mercredi 31 mars 2004

(Mainly) music jottings (iii) - free expression, fair dues There are alternatives, true, but the wait for the iTunes Music Store in Europe is getting a little long. Meanwhile at EMI, 1,500 jobs are to be axed, while 20 percent of the artists will have to start looking elsewhere: "The company said it expected the reorganisation of its business to save it about £50m ($91m) a year. But there would be a one-off cash cost of about £75m from the job cuts. EMI's artist roster, which includes Robbie Williams and Radiohead, will be reduced by about 20%, mostly 'niche and under-performing' acts in Europe. Other big name artists signed up to the world's third-biggest music group include Kylie, Coldplay, and Norah Jones. In London trading, shares in EMI surged 18.5 pence to 275.5p (...) But they refused to identify any of the artists who are about to get the chop, except to say they were 'local-country acts'." The penultimate paragraph of that BBC business report says it all really, doesn't it? Meanwhile, a patent application has been published for a 'Graphical user interface and methods of use thereof in a multimedia player' (US patent office). Otherwise known as an iPod. People have been saying what they think at 'Slashdot' (via the 'Guardian' blog). "The idea that we are at war works to the advantage of the Bush Administration. We have already seen how the war on terror conveniently morphed into the war on Iraq. Mr. Bush never misses an opportunity to conflate the two in his attempts to confuse the public. But is it a war, or just a shabby public relations ploy to achieve an alternate political objective?" Such questions (and attempts to answer them) are par for the course at 'Counterpunch', where Mike Whitney rejects the language of terrorism. More unusual is the place where I found that link. Bill Christison's 'thoughts on the eve of the apocalypse' often make for an interesting read. His list of media links is the most wide-ranging and freewheeling I've yet encountered in the blogosphere. It took a few minutes' work to determine that "BC" is indeed the Bill who "served on the analysis side of the (Central Intelligence) Agency for 28 years" (via 'Palestine: Information with Provenance.') Yes. I did plan to steer clear of both the mainstream and alternative political news sites until next week, but that's almost as hard as giving up smoking. Fellow junkies might care to know what 'Press Action' features as the "best of the web" (pablog). While scarcely as comprehensive as Bill's list, there are a few here I'm happy to discover. As EMI, Apple and others wage the interminable war to shape the music of the future -- and I pursue my illegal downloading of music and video without qualms, given the amount of money I subsequently legally spend on things I've sampled and liked -- I'm happy to be able to tell Matt Haughey that the 'Creative Commons' licence idea is making headway in France. Not just in the Web, but in mass circulation dailies like 'Libé'. Matt was wondering if 'Autres Directions in Music' (CC weblog) is what he thought it was. The full article about it, in French, is 'Albums de familles' (Libération). The same day, 'Libé' gave a write-up to A.S. Ambulanzen, a Berlin collective which has been militating for the abolition of copyright altogether. That's a pipe-dream, of course, but they contend that: "information does not want to be free. in fact it is absolutely free of will, a constant flow of signs of lives which are permanently being turned into commodities and transformed into commercial content. textz.com ("concept" manifesto) is not part of the information business. they say there was a time when content was king, but we have seen his head rolling. our week beats their year. ever since we have been moving from content to discontent, collecting scripts and viruses, writing programs and bots, dealing with textz as warez, as executables--something that is able to change your life. this is not promotional material. facing the unified principles of information--the combined horror of global communication and so-called guerilla marketing--there is no more need for media theory or cultural studies. the resistance against corporate culture can itself no longer remain in the cultural domain. you make a mistake if you see what we do as merely apolitical." Textz.com is a cult. It's also one of the places where, via 'juniradio' (berlin 104.1 fm, Ger.), you can you get the (in)famous 'Grey Album' (DJ Dangermouse) ... speaking of EMI (track 13). And this is where you'll have to excuse me while I watch Madonna's outlawed 'Erotica' video (pointless Amazon.com entry) and the banned Kylie Minogue lingerie advertisement. If "you'd like to ... watch Madonna", Andrew Parodi includes her in one of his many Amazon lists. A prolific reviewer, Parodi is one of those people that make Amazon so much more than simply a shop. One Acquisition (OS X peer-to-peer) leads to another... 10:14:22 PM  link   your views? [] My selfless career officially ends The first good thing about today was that I didn't wake up exhausted, as I have done since the week off began. The second was being told by gastrological expert Dr V. that the renewed bout of the Condition should be over in a couple of days at most. The third came in an e-mail from Tony. He informs that my 23-year career as an elected trade union activist officially ended last night, at the annual general meeting of Paris Branch of the National Union of Journalists. However his e-mail -- though the habitual model of brevity since the man still seems to believe he pays his Internet bill by the word count -- was unusually lacking in crucial details: "My duty won't B done until I inform U that the chair paid tribute 2 your work for the Branch @ last night's well-attended (27 members!) NUJ orgy in the Latvian Embassy. B4 U get 2 big headed I shd say I also got a tribute, along with several other persons in an evening that began with a minute's silence 4 recently deceased members, the secretary 4getting the minutes of the Feb meeting & the admission of half a dozen new members. After the nicotine break we proceeded 2 AGM, 2 numerous reports I cd not hear & the seamless & unanimous voting-in of every 1 of the single-choice candidates 4 office. I congratulated the chair on the speedy election in my best Russian accent but I don't think anyone saw the joke. JA, who'd picked me up @ M'parnasse, got us there in time to argue with the Bourse du Travail staff, who had 4gotten 2 book our room. He had a great time. I left supperless & walked 2 Gare de l'Est B4 I realised I'd taken a wrong turning. Cheers, Tony." First, my friend might make it clear that the tributes paid to us both were not part of the minute's silence. I'm ashamed to say that I've not been to a meeting for about a year, and thus could well be considered dead. Secondly, he fails to say who got elected. Thirdly, he explains neither how just one wrong turning sufficed to get from the Bourse du Travail to the Gare de l'Est nor why he wasn't fed. Fourthly, 27 members was a remarkable turnout. I need to know how many of them were old friends unseen for too long, how many were bores to be avoided and how many I wouldn't have recognised. Finally and most importantly, how many were unattached and highly attractive women? Tony has hearing problems and some of the rapporteurs may be monotone mumblers, but his eyes still work fairly well. Of half a dozen new members and others in attendance, I find it hard to believe that not one met the above criteria, deserving of the attention of a branch 'Welfare Officer (Retd.)' who is post-Conditionally determined to put his own first and foremost. 3:27:32 PM  link   your views? []

