustav Mahler as performed by Bruno Walter and some recordings of the late Beethoven quartets which were ... hmm, even more sublime than sex. A flurry of CD-buying this week has steered clear of that range, though, and included the soundtracks from two of my top 10 movies: Luc Besson's 'The Fifth Element', which merits a 'worship page' from one fellow fan and all kinds of "collectables" at SciFi Flicks; and 'The Barber of Siberia' by Nikita Mikhalkov, "clearly a composer's dream." But there had to be a touch of passion too: I was delighted to be re-united with Jethro Tull's 'A Passion Play', a find at Virgin on the Champs-Elysées (for once cheaper than it's selling at Amazon). Also snatched off the shelf was 'Ana José Nacho' by Mecano. At last! Marianne scarcely remembered that 'Hijo De La Luna' was one of her "cradle songs", but she did... 2:57:24 PM  link   your views? []

samedi 19 avril 2003

Behind enemy lines? This week, both 'Libération' and the 'Washington Post' published stories on how anti-French sentiment was beginning to bite (Post article requires free registration). Ah, how the world has moved on since Google ran such a celebration of France, liberté, fraternité and ... démocratie. Back in February, 'Le Nouvel Observateur' took a look at "these French people who've chosen America" (story in French). There weren't many of them, but 'Leur position, face à ceux qui disent: «Non à la guerre, malgré Saddam», peut se résumer ainsi: «Oui à la guerre, malgré Bush».' ("Their position, up against those who say: "No to war, despite Saddam, can be summed up like this: 'Yes to war, despite Bush'." ) 'Libé' tells us that last week, according to separate polls, 46 percent of Americans were ready to boycott French products, while 59% of the French were hostile to the US-British military intervention in Iraq. Now that American tourists have begun to arrive in larger numbers around this Easter weekend, sentiments are running high. The nearest McDonalds has shut down for renovation. It was among those stoned last month. They tried to keep it open with boards instead of windows for a week or two, but trade fell off. At the end of that demo, by the way, the riot police turned their water-cannons on the people in the cinema queues as well as the inevitable band of casseurs that trail along on such occasions, so a good time was had by all. Perhaps I prematurely wrote in a long piece on March 7 that the spat between peoples, as opposed to the politicians, were likely to remain little more than a "difference between friends". Derisory, uncivilised and always funny, 'L'Echo des Savanes' has in its May edition rounded up some of the best and the worst of 'How the Americans judge us today'. I've run into plenty of visiting Americans and Brits during the week's going about town, but observed no real hostility on the part of the French, apart from overhearing the occasional rude remark behind backs and a little more gruffness than usual from one or two shopkeepers and waiters. But I've also been wondering what Americans who live here, outside my usual circle of friends, have been saying about such behaviour. They have several sites of their own, and when 'Americans in France' last reported on "Anti-Americanism", they mentioned a poll saying that 70% of the French opposed the Iraq war. While this percentage has dropped since, you can now see graffiti and defaced advertisements around town where the "Fuck Bush!" message has metamorphosed into a "US Go Home!" one, and I don't think it's Paris they're talking about... One longtime US writer in Paris, Harriet Welty Rochefort, has with her webmaster husband Philippe set up a remarkable and most informative personal Franco-American Website. Their aim is to "help American visitors better understand France and the French and, hopefully, benefit from some tips on Life in France." But much of what they've written works the other way round too: a well-researched page on "Intercultural Differences !" also asks the question "what do Americans hate most in France?" As to the Brits, maybe I'll get to that another day. It is, after all, a long story. I don't altogether share the cheery outlook expressed by the Welty Rocheforts, since I suspect the fallout from the Iraq war is going to last even longer and run deeper than many of us feared, but theirs is a fine piece of "work in progress". At 'Merde in France', the first totally bilingual blog I've run across, a strikingly provocative author I have yet to identify describes just being here as "more than 20 years behind enemy lines"! 3:17:55 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 18 avril 2003

Another spin on the musical Apple Now 'Business Week' has taken up the "What's Steve got in store for music?" ongoing speculation: "Apple's Music Store is expected to have simpler rules. Each song will cost 99 cents -- no strings attached and no subscription required. What's more, people who have seen the service say it exudes Apple's trademark elegance and simplicity." (Tip-off from MacinTouch, which launched an RSS feed today.) 11:59:59 PM  link   your views? [] Esprit de 'Core' People have already written a lot about 'The Core' (QuickTime; Flash 6 -- and a-win-an-iPod pop-up!). It was released in the States before it came out here this week (called 'Fusion' at cinemas showing it in French). It's amusing to see the usual different views at the IMDb. "Everyone who was involved in this project should be banned out of Hollywood for the rest of his life. Director Jon Amiel should take a year off and begin to think about other career options,All the actors should dissapeare and never return to movies for at least five years.The people who wrote this film should replace their brains with those of cats. And finnaly,the people who are responsable for the awful,terrible and embrassing Sfx should go to Canada," thinks somebody in Israel, while in New York someone else shouts at us: "the acting was bearable, dialogue was campy and the movie's producers didn't hold back at all in making fun of themselves. they knew it was an absurd idea that armageddon come from the stalling of the earth's core, but they definitely researched this film to the hilt. there's actually a bit of character development in the movie too, something you don't see often in action/scifi movies. one thing i have to warn you about though....SEE THIS MOVIE IN THE MOVIE THEATERS ON THE HUGEST HUGEST HUGEST SCREEN YOU CAN FIND." Yes, well, we nearly always do that anyway, though in Paris the "hugest hugest" was unfortunately showing the dubbed version. The plot was wonderfully predictable, the acting was largely camp, though Tchéky Karyo as the French scientist stood out, while Marianne's favourite was DJ Qualls as 'Rat' the hacker. Hilary Swank in dress uniform cuts a fine salute and, if anybody ever films even part of that 'Night's Dawn' opus, Aaron Eckhart would probably have to get the part of Joshua 'Lagrange' Calvert, flying the 'Lady Macbeth'! Indeed, if Hamilton had written 'The Core', he might have given Eckhart and an over-earnest Swank a decent chance at free-fall sex, or something like it (many an SF writer's delight), once it seems they're decidedly doomed and have just 12 minutes left. Had I most improbably been in Eckhart's shoes, I'd have found that a far, far better thing to do than thinking patriotic and even spiritual thoughts... The special effects are almost all you could ask of a catastrophe cornucopia: a space shuttle crash-landing and the bird madness in Trafalgar Square worked rather better than a collapsing Coliseum and some of the oddities at the centre of the earth. I never quite understood why our bold crew had to avoid the "black bits" on their way to the middle with a payload of nukes... Alan Boyle took a look at the science of it all, as do Carolyn Giardina, and Jennifer Hillner at 'Wired'. It turns out we know precious little about the earth's core, but Discover finds "The Core a guilt-free pleasure? even for geophysicists and other science cognoscenti." Dash it all: I'll give a healthy 6.5/10 - that's minus half a point because our all-American heroes were silly enough to keep their suits on. ;-) (pix: Rob McEwan/Paramount) 1:18:04 PM  link   your views? []

jeudi 17 avril 2003

Guns, wine and Rozes (TFM/Emilie de la Hosseraye) Two armed convicts make a break from a police van and find shelter with a family in a quiet, small and sunny French provincial town. They wind up staying for a 15th wedding anniversary dinner. During the evening, the Rozes turn out to be far more dangerous and inclined to unleash their fancies than the unexpected guests. 'Bienvenue chez les Rozes' is one of those delicious, unpretentious French black comedies panned by most highbrow critics but extremely popular with le grand public. It got an age-unrestricted rating. Marianne took me to see it, not the other way round, but while she laughed a lot, she finally enjoyed it less than I did. The murder and mayhem doesn't come quite where you expect it, there's blood all over the shop (no shock images, though, hence the rating); but Carole Bouquet as mum shows a great deal of leg and Clémence Poésy, the oh-so-sweet daughter, gets to display her own curves and a little mild perversion in a brief bedroom exhibition guaranteed to make a younger teenager squirm in her seat. Ah, and the uses given to one of those new iMacs and webcams liberally planted chez les Rozes by a decidedly delinquent son ... well, this is scarcely la petite bourgeoisie exposed by the likes of a Claude Chabrol, but there's plenty of fun. A host of nice little cameo roles (such as the one given Yoland Moreau, as the ill-fated cleaning lady pictured with Bouquet) add to the entertainment. 11:16:42 AM  link   your views? []

mercredi 16 avril 2003

Safari season No plans to post much now and for a brief while. The weather's wonderful and tipped to stay so for at least another day. Time also to get my hand back in at TS, where it's getting hard to keep track of what remains, for now, the main Mac help, etc board and the big experiment in hand with new bulletin board software. And until next week, there are two very special ladies in town: only one of them being my daughter. The younger one has killed my plan to banish Microsoft completely from my Mac with the "official" arrival of tabbed browsing and further extras for Safari to join Camino. Internet Explorer is disappearing, but before I knew it, Miss Chat had installed MSN Messenger 3.5 for X. Can't live without it, she contends. After a couple of days with Safari v.73, I agree with Bill Palmer: if this is a beta, he's a giraffe. It'll certainly be my default with weblog-related reads and NetNewsWire. I spotted Bill's item at O'Reilly's MacDevCenter, which has finally slipped its way in as my home page on Safari and will join the links here. That list of "some places I go" gets longer whether or not I'm writing. For instance, they can't be to everyone's taste, but I find blogjam and scrappleface far too funny to keep out of an almost daily diet. As for really bad taste, Sony made a try in the games department. 3:08:54 PM  link   your views? []

mardi 15 avril 2003

SARS: the great - conspiracy - scam! "This article argues that this unprecedented viral attack is, alternatively, an ingenious social experiment featuring institutionalized bioterrorism for widespread psycho-social control." There are people who take Leonard G. Horowitz, D.M.D., M.A., M.P.H. author of 'SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome: A Great Global SCAM' and "thirteen books including the national bestseller, 'Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola - Nature, Accident or Intentional?'; and, 'Death in the Air: Globalism, Terrorism and Toxic Warfare'" very seriously. "I'm building a bomb shelter and storing food staples," headlines one customer reviewer of 'Emerging Viruses' at Amazon. "Who better to link the Illuminati, the Rothchilds, the Royal Family, George Bush's grandfather, the Rockefellers, Adolf Hitler, Merck, Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, I.G. Farben, the CIA, the NIH, vaccine related neurotoxicity, hypersensitivity, the devil doers of the Red Cross, 911 related events, a secret city under the Denver International Airport, and a Nazi artist who lives near him in Idaho." Quackerywatch brings a very different perspective on the messianic dentist. (Oh, and where did I get introduced to this apparently well-known feller? At Cruel Site of the Day. Some of them are!) 12:59:27 PM  link   your views? []

lundi 14 avril 2003

Tribute to a musical ambassador "Our friend, brother and spiritual leader left this plain for another, Sunday, April 6, 2003, 7:30 am, at the age of 75." Babatunde Olatunji first won world renown in 1959 with 'Drums of Passion'. He inspired and sometimes recorded with musicians ranging from John Coltrane to the Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart. He taught in California, where 'Lark in the Morning' is among places offering an astonishing collection of musical instruments from all over the world (and I've meant to post this since first spotting the news at WorldBeatPlanet.) 1:22:42 PM  link   your views? [] Flash electric bodies 3D graphic artist, photographer and designer Christophe Luxereau (needs Flash plug-in), currently showing his 'Avatars' at the main Galeries Lafayette store in Paris (until May 31), gets a feature in this month's 'UniversMacworld'. His 'electrum corpus' is chic and provoc' (also Flash). Seeking more, I've lucked on an intriguing design portal at Le Wub (site in French, many linked galleries in English). 12:21:42 AM  link   your views? []