mardi 30 mars 2004

Two pros of prose in the VIP departure lounge Eh, ben! Two institutions gone in a day... I have a tremendous admiration for Peter Ustinov, his humour and his sharp wit and intelligence. I was a teenager when an uncle gave me a copy of Ustinov's 'Add a Dash of Pity', a splendid collection of clever, sometimes satirical short stories which I recall finding as amusing as they were moving. And he was unforgettable in 'Spartacus' (Rotten Tomatoes), in which, as Roger Ebert wrote in a 1991 review on seeing the film for the third time, the man upstaged everybody else... Ever since those early years of my life, Ustinov has always been a small part of it in his many different capacities, but a big-hearted man. He was irascible perhaps, but had a tremendous gift for getting his deep humanism across in a way that was never anything but entertaining. "I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me to be the most civilised music in the world," the raconteur, actor, writer and mimic apparently told Reuters last year (BBC obituary). That strikes me as a self-composed epitaph fitting enough for one of the greats. And on this note, 'The Age' gives him a fine send-off. Alistair Cooke has died too, taking in his wake a big bouquet of tributes from all over the world. When first I mentioned his 'Letter from America' in May last year, I couldn't help but say how his mannerisms sometimes grated on my nerves. Indeed, there were times when he made me snarl at the radio: "Will you just, please, get to the point!" But there are those who say the same of me. I never stopped listening to those weekly broadcasts and often in recent years went to some lengths to make sure I was in earshot of a radio for those 15 minutes on a Sunday morning. Sometimes it was Cooke whose voice dragged a reluctant Marianne out of bed while I shaved, learned much, and mentally disagreed with and admired the man by turns. When this "icon/doyen/permanent fixture" retired just a few weeks before his death, Terry Sedgewick down under remarked how Cooke was "used to getting his way with celebrities. Most of them were only too happy to appear on his programs for minimum pay. That was until he met Groucho..." (read on at 'There Ain't No Sanity Clause'). British domestic radio even made Cooke's departure its top new item in one of this morning's bulletins and the BBC news site is full of highlights and remembrances. He's irreplaceable, of course. In the event that I ever reach the age of 95, it would be a remarkable gift from the gods to retain the kind of professionalism and acuteness of mind that graced Cooke until the last. 10:21:33 PM  link   your views? []

lundi 29 mars 2004

Local colour When an excited "San Francisco" told me that 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail' (IMDb) was the latest addition to his shelves, he even recited an extract or two. But still I wasn't going to fall for it until Francis started going on about the bonus DVD and its wonders. So I parted with more of next month's budget, sooner than I should have done. Come Sunday afternoon, Marianne persuaded me that it was silly to venture out to see the new Enki Bilal film straight away, when the queue was bound to be enormous. I agreed, feeling that we'd do better to make the most of the fine weather as well. But the Kid had other ideas. She closed the curtains on her side of the apartment, grabbed the 'Grail', along with a few other recent acquisitions, and turned the living room and her Mac into a modest home cinema. But today I can show you what the view from my back window looks like now that spring has arrived. I also took the 'phone for a walk. I've been meaning to blog a few more pictures of le quartier for a while, having written so much about it and some of the people round here. "Graffiti corner" is down at the far end of Thermopyles Street, where some of the local artists have little houses. It's only a few minutes' walk from home, but the cobblestones and a strong sense of community among people lucky enough to live there make the road a village in its own right. One day I'll take some close-ups of the work on the wall. It's prettier than the routine tags and diabolical threats that line the railway tracks. Most of the cottages are tucked away behind iron gates and gardens, making them hard to snap. This is one of the few that isn't fenced off. While local residents are fond of their privacy, it's one of the only roads I know in the whole of Paris where they hold an annual party when the really hot weather arrives. At this time of year, a little jazz band comes out on Saturdays to bring a touch of New Orleans to the corner where Thermopyles Street joins my own. I've never seen anybody drop coins into their hat, but they seem to be there for the fun of it rather than busking for cash. Up by the Pernety Métro station, on a busy junction in Losserand Street, the architecture says you're back in Paris, with its modern phone booths and the only local newspaper kiosk to open on a Sunday. You can't see the Canteen across the road, where Sam gave me no chance to choose what I wanted for lunch. He had one of his specials waiting when I arrived and had even made a tarte tatin, in one of his exquisite excursions from the regular menu. I asked if it was somebody's birthday, but no. Even Sam, who is not a political animal, was celebrating the local election results, which apparently means that a plan to get out the pneumatic drills will go ahead. "Once they've widened the pavement" he explained, "they'll let me put tables outside in summer." The last stop before it became too dark to use the 'phone's little camera was chez Francis, who was in less than saintly disposition. "Nice breasts," he remarked, looking at the obligatory slimming season cover of 'Elle' magazine. "I've noticed. She's plastered up at the corner too. What are you so cheerful about today?" "We won!" "The vote, you mean?" "Oh, please. No politics here. I'm talking about the rugby, you idiot. Gave les rosbifs a thrashing, didn't we?" 10:08:14 PM  link   your views? [] French ping-pong I can't think where Caroline Wyatt gets her ideas about the "ambitious and much-liked Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy" (in a BBC analysis of France's regional election result). Yes, he's ambitious. He's bright. And he's widely detested and even regarded as dangerous in the circles I move in. Caroline must have a different set of French friends. The morning's news cheers me up, of course, apart from the 13 percent of the vote given to the Front National (FN). But when it comes to that 'Reshuffle imminent in France after new poll thrashing for Chirac' (AFP/Yahoo), I'd be willing to bet that the French president won't risk giving the prime minister's job to Sarkozy. This election marks a return to business as normal. During the 23 years I've lived here, the French have almost always voted for "the other lot" -- anybody but those in charge -- when it comes to polls like this regional one. In 2002, though, there was a lapse into madness. During that year's presidential election, people got themselves into such a mess in the first round of voting that they ended up facing a choice between Chirac and FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. Though some of my friends wouldn't agree with me, Le Pen (Wikipedia profile) is neither a neo-fascist nor stupid, despite the never forgotten remark about the Holocaust being but "a point of detail" of World War II. But some of the fervour he inspires has created the nearest thing to the Hitler youth this country has at the start of the 21st century. All that is pretty much what the Faithful 5 ¾ might expect to find me writing about the poll. However, the result and the sunshine inspired me to do something less predictable: filling in my complicated tax declaration this morning with something almost approaching alacrity. The tax form is the only document that annually arrives in our letterboxes in a black envelope. I'd planned to postpone filling in mine until the last minute, being unable to dissociate my dislike of dealing with bureaucracy from the heart-sinking feeling this particular civic duty used to give me back in the years when my French was almost as bad as my maths. I would do it online, now that's possible, if I didn't have to send the tax people so many bits of paper to prove that I'm telling the truth. If Chirac does decide to replace the prime minister, an outcome they seem to have taken for granted at the Factory, I wouldn't be surprised if he chooses a woman, Michele Alliot-Marie (the Globalist), the current defence minister. She's uncontroversial and would put up a good performance on telly without representing much of a threat to Chirac himself. But his choices are limited. And dull. It's partly because almost all of them are so boring that I don't write about French politicians very often. I imagine, nevertheless, that the people who make 'Les Guignols de l'Info' are readying a few new puppets right now. The equivalent of Britain's 'Spitting Image' satire -- described in a recent article which is as good an account of French humour (Economist) as any I've read -- is one of the few reasons the Kid still reproaches me for throwing away the TV. 12:58:28 PM  link   your views? []

dimanche 28 mars 2004

Hotlines Augustine has kindly furnished a one-place link to her interviews with God. She's also removed any lingering doubts over whether to bother with Gibson's 'Passion', due here this week unless three Jewish brothers win a court case (BBC) -- which is extremely unlikely. "Well Mel, if you're interested in credibility, here's what you should do..." suggests Blaugustine (March 27 for ideas). zzz "The Touch Graph at Google allows you to see the net of relationships between web sites. Entering a URL lets you see a graphical map of its various 'Similar pages' links, as well as the pages similar to those pages, and so forth." (Grafyte Blog). It uses Java and requires a few moments' patience while it does it's thing. But then ... WOW! For reasons that escape my tired mind, 'Sexy Magick' was the nearest place running rings round me when I tried it. Perhaps Julie will know why when she's done with her move... I don't think it's just a matter of shared interests. Any sexy magick from this corner is locked up for today. I'm still waking up to the joy of being on holiday for a week when I'm not half asleep. zzz The Google beta is fun. So is the Blogbot project ('Things that... make you go hmm') they're working on at Microsoft, though I'd rather somebody else got there first. Having, on the other hand, turned down Orkut invites, I'm glad to see David Weinberger explaining why he looks "down (his) long and winding nose at Friendster and other such Artificial Social Networks (ASNs)" (JOHO). David -- whose 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined' (Perseus, 2003) is creeping its way up my reading list -- also objects to a misconceived notion common in news circles. "The Internet," he says, "is not a medium" (hyperorg). zzz ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz.............. The rest can wait. 10:05:17 PM  link   your views? [] At the back of your mind Some of my more elderly friends and relatives worry far more about their memory lapses than they should. It's alarming, of course, to feel that you've "lost it", but I've been reading up the whole subject a little more closely of late and the news is not nearly as bad as it can feel. The science of the workings of memory has come a long way in the past decade alone. And it has once again attracted Hollywood's attention. "'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' (official site)' is one of the few films that has managed to take advantage of some of the storytelling possibilities of recent advances in memory research." Not due for release in France until October, the movie sounds pretty good, if the rest of Kirk Jobsluder's write-up on the film and the "mythical memory videotape" (Kuro5hin) is anything to go by. "Memory is not a videotape that can be rewound to a specific point in time, erased and wound forward again. We don't recall memory so much as recreate it anew each time. The badly-aged 'brain as computer' metaphor has tended to dominate speculative fiction about memory. In this metaphor, memory is encoded and stored on something analogous to a computer hard disk to be recalled and recovered later, and the ability to scan, project, copy, download, edit and delete memory makes perfect sense. In contrast, more recent research suggests that memory is quite a bit more slippery," Kirk says. The rest of his article is worth reading, as are a couple of entries on two different aspects of memory in the past week by Roland Piquepaille. On Monday, he told us of 'The Arrival of Nanotech Memories' and today, in Technology Trends, he explains "why researchers from Trinity College in Dublin are adding memory to virtual reality characters to give them a more realistic gaze". One of the most important things about memory decline with age is believing, wrongly, that you're doomed to suffer: "Research has also shown that common, everyday memory failures tend to be judged more harshly when the failure belongs to an older adult. What is laughed off in a younger adult is treated as an indication of cognitive decline in an older person. There are ways in which cognitive function (memory, reasoning, problem-solving, etc) declines with age, but it would be fair to say that general belief over-estimates the extent of this. It is, to a large extent, a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe deterioration is inevitable, you are not likely to make any effort to halt it." That observation at 'The Memory Key' reads like banal common sense -- unless you happen to be one of the worrywarts. I strongly commend that "key site", 'About Memory,' maintained by psychology PhD and author Fiona McPherson. It's regularly updated and includes a weblog. If you've got Shockwave Flash, one of the fun links at Fiona's site is to 'The Secret Life of the Brain' (PBS) in 3-D. A trip there is much cheaper than a run through a scanner! 5:26:38 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 26 mars 2004

'Too close to the story...' Ouf! Life is better this morning, after last night's "cri de coeur". I both got some sleep and kept the food down. Woke up remembering the nicer things that happened yesterday. A chat about Edison Denisov with Barry, who loved the Symphony I'd lent him (in a Russian recording which no longer appears to be available). And the Desk's "farewell and good luck" party for Carole, one of the Factory's nicest people, who flies out this weekend with her family to take up a post in Johannesburg. Godspeed and a kiss, Miss. Our loss will most definitely be the South African bureau's gain! If this morning's renewed spring sunshine lasts through next week, then I'm really going to enjoy those days off. What was not good, however, is that I dug out and popped a couple of Valium tabs before a long soak in the bath in the knowledge that they will make the day's work to come endurable. Resorting to such chemical crutches runs deep against the grain now, since it's exactly the kind of non-solution to angst, stress and guilt that I strongly feel all the physical and psychological treatment I've had for the Condition over 10 months was intended to render unnecessary... Yet I'd collapsed into bed last night wondering what the hell I was doing as AFP's Africa Editor! Two things almost overwhelmed me yesterday. First, it was exhausting fighting off the "vibes" emanating from one or two other stressed-out people on the Desk in the engine room, as if their own problems and emotions were a part of me! What of those "barriers" I'd spent so much time probing with Dr F.? Secondly, there's a deeper sensation I've never understood and perhaps never will. It's as if I was at once both in Paris, handling all the news pouring in, and in Abidjan as the day's awful events unfolded. This, I suppose, is a tribute to the communications skills of colleagues there whose descriptions of the place on the 'phone in many a conversation have put flesh on the bones of my own experience of other African cities... But it happens to me often with this kind of story. In another life, I might be probing the psychology of empathy (Health 24), which apparently triggers some of our emotional circuitry. A way into my sessions with Dr F., I asked her how she managed detachment. So many people, so many problems, hour after hour for day after long day. She smiled, but refused to answer. Pamela Cytrynbaum has a go in 'Why your therapist can't be your friend' ('Psychology Today'). I'd check to see what the admirable Kathryn Petro has to say about this kind of thing at 'A Mindful Life', but ... "duty calls". 10:57:03 AM  link   your views? []