dimanche 13 avril 2003

More X (10.2.5) and la Pomme's next step? Got to Mac OS 10.2.5, via the Software Update panel this morning. For now, after being stung by 10.2.4 (bad modem problems with cable), I'm being cautious again and have downloaded it to my desktop. Having perused the first reports at MacInTouch and MacFixit, it could be another risky one. For good measure, some are already recommending going for the 'combo' installer instead, reporting that it fixes some "issues" which may otherwise cause problems. This seems to be becoming a regular practice (and, ouch, 81.9 MB worth of it). At TechSurvivors, the bolder seem OK so far. But some of them have the luck of the very devil, n'est-ce pas, pendragon? zzz Apple's "interest" in Universal, also coveted by Microsoft, can only lend weight to some of the Panther rumours. "'While it can be argued that Apple could make some incremental revenue from the online sale of music, the company would not need to own a music company in order to do so,' Merrill Lynch analyst Michael Hillmeyer wrote in a note to clients (reported on MacCentral). 'In fact, there do not appear to be any synergies between a music company and a PC company, even one as innovative as Apple.'" Hmm... don't always believe what you read! "(Steve) Jobs already has secured deals with four of the world's five largest music corporations..." (Access to the LA Times story requires free registration.) 1:23:14 PM  link   your views? []

samedi 12 avril 2003

The media and the spoils of war Time for more questions, not exclusively for hacks. (At TS, I'd be roundly teased for a typical taliesineque thought-stream! I've not abandoned you people, but I do want to try my hand at a link-essay! If you're sitting comfortably...) Baghdad is in chaos and the story's all over the media. Some of it. There's no more striking series of reports than in The Independent today (pity I can't "borrow" the AFP photo on its front page). When I left for work this morning, the BBC was up in arms, rightly defending itself against Downing Street's blast against their man Andrew Gilligan for the way he saw the looting. Donald Rumsfeld has also attacked the media as Washington turns its sights on Syria. The same Rumsfeld whom I mentioned on March 31, for reportedly over-ruling his generals when they warned him ground forces would be overstretched. This was not merely a question of waging a war, it was also the little matter of planning for the aftermath. A perhaps overly cynical Senegalese newspaper (Le Matin' -- no website) editorialised today that chaos and looting may suit the US administration right now, the better to impose its own brand of "democracy" on Iraq later on. The same Rumsfeld in January gave an interview to George Stephanopoulos of ABC -- the transcript is on the US Defense Department site -- of which a sizeable chunk is worth recalling: "Stephanopoulos: Meanwhile, you have to prepare for war. I want to show up on the screen some guidelines you wrote for yourself that you think you have to think about before you commit forces to combat. They were printed in 'The New York Times.' It says: 'If there is a risk of casualties, that fact should be acknowledged at the outset, rather than allowing the public to believe an engagement can be executed antiseptically, on-the-cheap, with few casualties.' What should the public know right now about what a war with Iraq would look like and what the costs would be? Rumsfeld: Cost in dollars or cost in lives? Stephanopoulos: Dollars and human costs. Rumsfeld: Well, the lesser important is the cost in dollars. Human life is a treasure. The Office of Management and Budget estimated it would be something under 50 billion dollars. Stephanopoulos: Outside estimates say up to 300 billion. Rumsfeld: Baloney. How much of that would be paid by the United States, how much by other countries is an open question. But if you think about it, September 11th, besides the 3,000 lives, cost this country hundreds of billions of dollars. So, yes, measure the risk of acting, but also the risk of not acting. And if we suffered a biological September 11th, the cost would just be many, many, many multiples of any conflict. Stephanopoulos: But do you think the risk of an attack like that, another attack on the United States is increased by taking military action against Iraq? Rumsfeld: It is clearly decreased, because every day that Iraq continues with its chemical, biological, and nuclear programs, they get that much more mature and that much closer to -- in the case of nuclear -- to his having a nuclear weapon. Stephanopoulos: But might not an attack inspire other terrorists to try to attack the homeland? Rumsfeld: I don't think the other terrorists need inspiration to attack us. They already have. They're trying to do it now. We're frustrating it all across the globe by arresting people and putting pressure on them. In terms of human life, the other part of your question -- first of all, war is always unpredictable. It never plays out. We know he has chemical and biological weapons. Might he use them? Yes, he might. Stephanopoulos: And we're prepared for that? Rumsfeld: Our forces are prepared. Stephanopoulos: How -- he's also said (...) Saddam Hussein did, and in that speech he said, 'Baghdad, its people and leadership is determined to force the Mongols of our age to commit suicide at its gates.' I guess that means he's saying if you want to come here, you're going to have to fight in the streets of Baghdad. What kind of challenges does that pose to the military? Rumsfeld: Well, first, Saddam Hussein is a liar. He lies every single day. He's putting weapons systems right next to mosques, next to schools, next to hospitals, next to orphanages. He's talking about 'human shields.' He is still claiming that he won the war. His people are being told every day that they won. It was a great victory in 1991 when he was thrown out of Kuwait and chased back to Baghdad. Now, it seems to me that almost every time you quote something from him, you should preface it by saying 'here's a man who has lied all the time and consistently.'" On reading that last paragraph again, one may now legitimately ask, "How are we handling it, at AFP?" And many a journalist is doing so, now that the pressure has eased off a little. Do we always "preface" some of our stories as we should? How much editorial freedom are we allowed? Is the multinational make-up of the agency adequately reflected in our coverage, from the "embeds" to Baghdad and around the world? There can be no doubt from the daily "controls" measuring "performance" against Reuters and AP -- a standard, if often unreliable practice in all major media organisations -- and from the "pick-ups" in text, pictures and the broadcasters that the agency has so far done a remarkable job, with many journalists working in conditions I've not known myself for nigh on 20 years now. But are these stories sufficiently different from what the "competition" is saying in the ways that, according to many clients, distinguishes AFP from the others? The debate is at once internal, not a matter for this weblog, and external, like the Gilligan affair, since it's of prime concern to the readers, listeners and viewers for whom we work. And thus, I simply want to say here -- before a week's holiday takes my mind off these issues -- that the discussion is open and I'm among others in the agency who would welcome views from colleagues wherever they may be. zzz I was amused by J., who has mellowed since becoming a mum, for the crisp bluntness of views born of a particularly tough American city and of worst-of-Lebanon experience that always marks her style, though she never allows these opinions to slide into her work. I think many of us had seen enough of Rumsfeld repeating his lines the other day when she simply declared, with a shrug of the shoulders: "He's an asshole. They're all assholes." I have no idea who "all" was, nor whether this was J.'s considered verdict or a circumstantial outburst, but it surely eased much of the tension! And we had her to thank for getting first to a grand master of spin, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf. (This site proved so popular that this morning there was simply a "place-holder", informing us that: "4000 visitors per second showed up from around the world and overwhelmed this shared server for over 8 hours until we turned it off in self defense. It basically put a 100 other businesses out of business for a day. If we had known it was going to be this popular we would have put it on its own server from the beginning." zzz The wholesale pillage in Baghdad we journalists are supposed not to dwell on led the Beeb this afternoon to post the sorry story of the Iraqi National Museum. I'd looked for more about this earlier and found mainly details that become ironic with hindsight. It's little consolation to read that by July 2002, much of the damage had reportedly been already done. One gateway to the lost and many other treasures was put on the Web in March. When and whether Britain, Washington, the European nations -- oh, and the Iraqi people -- will ever reconcile differences and form a government which genuinely suits everybody is anybody's guess, especially in the wake of Thursday's flag incident, which led Brian Flemming to consider 'The United States' Tragic Flaw' (via blogcritics) more comprehensively than I've ventured to do as a non-American, but so little has been learned from history. Nearly 83 years ago, in British colonial times, while the United States was only developing an interest in what was to become Iraq and its oil, a soldier-scholar wrote: "The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster. (...) "We say we are in Mesopotamia to develop it for the benefit of the world. All experts say that the labour supply is the ruling factor in its development. How far will the killing of ten thousand villagers and townspeople this summer hinder the production of wheat, cotton, and oil? How long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of Imperial troops, and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?" If you haven't already guessed his name, it was Ex.-Lieut.-Col. T.E. Lawrence and this comes from a piece for The Sunday Times. By August 1920, a man who had no stomach at all for looters already knew that the vision he shared with the Arabs of their "nation" had been very largely sold out by his political "superiors". Women in Uganda are not dealing with looters the way Lawrence of Arabia might have done were he not perhaps rotating in his grave, but some of them are giving a whole new spin to the concept of 'make love, not war'. 10:01:57 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 11 avril 2003

'Reloaded' released What do they see? (Jadin Boland/Fox Studios Australia) Worth noting, for fellow fans, that not only has the Animatrix grown since last I looked, but today's a day to enter the M itself: the trailer for 'Reloaded' has been just released. Yeah!!! I've not watched it yet: certain pleasures just must be held off for as long as possible (oh, and the large version is a ... 59.6 MB download/QuickTime 6 required). The list of contributors to the philosophical part has lengthened too: 'Plato's Cave and The Matrix' even, along with the older pieces such as 'Wake Up! Gnosticism and Buddhism in The Matrix' -- so the film just has to be up to expectations. Rumour has it there's a traitor this time round too. Some rumour even has it that it's one of the big three... zzz As for the pre-bedtime book, it's mostly outer rather than inner space again: I'm back with Hamilton before the trilogy fades in memory. When authors can't leave a theme like a dog a bone, the result isn't always successful, but thus far 'A Second Chance at Eden' is a cracking collection of yarns. 11:51:51 PM  link   your views? []

jeudi 10 avril 2003

Fragmentation bummer "I had another disc explode a few years ago. However, I find it concerning. How, in the hell, is it possible that this happens to someone MORE THAN ONCE???" The illustrated woes of a man who spins his CDs to bits (via Cory at Boing Boing - in "places I go"). 11:28:38 AM  link   your views? [] Odds on Obasanjo The Nigerian giant faces a huge "test of democracy" this weekend, with legislative elections due to kick off a series of votes at all levels of government. In its "front page" intro to a story about what radical Afrobeat icon Femi Kuti, son of the late, fabulous Fela, thinks of it all, the Beeb says "Nigerian star urges young to vote in April's general elections". Sadly, when you read the story itself, this is not what the star of the Shrine is saying at all! It's more a case of "politics matters, but plus ça change..." At allAfrica, many stories pave the path to the polls: most of them for aficionados only, I reckon, but sound groundwork, much of it from a couple of the best of Nigeria's own papers. Olusegun Obasanjo is tipped to retain the presidency, despite many leaks in his party's umbrella, defeating his rival Muhammadu Buhari, but Nigerians know this ultimately comes down to a scrap between one former military dictator and another. For all the problems ahead of the vote, and heaven knows they've been numerous, our team at the scene reckon there's a good chance it'll be (relatively) all right on the day. I hope they're right. It's afterwards that the trouble could start (not without an echo or two of another big oil nation where some people still want to put a general in charge, at least for a while, and bugger the United Nations). Wole Soyinka richly deserved a Nobel Prize for some of the finest and at times funniest writing out of Nigeria. Among other famous men, Ben Okri is also a splendid, often magical read. 11:05:18 AM  link   your views? []