jeudi 25 mars 2004

The killing season starts ... again Getting a mild dose of tear gas tonight was the least of my worries. As the Métro train was approaching Opéra station, the driver announced that there would be a little "smoke in the tunnel. Just don't panic, please. The train won't stop at Opéra." But it certainly wasn't just "smoke." I've no idea who was being gassed above ground and I'm too tired to care tonight. Far more importantly, my friends' most dire forecasts about Ivory Coast appear to have been right. I don't know about the other agency copy on the Net, but the stuff from the Factory -- 'I. Coast peace in shambles after deadly protests' (AFP/Yahoo) -- couldn't be filed from the office because our people were unable even to get to the place in that part of Abidjan. What happened today is the kind of insanity -- or, rather, deliberately orchestrated mayhem on the part of a head of state -- that makes people want to stop reading about Africa. "Meanwhile, in the midst of the bloodshed, international radio stations including France's RFI and BBC's Africa service, went off the air, just as they had done when rebels rose up in September 2002 against [President Laurent] Gbagbo." That paragraph fairly near the bottom of the story speaks volumes. One of the obvious ways in which a power maniac like Gbagbo can really scare the hell out of his people and set the panic and rumour mills going is to deprive them of the news from abroad about what's really happening at home. This particular piece of shit, during all his years in opposition, billed himself a socialist! A man of the people... After tomorrow, I think I'm going to avoid the news sites for a week, unless I want to be consumed by guilt for taking those long-awaited days off when I know staffing's short at work. I'd forgotten until tonight, but it was in part an inability to let go of a bad, breaking story -- and repeating that experience over and over again -- which led to the onset of the Condition last year. And I called last night's entry 'Avoidance therapy'? 10:31:32 PM  link   your views? []

mercredi 24 mars 2004

Avoidance therapy The Wildcat has placed her latest order for things wanted from Paris, but will have to wait. Yet another new publication appeared in Francis's shop today, offering the 'Star Trek: First Contact (IMDb)' DVD for less than five euros. "No!" Francis said. "Not allowed. Don't argue." "You're right. Thanks." Two of the Kid's top five films from last year, 'Pirates of the Caribbean' and 'Equilibrium' (both reviewed here), appeared earlier this month on DVD, cheap. When I snatched those up, I asked Francis to remind me next time I looked greedy that I had just nibbled into April's music and film budget. He gets a gold star for keeping his promise. In any case, I saved money today by the simple expedient of being woken up early by the return of the Condition and feeling so nauseous for most of the morning that by the time I thought of having lunch and told Karin I was going to fetch my tray, my colleague informed me that it had been closed for an hour. An hour I appear to have lost completely. I'd already shut my front door without my keys, but didn't find this out until tonight... Several other minor upsets followed. All in all, it was a very rough day. I needed to sit down in the Métro coming home so much that I let two impossibly crowded trains through before being third time lucky, apart from the almost equally impossibly obese woman crushing a man opposite. She was from one of those countries where many women seem to become huge in their 30s while most of the men seem to stay slim as rakes, had four massive rings squeezing her fat fingers and a piggy stare all, persistently, for me. "Do you ever find people so ugly to look at that it makes you feel sick?" I asked the Wildcat, obviously not meaning those who are unwell themselves. "Every day," she said, which I shouldn't have found reassuring, but did, while I also felt better for not having eaten any of the chocolate I'd last night again felt the urge to get for myself and friends at the Factory. I still don't feel hungry and will only try to eat something anyway when I'm tired enough to sleep afterwards. All moaning of this kind has felt sillier and more relative than ever since reading 'cancergiggles' properly on Monday and finally putting it in the blogroll. I hope that the reason I've not been able to log back on to Cass's site for a couple of days is that he has attracted so much attention with his writing, including a press release, also on Monday, at 'pharmiweb'. Checking the link led me to my latest encounter -- and a poetry contest -- at 'The Raving Atheist,' a site which must get a mention and describes itself as "an atheistic examination of the culture of belief: how religious devotion trivialises American law and politics". As of this morning, I've completed another "meaning to". All the blogrolled links here which provide feeds are henceforth in my newsreader, among a total of 164 subscriptions. This may seem a heck of a lot, but sorting it out has already proved a considerable help in my daily check on friends and foes. Plenty of people can change my outlook on life, including right-wingers with whom I disagree fundamentally. I've again forgotten whether to ask the Wildcat if she was so surprised at my boobied bloggers link because some of those people are in a totally different part of the political spectrum from the likes of ourselves... Maybe there are exceptions to the "scarily simple" first of Charles Miller's Rules of Argument ('The Fishbowl'), holding that you "will never change anyone's mind on a matter of opinion", but I'm grateful to Rainer ('Solipsism Gradient') for an excellent link to some extremely sensible suggestions. 11:46:08 PM  link   your views? []