mercredi 9 avril 2003

A false note in triumph Amid anger, jubilation and looting in Baghdad, a Metafilter contributor points us to 'Saddam and the Destruction of Civil Society in Iraq.' It's a 1997 master's grad dissertation in international relations by Nicholas Natteau, which makes for a timely read, particularly Part III on the prospects for change. Today's constantly repeated TV footage of the toppling of Saddam's huge statue in Fardus square will long be remembered as eminently symbolic. Not a woman in sight in the crowd that I noticed, but this is unsurprising. The jarring note came during the initial live coverage, when the Stars and Stripes were briefly placed on the bronze statue before it came down, a moment which caused gasps of disbelief in our newsroom. Abroad, friends reached on the 'phone imagined, as we did, some general sending the order down the line: "Get that flag off it -- now!!" Whether or not that really happened, what a signal to send to an edgy world! Still, this is perhaps a day to ease off on cynicism, since the rejoicing in Baghdad and the relief were so evident. Nevertheless, the war may yet be far from over. There's scarcely time to envisage the consequences, short and long-term, since the end of the beginning has come so swiftly. Tonight, I'm taking a look at an article on the Pentagon spin machine and other columns at Working for Change. And digesting some of the first reactions in the Arab world. 9:15:19 PM  link   your views? [] Excess deaths "A mortality study (...) by the [International Rescue Committee] estimates that since August 1998, when the [Democratic Republic of Congo] war erupted, through November 2002 when the survey was completed, at least 3.3 million people died in excess of what would normally be expected during this time." AFP wrote up this story yesterday, when the report was released by the New York-based IRC, which was first "founded at the request of Albert Einstein to assist opponents of Hitler" and carried out the DRC survey in as much of the vast country as its rapporteurs could reach. The war even made domestic broadcast news in France and Britain this morning, because editors used last week's massacre in Ituri as the "peg" to hang the equally horrific statistics on. [Update: with some embarrassment, the UN has revised the death toll down, not that this makes things any better.] The IRC considers that the "four and a half year war in the Democratic Republic of Congo has taken more lives than any other since World War II" and is probably right, though such comparisons call for caution. zzz In Brussels, the International Federation of Journalists issued a separate call for justice, when it "condemned both sides in the Iraq conflict of 'crimes of war' after a series of attacks on journalists and deaths of media staff". "There is no doubt at all that these attacks could be targeting journalists. If so, they are grave and serious violations of international law," said Aidan White, General Secretary of the IFJ. "The bombing of hotels where journalists are staying and targeting of Arab media are particularly shocking events in a war which is being fought in the name of democracy. Those who are responsible must be brought to justice". Until now, I've kept my mouth shut about these "excess" deaths. It seemed inappropriate to highlight the issue, given my job and the way we saw a friend on AFP's English desk travel more than halfway round the world to attend the funeral of one of the colleagues who lost their lives reporting the war. To mention such private grief here seemed inappropriate, especially when this conflict has brought grief to so many others as well. But when a heavily armoured battle tank fires a shell at the Baghdad hotel where foreign journalists have been staying, allegedly in response to a sniper and grenade attack the journalists deny happened, and when the Al-Jazeera offices are also hit, it's time to ask what the hell's going on. For Chris Allbritton, "Sigh I guess we should chalk this up to a tragic mistake, just one of those things that happen. After all, the journos were there on their own free will. Unlike the citizens of Baghdad, they made the choice to be in the firing line." Christopher has, as his readers know, managed to get back inside Iraq, where late last night he was posting on media freedom and Kurdistan. Perhaps he's right about the "tragic mistake", maybe he isn't. At Alternet, Maria Tomchick reflects on "televised lies" while "young soldiers face a lifetime of asking themselves why." It's been a long time since I've seen shots fired in anger, but with memories brought back now, questions from the comfort of an editorial desk don't seem so futile after all. 11:30:07 AM  link   your views? []

mardi 8 avril 2003

The war and the law After saying two weeks ago that I'd been unable to find detailed legal justification for the military action against Iraq on the Net, but plenty of arguments against it, I offered a week's supply of free refreshment (well, coffee) to anybody else on the Desk at work who could. Maybe the bribe wasn't big enough, but nobody turned anything up. So I've come across a new legal perspective with interest: "UN resolutions for military intervention in Korea in 1950 and Iraq in 1990 show, by their novelty, that nearly all wars since the Second World War have been waged without UN authorisation. Prosecutions for war crimes have been equally scarce. After concluding their affairs in Nuremberg (1946) and Tokyo (1948), there were no war crimes tribunals until the UN created two to deal with conflicts in the former Yugoslavia (1993) and Rwanda (1994). The formation of these two ad hoc war crimes tribunals in the mid-1990s was a significant step in bringing international law into the arena of war. Before then, international law was a discipline studied by international lawyers that rarely impacted on nation states deciding whether, when or how to wage war." At 'spiked' (among "places I go"), barrister and writer Jon Holbrook makes a tightly argued case -- discussing "custom law", "treaty law" and the UN Charter -- to suggest that in "the debates about international law and Iraq, the very basis of international law is being undermined". And he comes to a thought-provoking conclusion. 8:44:53 PM  link   your views? [] Chasing the next big cat Since Apple announced the programme for this year's Worldwide Developers Conference, speculation has mounted as to what Panther will bring: the Mac's own music download service, and that after iWorks instead of AppleWorks 7? Xicons is already offering a Panther set: pink! Hmm... In French, VNUNet speculates in detail on an OS 9-type finder. In English, slashdot takes another angle. For the end-user, eWeek predicts the release for September. And the discussion at GEEK.com is under way. Were I sufficiently geek-headed, I could think of far worse ways to begin a trip to the United States than San Francisco in June, but I'm also informed that many of these people get up far, far too early for my system, if ever they go to bed! 11:27:32 AM  link   your views? []

lundi 7 avril 2003

Lavatory humour? "An internet toilet roll browser and a net-enabled chopping board are among cutting edge designs at the Ideal Home Show." (Another yesterday story, full of tomorrow's waste matter. Thanks, blogdex.) 8:07:47 PM  link   your views? [] Stunning looks and sidebar links Darned cold it may be, but it's spring! Hormones are doing their thing, the sun's shining, the sap rises, a feller sees a lovely woman in Monoprix and momentarily forgets what he meant to buy. He smiles, she smiles back, he checks out of the supermarket, goes to get the bread. And she suddenly decides to cross the road after walking straight past the bakery, joins the queue. There's another exchange of smiles. He fantasizes that she just might have turned back because of the first smiles ... but then he thinks better of it (and anyway -- he fools himself -- she looks a little too young for such risks)! Those accustomed to the world of "blogs" already know how varied it is, but most of us are still finding out. In a previous reference to Rebecca Blood, I omitted to say how good I found her 'Weblog Handbook'. With considerable skill, she tackles ethical aspects of blogging in a chapter to set a dozen bells ringing in the heads of fellow journalists. Rebecca brings a fresh approach to ideas we've discussed ourselves, worth reading and reflecting on in a webbed world. In a footnote, she adds that she's "indebted to Dave Winer", (described on an interview on WebReference as "scripting pioneer and founder of UserLand Software", and thus, as it happens, my current 'host'), though she says their views "diverge greatly". Since Dave doesn't seem to have written a book, I'll link straight to his remarks on integrity. Rebecca also mentions, in her "afterword", a phenomenon I've now seen for myself: the way webloggers form clusters. She warns that by doing so too closely they "risk amplifying their own view of the world to an extent that distorts their perception of reality." And part of her conclusion is a plea: "If you asked me what the weblog community needs, I would answer, Stronger ties among webloggers from various clusters, more independent thinkers, and more irreverence. Much, much more irreverence." I hope you'll find plenty of that here when the mood takes me. There's a full moon on the way. Where does that gorgeous lady come into it? In the wake of an ... irreverent fancy in the bread queue, I remembered one of many sex clusters (and shan't mention who sent me there; it's already raised eyebrows in a place where the computers are, of course, purely for work). It'll suffice to note that the writing of, say, some polyamorous people is spiced with quite remarkably graphic tales; the further to broaden our minds, perhaps. Indeed, the LiveJournal community has for four years offered many ways of linking people, 900,000 of them. In very different corners, I've stumbled on a Rabbinical blog network and a TheoBlogical Community. Google attempts to classify weblogs, but lists fewer than 3,000 personal ones out of scores of thousands. At 'the ageless project', you can search for blogs or other personal sites by their authors' dates of birth. And the Weblogs Compendium offers a range of other directories. Matt Haughey was another pioneer with 'MetaFilter', a community "blog" which bills itself "more addictive than crack". Brigitte Eaton set up the EatonwebPortal as a "labor of love (...) back in early 1999 when there were less than 50 known weblogs-there were a lot more than that out there, they just hadn't been discovered. as more kept turning up or getting started, i kept adding them to my list. it's grown a little since then." A little: Brigitte presently lists 10,491 logs in a mere 112 countries and 38 languages. The answer to those who ask why my sidebar contains what it does is three-fold. First, it's a very small sidebar! Secondly, there are places I'd like to add and some that I will, with the emphasis on variety and, occasionally, irreverence, even if there's still no escape from The War. Finally, while some links there are already well-known, they're among the best invitations I've found to look further. Well, I'm clean out of bread again... 7:50:23 PM  link   your views? [] White Stripes and razor blades "Along with engineer Liam Watson, Jack and Meg recorded and produced 'Elephant' in the same way they would have had they been recording decades earlier. Microphones, a piano, drum kit, reel-to-reel recorders, lots of tape and a carefully wielded razor-blade." Wielding razor blades was good fun in 1970s radio, when the technique involved what we called "Emm-ing and ah-ing" too (slashing out some of the most tedious pauses in interviews and remembering to make sure intakes of breath stayed in the right place). What Mark Coles talked about on the radio this morning, though, was how 'Elephant', which went straight into UK charts at Number 1, was recorded by White Stripes on sound equipment of the kind the Beatles would used (and perhaps did). The interesting audio interview can be found on a 'Today' page (requires Real- or RealOne Player -- and the fine print for the free version). A handful of the finest quality recordings I enjoy date right back: things like Antal Dorati conducting Prokoviev's Fifth (1957) and other wonders on the Mercury Living Presence label. The same is true of many musical genres a far cry from the classical. Many a small miracle is worked with today's more sophisticated techniques: for sheer recording quality, 'Les Chronovoyageurs' by Stone Age is nice. It's available on Amazon, where it's called 'Time Travellers', as an alarmingly expensive Japanese export ($36.99 -- ouch!). And I learn that Stone Age is known in the United States and Canada as Stone Edge. Amazon's own reviewer, Jeff Bateman, disagrees with me completely about their first album: "too often the traditional strengths of the players are suffocated by electronic textures and progressive rock overkill." A right pair Six other people share my ears, though. ;) To each their own: "electronic overkill" is a phrase I'd use to sum up a gripe about one or two of the records my daughter likes. Until she grew on from 'fun radio' to 'lemouv'', where there are mercifully no ads, it was the repetitiveness of some of the music that was like Chinese water torture to me. "In my day, lass, people played the drums -- they didn't use these mind-numbing loops!" The reply, of course, was equally sharp. "She's really the teenager now," warn my friends often. "You ain't seen nothing yet!" She's in Morocco now, first week of the school hols. Leaving us to listen through the gateway. 1:34:45 PM  link   your views? []