mardi 23 mars 2004

Africa's digital divide: updated facts, downgraded priorities Checking out some background related to an Internet and Africa story before leaving work, I should have looked at my own blogroll, which was a darned sight more helpful than Google & Co. Much of what I wanted was recently rounded up right here: 'For Most Africans, Internet Access Is Little More Than a Pipe Dream (OJR).' A fine "workplace" report posted at the Online Journalism Review by Chris Aiden last week confirms several things I knew, but adds some interesting ones I didn't. Just to quote one example: "The Zimbabwe government has been criticized for suppressing the media; officials in the administration of President Robert Mugabe last year closed Zimbabwe's only independent daily paper, the Daily News. The paper was closed in September; and though it resumed operations last month, a government application to ban it is going through the courts. Nevertheless, Zimbabwe has experienced an explosion of new Internet users: With a population of 14.7 million, there are a half-million people accessing the Internet, up from 50,000 in 2000. That's an increase of 900 percent, and the country's Internet penetration rate -- 3.4 percent -- is among the highest of any country on the continent." On that OJR page alone, there are several dozen hot links, many of which are new even to a "specialist" like me. Strongly recommended to anybody else pursuing similar interests. 9:56:06 PM  link   your views? [] Men should abstain; we've been pigeon-holed... ...but the 'Hindustan Times' picks up a test for the ladies. "Jane Ridley puts women into 27 distinctive character types and claims all women fit into one of her categories. And her A-Z of the fairer sex, makes for some very interesting reading." In which Kate learns she's not, after all, an Alpha Female (Electric Venom). 11:04:31 AM  link   your views? [] Blood, riches and an ambitious African film Here's a film which we may not get to see in Europe or the States, though it looks promising at allAfrica Arts. "Sierra Leoneans seem determined to put behind them the nightmare and scars of that war. From the ashes of war, a new nation is already evolving. Early this year, Sierra Leoneans got a helping hand from the ever resourceful Nigerian movie makers who have already made a film based on the war. Set naturally in Sierra Leone, the film is based on a simple plot that exploited the bitterness associated with the struggle to control natural resources. (...) 'Blood Diamonds' was inspired by the producer's desire to discourage armed conflicts in Africa and also spread the message of peace. The movie also reflects most of the tragedies of the war like amputation, conscription of children into the army and many other vices of war. And for the director [Teco Benson], this is one of his most ambitious projects in his over 10-year career as a movie director." Full article by Sylvester Asoya for 'The News' in Lagos. 10:45:12 AM  link   your views? []

lundi 22 mars 2004

A surfeit of muses? Not likely Since around the middle of last week, the Condition has made one of those sporadic and irritating comebacks I was warned about by the doctors last year. This is a minor and tiring nuisance, but also a "warning sign". I'm very glad that in a few days, I'll be enjoying a stretch of real holiday, when I can catch up on overdue medical follow-up, family phone calls, outstanding e-mail and unwritten reviews. Right now, I return with relief to a favourite subject. Women. And one "remarkable writer" of a man. There's no pecking order here. Each of the women, "chicks", "girls," I mean to mention have outstanding qualities. First comes Cindy the "squip", who informs us, with a link to Clive Thompson's 'Honesty Virus' in the NYT magazine that "When online, we are oddly prone to telling the truth." Would you believe it? "This snippet from the essay made me laugh: 'I spend about an hour every day visiting blogs, those lippy Web sites where everyone wants to be a pundit and a memoirist. (Then I spend another hour writing my own blog and adding to the cacophony.)' (I now have visions of all blogs with big red lips on them, not unlike the Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse "kisses" urinals.) ;-)" Great stuff at 'Dusting My Brain'! Will Cindy shoot me if I mention how she's confessed that she's a "wild and crazy chick" (WCC)? It was that kind of self-definition -- and the impossibility of self-definition -- which cropped up last night when I had a wide-ranging chat with the Wildcat. After an hour, I had the Wildcat call me back. As you know, I learned many a lesson last year, about bills as well as about women. The Wildcat is in fine fettle. If I haven't mentioned her for some time, it wasn't because we're still fighting. For weeks, I didn't 'phone her and failed to answer the telephone when I knew it was her, knowing she'd leave a message if an emergency arose. My hope was that if we weren't nattering to each other, she'd be getting on with the writing she excels at when she puts her mind to it. And indeed she is, not every day but for herself when she's not doing it for the Factory. This is excellent news and I hope that it'll make her famous one day. The Wildcat's also feeling far healthier than she has for months, having survived the worst winter of her life, but the arrival of the sun where she is means that she faces the urgent problem of finding enough money to replace a fridge which has broken down and the shoes she'll need for the summer. I fear that she'll soon have to emerge from her anonymity and acquire some celebrity if she's going to make a living, because it's certainly not the Factory's policy regarding the wages of people like her that's going to make her rich. It was for the Wildcat, among others, that I've today managed to do one of the things otherwise postponed, because just as I encourage her writing, she it was who pressed me for an update here on the French battle for intelligence. She professed to be startled at my enthusiasm for 'Bloggers with Boobies' like Cindy, having apparently forgotten how gorgeous she looks herself -- if dangerous too, as now we know -- and how very hungry I get when women are as creative, "crazy" and unconventional as many are lucky enough also to be stunning to behold. I have now definitively forgiven her for fleeing at Christmas time when we could have gone to bed with each other. On the "chicks" and "girls" label that annoys some women but worries other not at all, the Wildcat informed me that she told one bloke who called her a "femme fatale" that she'd rather be known as a "fille fatale". There was then some debate as to whether or not she'd had more lovers than Carla Bruni... But I digress! Natalie has WCC qualities, of course. And the track that led me from her to Cindy and the other happily boobied bloggers -- or was it the other way round -- is too tortuous to describe, but we find common ground at one of my long-postponed "meaning tos". I've been meaning to write of Cass Brown, who gave another well-merited good review to 'The Joy of Letting Women Down' at 'Cancergiggles'. Yup. You read that correctly. Cass has describes his blog and more thus: "This site is hopefully an idiot's guide to accepting, living with, laughing at and dying from cancer. The very, very last bit I can't be absolutely sure of but then who the hell can? I could have put together some beautifully crafted, grammatically correct essays but I hope you will understand, that when I say 'I don't have a lot of time' I mean it far more literally than you do. I wanted to publish some thoughts which may just light a spark in some people." He succeeds, more modest than he need be about his writing. At the end of his own most recent post at 'Cancergiggles', Cass says: "If you ever, for one nano second, feel sorry for yourself, just simply be ashamed. Sorry to turn this on its head but this ISN'T ABOUT YOU. It's about the people you will leave behind and soon you will have absolutely zero input into the situation. Use whatever time you have to make them happy and for God's sake MAKE THEM LAUGH. If you have devoted your entire life to being a miserable, selfish, mean and entirely unattractive excuse for a human being, knock it off now! If you are bankrupt, don't have a friend in the world and your family has deserted you, get off your ass and make somebody else laugh. You get just one crack at this. You can't die happy if what you leave is a world of shit and grief. If at some stage in the future my name comes up and it elicits a wry smile from someone that's good. If it makes somebody laugh, you'll hear me jumping on the clouds." In his piece on Nat's book, he explains that he's "a partially reformed drunkard and a totally reformed womaniser." I'm a totally reformed drunkard. That proved so necessary that at the time it even seemed absurdly easy. As to the rest ... the Wildcat enjoyed herself last night. This was when I admitted that I had been wary of some women I found very attractive because I had considered myself "too old" or them "too young". The sheer stupidity of this inhibition came to light in the course of my encounters with Dr F., the psychosomatic "shrinkess", as one of my friends calls her. Whatever the Wildcat didn't do, she and Natalie both contributed to a crash course. Even if I've still much to learn. It gets worse. My acquaintances include a woman who's up to something extremely interesting I'd like to blog about, if she lets me. Now it would be dishonest to claim that her almost distressingly good looks have nothing to do with a conversation that went, in part, like this: "...but the last time I asked you out to dinner--" "Which was about 150 years ago," she interrupted. "--you set impossible conditions!" I finished, so astonished at the way she'd responded that it was a miracle I managed to complete the sentence. I don't know whether she and one or two other women who have inspired me in recent weeks, making life infinitely more palatable simply by being there, are WCCs. Yet. But the Wildcat, like Dr. F, thinks I've been one of the idiots of all time for hesitating to find out. Yes, I'm really looking forward to that week off, now that it's spring. "Why do we get all our funky new Aries Beginnings (Sun, Moon, and Mercury are partying up a storm in the sign of the rambunctious Ram) just as we slide into Winter? At least you northern Hemisphere-ites get some Spring into your step just as you're getting jiggy with it...," Goldie moans ('dramaqueen') That's simple. It's our turn! As to the Kid, time flies! The last weekend we were together, she decided to interrogate me about what brought me to France in the first place, and was delighted to learn that it was not a matter of what, but whom... Question after question, her eyes shining. "And after her," Marianne asked, "how did you meet Mum?" "You mean she's never told you?" "No," said the Kid, who's grown into a "blogger with boobies" herself in the past year. Well, possibly she wanted to hear the story all over again. Because now she's begun to understand what it's like. And as to the poor lad who couldn't tear his eyes off the Kid on the train, then thrust a hastily scribbled note of admiration and phone number into her hand just as she was getting off, oh heavens...! No. She never did call that number. 10:29:32 PM  link   your views? [] Minor iGripe: cleaning the Windows John Udell is a browser switcher. And the figure he mentions explains a little something which gnaws at my pride while possibly highlighting my incompetence. "In January 2004, 94.8 percent of Web surfers used Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, according to the Web analytics research company OneStat.com. Not me, though. For many months I’ve been using a Mozilla-based browser that can’t seem to settle on a name: Phoenix, Firebird, now Firefox. Identity crisis notwithstanding, it rocks. Trust me on this — I’m no knee-jerk open source bigot. During Mozilla’s long nuclear winter, I stuck with IE because I wasn’t willing to live with compromises. Then the tables turned. Suddenly, IE was the compromise I could not live with. Bugs didn’t get fixed. Standards support didn’t improve. New features didn’t appear. And the last vestige of cross-platform ambition evaporated when IE for the Mac was killed last year. The message is clear: Internet Explorer is dead in the water." 'Firefox fills the IE void,' John wrote at 'InfoWorld' on Friday. I'm happy with the browsers I've got, but here's Firefox 0.8 for Windows (and Mac). As to my pride, we are compelled to use IE 5 in the Factory. On Windows. And, unlike Explorer 5.2 for Mac, exceptionally in use in the following screenshot to prove my point, my computer at work obstinately refuses to display this experiment of mine as it should be seen. If the statistics John mentions are correct, up to 94.8 percent of my visitors conceivably do not see the right-hand column of my blog as anything other than a vertical mish-mash -- the way it looks at work and not as it does in the pic. I've done all that I can to rectify any errors in the HTML code. Nothing works, yet the site looks right in every other browser I've tried. So, sod it! Barry would recommend going to the Opera! 5:51:49 PM  link   your views? [] Three hefty blows to 'the Establishment' When there's so much of abiding interest to take in, meditate on and write about and so little time, the BBC's online 'Listen Again' feature is more than useful. It's a public service gift and necessity for busy people who need to plan ahead. Since I've had positive feedback about my previous links to programmes as Net subscription prices come down and more and more visitors here go "broadband", today's recommendation is something essential. This year's Reith Lecturer is going to be no less a figure than the phenomenal Nigerian writer, playwright and poet Wole Soyinka. His five weekly talks on a red-hot issue of our "terrorised" times, 'The Climate of Fear,' begin on Wednesday April 7 at 8:00 pm (that'll be 1800 GMT, I think, with the change to summer time imminent), with repeats on Saturday nights. The titles? 1. The Changing Mask of Fear 2. Power and Freedom 3. Rhetoric that Binds and Blinds 4. A Quest for Dignity 5. I am Right; You are Dead (more details at Radio 4 - Reith 2004). Soyinka sharpened the appetite this morning with an introductory appearance on Andrew Marr's 'Start the Week,' with other guests worth hearing too. Yesterday was "quiet" enough in the Factory to give me time to work on a couple of good feature stories from Africa. One of them -- written by a woman of such breath-taking beauty that she recently inspired a couple of my more elliptic entries here -- was such an original look at what it's like to be gay in Gabon that it was a real pleasure to render it into English! Her article included good quotes, that vital something some of us back in the engine room occasionally despair of getting from correspondents out in the field, particularly too many of the French ones. Born in a country long plagued by an institutional and turgid approach to the news, these people ruin potentially worthwhile stories by sending us pontificating ego-trips they classify as "analysis", which are regrettably prime candidates for the P13 treatment (my entry of March 9, to be pursued). However, that particular kind of pundit is an endangered species. Anne-Laure's story hasn't made it to the Web yet, so I can't link to it, but I can reference the more academic 'Heart of Lavender: In Search of Gay Africa,' written by Eugene Patron in 1995 for the 'Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review.' "The notion of Africans being 'innocent children' of nature, corresponds to European views that African sexual practices were primal and largely devoid of emotionally constructed associations. Likewise, homosexuality has also been vilified in western thought as being incompatible with intimacy and true romantic notions of love. As viewed from a defensive position, the ascribing of homosexual behavior to Africans and people of African descent can be regarded as doubly denying the emotional component of their sexual lives. It is not surprising then the popular view both in Africa and the African Diaspora that homosexuality is seen, as reported by Dynes, 'a "white vice" forced on healthy people to drag them down.'" The whole of Patron's essay is reproduced in 'People with a History' (Fordham University, NY). Yesterday's elections in the Comoros were so boring that even if we duly churned out several hundred words about them, I can't find almost no evidence that they ever happened on the Net. However, I'm delighted to mention a 'Setback for French government as Socialists surge' (AFP/Yahoo): "'This is a rejection of the government's policies..., a rejection of their effects in terms of employment, public services, education, research. In short the French wanted to deliver a serious warning,' said Socialist party leader Francois Hollande." After the second round of polling next weekend, I'll have more to say. Meanwhile, anybody would think that Hollande might have been reading 'Les Inrocks'. The sole contribution I could make to this "rejection of the government's policies", since I've never bothered to acquire dual nationality, was signing that petition I've reported on (the 'Appeal against the War on Intelligence'). Not only does the fight go on, but that document has led to the publication in the press of a mass of material I'm still wading through with the intention of summing it up here. This includes dozens of accounts by people bearing personal testimony to the destruction wreaked on whole sectors of society by the current government's policies of privatisation and other features of Thatcherism revisited. "Oh, that magic feeling Nowhere to go Nowhere to go-ooo" From 'L'écume de mes jours' (illustrated) Worse still, artists and scientists alike have been writing at length of the systematic suppression of creativity, intelligence and vital cultural activity considered to be of no economic value. Most interestingly, the war against such a mercenary approach at the top is no longer being waged merely by the "intellectuals" who sparked off a counter-attack from people in power. A few of the most telling contributions published in the latest issue of 'Les Inrockuptibles' itself, based on people's day to day experience, have been submitted by a medical secretary, a costume designer, an out-of-work actor, a young student of architecture... Some of these "witnesses" make a point of saying they don't think of themselves as intellectuals, but consider that they are in the front line of victims of the government's notions of economic success. Their "evidence" stands alongside that of people like the director of the Théâtre de la Bastille, whose website has gone as far as to publish a separate editorial -- in French -- about 'L'offense faite à la démocratie' (warning, Flash with an irritating sound effect!) Interestingly, a term that appears often in these articles, both on the Internet and in the written press, is "la résistance". Nowhere has the magazine that started all this fuss spoken of a "resistance movement". Instead, this idea is raised by different people from across the country who've begun to explain why they signed or support the petition. On March 4, though 'Libé' has slid a long way towards mediocrity since the paper I remember of the 80s, it gave column space for a reply to Xavier Darcos, junior minister for school education ('Libération'). Darcos makes mention of a "collective project" for society which he alleges forms part of the government's plans. First I've heard of it. The very use of the word "collective" by any member of the current crew of clowns strikes me as an ideological contradiction in terms. "2003/2004, l'année des menteries. 2003/2004, trois chefs d'Etat de trois grands pays ont menti. 2003/2004, Bush-Blair-Aznar. Ainsi vont la vie et le vice." ('mensonge(s) d'état et songes disparates', at davduf) Yes, but we knew that. What about here? Now? In France? The same day in the same paper, Pierre Marcelle was among the first to break the entertaining tale of how the prime minister asked his ghost-writers to start peppering his speeches with "a bit of culture" ('Raffarin et l'intelligence'). It was a dreadful mistake. Even a ham actor could have read those quotes as if he understood what he was saying. It may not be The Revolution. But I'll keep you posted on the Resistance. 4:16:41 PM  link   your views? []