dimanche 6 avril 2003

'Ship of Fools' For centuries, the Argonos has journeyed through space, its mission and origins obscured by time and many of its records destroyed. The latest generation aboard is divided, like those on the 'Titanic', among the favoured people of the upper levels, an under-class of 'downsiders' and the crew. Nikos Costa, its captain, risks losing his grip to his rival on the Executive Council, a bishop who claims that the vessel has always existed, with Earth but a legend. Mutiny is in the recycled air. But then comes planet-fall: Antioch. In the remains of a human colony there, the captain's advisor, the club-footed, deformed and widely disliked Bartolomeo Aguilera, with priest Father Veronica and others in the survey team, make a discovery which restores purpose to all on the "ship of fools". Their gruesome find, with the sudden beamed signal that's a hallmark of "first contact" novels, leads Bartolomeo, our narrator, and his thousands of shipmates into an encounter with the alien so macabre that Bishop Soldano deems it the Evil of an Apocryphal text. Bartolomeo knows little but the essentials of the mechanics of space flight, the workings of weapons systems and the mysteries of navigation, matters best left to Costa and the crew. This conveniently leaves him -- and author Richard Paul Russo -- free to tell the story of the Argonos and its fate by concentrating on the finely drawn characters involved and their different, deepening dilemmas. The novel could be "Alien with an intellect", wrote Interzone in April 2001. Yes, and much more. Some of Russo's visions will long linger in my imagination: the long shadows, strange machines, rent pipes and torn cables of the bowels of the Argonos; a few of the ... things found by exploration groups (no spoilers here!); and -- oh well, just one, in part:   "The enormous stained glass window at the head of the cathedral, which had always been too dull, indistinct, and chaotic to reveal any concrete images, now blazed in the depths of space, burning in the side of the Argonos. The Church's beacon to the stars.   The Crucifixion.   A crimson sky blazing as if the air itself was on fire.   Against that flaming sky, the Cross, the wood so dark it was almost black, stained with sweat and blood.   Jesus hanging from the dark wood, metal spikes driven through wrists and ankles. He stared not upward, but out at the universe, at whoever looked at Him. At me." Bartolomeo may never be a believer, but his trials and encounters enrich both him and the reader. It may simply be an accident of circumstance that religion and complex moral issues, in one form or another, have cropped up in all the books I've reviewed to date. But at the start of this millennium, the metaphysical thriller would seem to be decidedly in vogue. With 'Ship of Fools', Russo has shown that he's very good at it. 5:38:13 PM  link   your views? [] Of photojournalism, AFP & Getty Well, Béatrice seems to be doing just fine in Nigeria, going by a story about President Olusegun Obasanjo on the campaign trail for re-election which was singularly colourful. You're well out of it here, B. It mildly pleases me to see that the day we all had to get on our bikes or hotfoot it across Paris to work, Yahoo chose to illustrate a story on the French pension reforms Day of (in-)Action with an AFP picture of the only Métro line that was really working. Line 14 is entirely run by robots. From Nairobi, AFM reminds me of some strong stuff at AfricaPhotos, where the visual essays are not all recommended to those seeking a break from war news. One of many bids to classify such sites, some well worth the visit, can be found at a photojournalism webring (attention: pop-ups). A few people there even invite you to use their work, so long as it's not for commercial reasons. zzz AFP has begun its partnership with Getty Images. Since this is not an AFP weblog (though I'm occasionally jotting down notes about life at the agency, encouraged by a number of you abroad), it should be added that this venture has met with concern as well as curiosity among staff on both sides [article in French] of the Atlantic. (For the SNJ view, see the internal wires. My own, FWIW, is that this sure is a "turning point", as photo director Jean-François Le Mounier told 'Le Monde'; and one to be watched closely. Should it not turn sour on us, it bodes interesting times to come.) 1:47:15 PM  link   your views? [] Note de service A lot of people have said they find AFP's instructions sent with their voting papers for this year's elections incomprehensible. Somebody also slipped the white papers into the ballot envelopes in the mistaken belief that they were meant to "hide the others" -- and thus nearly cast a blank vote. Others are sticking them into the internal post, but in France, they must go into a public letter-box. David S. has drawn up an easy to understand explanation of how it works. Keep your eyes peeled: this will be released very soon. David's also been working very hard on other practical info to go online once he's ready. And I'm searching through cupboard after drawer after cupboard of files for a guide I wrote to the jungle of the French unions.... 11:29:58 AM  link   your views? []

vendredi 4 avril 2003

Browser battles (& issues worth arguing about) 'Browser wars' are just dumb! Julie, newish to Macs and happy with Jaguar, has asked me about Safari, fiddling with "Safari extras" and what else I thought she could download apart from Internet Explorer. "Lots," I replied. "Try these and see." To read many Mac sites and especially forums, you'd think it was almost all about speed. Apple proudly put this graphic on its Safari home, comparing the time in seconds it takes its new browser to open, well, I don't know which page(s) on an iMac (800MHz PowerPC G4, GeForce4 MX GPU, 256MB RAM), along with an ad for Amazon. OK, that's neat. So are other features like the way it sorts its bookmarks and the "tabbed browsing" to come. But so what? If that were all there was too it... When it comes to tussles, I'd rather argue about things like Bill Gates's action on AIDS (and the trouble it got him into in India last year). Or why you can now find Windows all over Africa, while Macs are very rare. This is a most interesting story that Philip Machanick told me last year before he left South Africa for Australia. In essence, it stems largely from Apple's scruples about dealing with the apartheid regime at a crucial time when computers were working their way up a large chunk of the continent, unshared by Microsoft. And with inappropriate sales policies after that. Or whether Apple is doing what it needs to today in education. My working day starts with iCab, set up just how I want it to get, and print, the news. But either iCab's handling of style sheets is not yet up to this site of mine, or I still haven't got it right. For "working" here, I'm happiest with Camino, several tabs open. For general browsing, it's that or Safari, in conjunction with a newsreader. But I like Omniweb too, with rumours abounding of a potential switch to the "Safari engine" since last month's OSNews interview with CEO Ken Case. Internet Explorer rarely gets a look-in on my machine now. It would be gone forever, mainly "on principle", not because it's a bad browser. I once used its increasingly redundant "album" feature often to save the odd useful page otherwise destined to disappear forever. For a while longer, I want to keep an eye on whether it renders what I get up to without hassles. There's ageing speculation that we might see IE6 for Macs, but why bother? Maybe I'd turn to Netscape 7 more often if I wanted an all-in-one job with mail and even AOL Instant Messenger. There are many who keep it as a convenient default browser (yes, Mr T, I know default is an odd word for something you use most of the time, but as you're learning, computer terminology is nothing if not obscure sometimes). But now speed does come into it for me, while I remain unimpressed by Netscape's print options. The extra fun with Safari and Camino is customising them, thanks to people like Reinhold Penner. So this is how I "dock" my browsers, in rough order of preference. There's my long answer, Julie. Oh, and as for my default, there isn't one, not with IC-Switch tucked up in the menu bar. A flip-click and you're done! 11:08:05 AM  link   your views? []