samedi 20 mars 2004

Tony, the taxman and the TV: sunspots or psychic powers? Tony's been having problems, round in Odessa Street. And I haven't a clue what to tell him. This, with his permission, is what happened, from his e-mail: "DO U know about sunspots? Or possibly load shedding by electricity generators? I ask becos when I sought relief from filling out my tax declaration a wave of electronic hell hit me. First I tried your blog (anything 4 a laugh) which took 5 minutes to move from the heading, then froze after a few words, oddly spaced. I gave up & tried to change an address in my phone repertoire; a long but uncomplicated operation I've done many times - the machine simply failed to obey. After that I turned on my TV which went RED. Then I turned everything off & went back to my tax declaration: a long but complicated operation, since my pension consists of 12 different sums which I have to add up 3 times B4 I get the total right. Discouraged, I took no action & the condition cured itself. Is there a technical explanation? Do U know it? Wd I understand it? Or shd I just ask Sainte Anne's to keep me a bed? I imagine that the explanation must be sunspots or load shedding by the local power station but can't help a feeling that someone is sending me a message: You are not fit for the modern world, chum." Any thoughts? I have been to 'Sunspots in History' (Spaceweather), where I learned that "some people claim that even the length of mini-skirts and the performance of stocks are affected by sunspots." By way of 'A Vos Mac!' magazine, I discovered two pieces of software, one called Celestia and the other called 'Stellarium'. Both are free and quite remarkable, but proved a major distraction from Tony's complaint. I've Googled in vain, finding lots of information, but little of it within my grasp. Then I tried Enchanted Learning. And ended up at 'The Roots of Consciousness (William James site),' an online version of a hefty tome by Jeffrey Mishlove. This much I now know: I don't think it would be either wise or necessary to entrust Tony to the care of St Anne's mental hospital, particularly on the first day of spring this side of the equator. But the question of mind and matter has moved on apace in the years since I read Fritzoj Capra, as is amply illustrated by a highly rated reading list on 'Consciousness in Physics' (Amazon US) by one "marrorris2". In the meantime, Tony, you might get an answer out of EDF by the simple expedient of deducting an appropriate percentage from the payment of your electricity bill for each day the television turns RED. 7:23:11 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 19 mars 2004

Impatient for Enki The Kid has a potential new school to visit at the end of the month. As if that weren't enough for a special Saturday's excitement or disappointment, Marianne's already obtained her Mum's agreement to let her be in Paris in time to take me to see 'Immortel'. Of all the interesting prospects recently trailed in the cinemas, this looks set to be one of the best. The poster's yet to appear on the streets, but the style is instantly recognisable. We're both hot fans of Yugoslav-born artist Enki Bilal, whose work I've mentioned before. His third film -- drawing on characters from 'La Foire aux Immortels' (a 1980 "comic" book series) is released here next Wednesday and is already all over the multi-media press. The original, available in English as 'The Nikopol Trilogy', takes place in the Paris of 2023, but presumably in one of Bilal's rare concessions to the demands of the market, the film's set in New York, 2095. It looks stunning, going by the trailer and some of the most prolific pre-release work I've seen in magazines since the original 'Matrix'. The 'Immortel Ad Vitam' movie site is in French, as is by far the best Enki Bilal site, but 'The MovieBox' offers a synopsis and other details in English, with some further links. The star with the striking hairstyle is Linda Hardy, who came came to public notice as Miss France 1992 (photo credit: Marianne Rosenstiehl of H&K). She made her first film, 'Recto Verso' (Allociné, Fr.) six years later. Though little more than an unpretentious comedy, it had the merit of being out of the ordinary, which makes Hardy a prime candidate for the 'Final Fantasy' treatment. Charlotte Rampling's also in 'Immortel'. This can only bode well, as does the choice of Thomas Kretschmann, who was brilliant in Polanki's 'The Pianist' (Rotten Tomatoes), to play Nikopol. While I'm not in the habit of saying much about films before I review them, this has to be an exception. It's even inspired yet another noteworthy addition to the multi-media press here, making the cover of the promising 'Parallax' N° 1 (no site ... yet). 8:36:36 PM  link   your views? []