jeudi 3 avril 2003

Of cannibals and chums (friendlink - 2) Africa's most recent allegations of cannibalism have been levelled against rebels in the northeast of the DR Congo, reportedly confirmed by UN investigators in January, but denied by rebel leader and would-be vice president (...if not more) Jean-Pierre Bemba. In Madagascar, cannibalism predates people and was practised by at least one dinosaur, the Beeb informs us, with a link to one of those many fascinating museum sites, the one for Natural History in London. zzz Good morning, South Africa! Another "you-know-who-I-mean", 'Colonel, sir'. Welcome aboard. He and all the Jo'burg team did a fine job on the DRC story yesterday; it was only the 362 Congolese delegates in Sun City who kept us on edge as bell after bell signalling "urgents" buzzed in Paris and successively persisted in not being the start of that ceremony to end Africa's "first world war". One of the characteristics of that continent is that almost nothing like this ever begins on time. This can be relaxing when you're travelling, but less fun when you're trying to meet deadlines. I don't know whether that's true of Hawaii, but Al, one of my fellow TS founder members, offers a personal introduction to the island. He's been busy, er, "blogging", in his own way, since November 2000. 10:58:48 AM  link   your views? []

mercredi 2 avril 2003

Better post? A good night for applications: the invaluable Graphic Converter is now into version 4.6, which "adds ECW import/export, PDF export under Mac OS X, MDC import, better TWAIN compatibility, and several other bug fixes and improvements," while a Eudora upgrade is finally out of beta (v.5.2.1) "bringing numerous bug fixes, including dramatic performance boost for HTML saves, restored PPP control under Mac OS 9, better peformance with multiple windows open, less CPU utilization, and a re-enabled battery check under Mac OS X." (Tip-offs and quotes from MacNN and a dozen other places.) If the e-mail programme can also sort out some of a frequent correspondent's cut and paste jobs, that would be better still. D., you know who I mean. ;) (Bad night for blog-tweaking. A few further changes are slowly travelling between here and RadioUserLand, so if it looks a mess meanwhile, sorry. Lesson: remember, again, not to do this kind of thing while all America's awake.) [Update: as I was preparing for bed, the software update preferences pane switched itself on to propose QuickTime 6.1.1 : "delivers important bug fixes to MPEG-4 streaming" 19.4 MB. Sounds anodyne, but this is one I'll check out before installing. One or two recent "fixes" from Apple proved trickier than first thought.] 11:13:45 PM  link   your views? [] Shocked at cellphone rudeness "The increasing irritation of inappropriate or noisy conversations in public places prompted design firm Ideo to come up with handsets that would encourage people to be more tactful in their phone use. The designs are not intended to make it on to the high street but rather to prompt debate about the social impact of mobile phones." Don't see this catching on, somehow. And I can't read Japanese. But I note the date on the BBC story. 11:04:55 AM  link   your views? [] Best hope since Lumumba? Could this be a big day for the Democratic Republic of Congo, with the signing in Sun City, South Africa, of what looks like the best chance for a ravaged nation since the murder of Patrice Lumumba? One of the most gripping reads about that vast, pillaged country, largely set at the time he was assassinated, and a fine account of why it has been such a mess since, is 'The Poisonwood Bible: a novel' by Barbara Kingsolver. I can't be unduly optimistic about the prospects for real peace, let alone democracy, in the wake of four, or six (depending on when you think it started), years of war that has claimed at least two million lives, directly or indirectly, and drew in the armies of half a dozen other African nations at its height. The peoples of the DRC are sitting on too much coveted wealth for their own well-being, while some key players are shady characters, to put it mildly. But the young Joseph Kabila has proved a surprising leader since his father was shot. The news agencies will be filing more up-to-date portraits of him today. 10:40:25 AM  link   your views? []

mardi 1 avril 2003

Energy: never put your eggs... How intriguing, in such times, to see Israel and the United States jointly planning a first conference on "Cooperation for Energy Independence of Democracies" in Jerusalem in mid-May. The energy in question is renewable. This, also, after months in which American officials, not least US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Walter Kansteiner, have been assiduously cultivating the oil-producing nations of west and southern Africa, while life remains decidedly dodgy in Nigeria's delta ((March 28 entry). Even before the latest unrest, which has now seen production slashed by more than a third, Kansteiner denied claims that Washington was seeking to encourage Nigeria to quit OPEC. But industry analysts, let alone African rights activists, have been expressing concerns about US policy for some time. Backers of the Jerusalem initiative include the "It's time to set America free" Institute for the Analysis of Global Security and the Nuclear Energy Institute. (Tip-off found in 'rebecca's pocket'.) 11:52:33 PM  link   your views? [] Finger on censorship Over dinner last night, Tony was fretting about how "wall-to-wall" war coverage on television and radio is effectively "censoring" news about almost anything else. He also said that "I've got considerably more experience than Donald Rumsfeld and could have told him that bombing campaigns will not win you a war!" He does have a point on the reporting, now that he describes himself as "wobbly and largely housebound". Tony was in Germany immediately after World War II and remembers the Blitz as well. In London, Index on Censorship has awarded its 'Golden Raspberry' to Mugabe's spin doctor, Jonathan Moyo. "According to the local press, Mr Moyo has not been available to comment on his award. But (the BBC adds) the secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists, Luke Tamborinyoka told the Daily News newspaper: "We hope this eminent media terrorist will marvel and be proud of his award." That T-word again. 10:59:03 AM  link   your views? [] Cut footage It's called BigBlueBlog. It's way off my usual circuit... Should you be curious as to the kind of thing Hollywood chopped after the tragedy of September 11, the Columbia trailer (and presumably the relevant chunk of movie) of 'Spiderman' snatching a helicopter between the Twin Towers is a rarity. They've got it on their server (their link is to a 21 MB QuickTime .mov file). 12:42:46 AM  link   your views? []