jeudi 18 mars 2004

Gossip column (from the blogroll) "Estuary English [the kind more and more people have started speaking in the 20 years since I quit the country] is the form of the English language common in the South-East of England, especially along the river Thames and its estuary. It is a hybrid of Received Pronunciation and a number of South Eastern accents, particularly from the London and Essex area. Some people think it will eventually replace Received Pronunciation as the Standard English pronunciation." That surprising assertion is in the Wikipedia. The link came from the London call girl darling of the moment. Who is suggesting that others "confess (to her) sins", if they insist (Belle de Jour). "This is rubbish and far too meta for my taste," she reassuringly adds. "I want to write about the usual things again. Let us return to the suck/fuck/sleep/gossip, shall we?" zzz Ah, the same old lies, but it's a long time since I mentioned D. 'Strangelove' Rumsfeld: "I’m delighted to see that MoveOn has acted quickly to put together an ad based on Rumsfeld’s 'Face the Nation' appearance on Sunday. Well worth watching. Send it to a friend." Sez Liz at 'mamamusings'. zzz "Downhill Battle presents: The Reasons to get rid of the major record labels. Here are the reasons (each is explained): Music diversity will grow. Pay-for-play radio will end. Independent music won't be marginalized. The lawsuits will stop. Artistic freedom will expand. Musicians will make a better living." From J-Walk Blog zzz Now this is a couple of weeks old. But still ... unusual! "That's it," warned 'blogjam'. "We're all going to die." zzz "Do you know what a stereogram is? It's a two-dimensional image that, when viewed properly, reveals a three-dimensional image within it. The trick to experiencing that transformation is to have enough distance from the image and to relax your gaze. Then it seems to pop right out. It can be very soothing as well as fascinating to rest your gaze within the picture. Well, that's what insight is, for me. If you look too closely at a situation, poring over minutiae, and if you stare too hard, you won't see it. Just relax. Step back from your thoughts. After awhile, insight emerges; it feels a bit magical. And you find yourself thinking, 'Wow! I see it! Wonder why I didn't before?'" writes Kathryn Petro. At 'A Mindful Life'. Stereograms were among many interesting things Marianne and I once found at Futuroscope. zzz Ye Gods! "Daytrip: Group Hug. True Confessions?" From 'WomanChild' (Snozberry). 11:00:31 AM  link   your views? []

mercredi 17 mars 2004

If you think I'm a 'braindead fuck', be bolder about it Francis, bless him, thought to keep me a copy of 'El Pais' for the Kid's eventual 18th birthday collection (the Faithful Five ¾ know what that is by now). Perusing the paper after my nightly stop by his shop, I felt tremendous admiration for the courage and resilience of the Spanish people, picking up their "lives as normal" after last week's atrocity. This bravery and contempt for the bombers is also manifest in some e-mail I've had from Madrid. I've already made clear, one way or another, what I think of the simple-minded clowns who've used the Net and other media to equate the outcome of the Spanish election with "cowardice in the face of terrorism". However, some of the stuff coming out of the United States in the past two or three days, such as an editorial by Wesley Pruden in his 'Washington Times', has been of a kind to make me feel both annoyed and disheartened. Being angry will get me nowhere, but I really don't like the feeling that a number of the people for whom I once felt a degree of respect, even friendship, have gone to live on a different planet, where almost intolerable arrogance and a total refusal to give even a moment's thought to the real origins of the behaviour they find unacceptable is the norm. Meanwhile, it's intriguing to see what some people use the search box on this place for -- the Atomz people being kind enough to send me a weekly report. So far this month, "sex" tops the list with 62 searches, presumably attributable to spiders rather than people, but who the hell's going to come here expecting to find "pictures of torture instruments" ... or "corky's lost car keys"? Some of my recent reflections have earned me hate mail, if only a little. This neither surprises me nor troubles me, but I do wish at least one of the four people who bothered to send it had been able to spell properly. If you want to insult me, you're welcome to do it right here on the blog! That's what the comments box is for and there's slightly more of a chance I might see some point in replying. To keep it private and personal smacks of ... well, you know what. As to the nice mails also piling up, I'll reply as of Friday. Sorry, but it's been a busy week. And by then, the mini-heatwave we've been enjoying will be over. Right now, there are good reasons to stay out late. 10:51:52 PM  link   your views? [] Use and abuse in the 'morning paper' Just occasionally, the Kid has been known to eat popcorn. "Health officials insist people who microwave popcorn and eat it at home are not in danger, although the Environmental Protection Agency is studying the chemicals released into the air when a bag of microwave popcorn is popped." Chemicals? In the air? The stuff isn't good for you, that we knew. But I had no idea how awful it could be for the people who make it until I saw Eric People's story on the BBC: 'Popcorn victim wins $20m damages'. zzz "No longer can we sit in grubby geek glee, protected by our avatar shields, wearing only uniforms of underwear. Endangered are the days where we can pass digital transmissions and gas simultaneously, picking our noses with one hand, and stuffing pizza down our throats with the other." Well. During last year's heatwave, I was certainly clad in little more than underwear when I was working at home. And yesterday was warm enough, at last, to wonder what this summer will bring. They can't insist on trousers at the Factory -- can they? True, I prefer to have an idea what people I'm talking to look like. And since this may be reciprocal, I allowed the Kid to snap me with the 'phone camera last weekend, to adorn -- or otherwise -- my "about" page here. But video conferencing is not my thing and I've done with chat. For those who have made the leap, with iSight or whatever, Nitrozac and Snazzy are really trying to be helpful, offering hi-tech tips on making you look your best: 'You Sexy Thing!' (MacDev Center). zzz As if that were not enough, Apple plans to be seriously more helpful to disabled computer users with a 'Spoken Interface' for OS X. Some of us have only just upgraded to Mac OS X 10.3.3 (I went that way last night once I was sure it was safe), but the industry speculators reckon the new technology is in hand for OS X 10.4 (MacRumors). zzz As to the iPod, Apple's last exercise in genius, it wasn't meant to be killer technology: "A Memphis woman was arrested and charged with first-degree murder after she bludgeoned her boyfriend to death with an iPod." ('Liquid Generation') Via OxDECAFBAD. zzz "PARIS -- The European Parliament approved a controversial piracy law that would allow local police to raid the homes and offices of suspected intellectual-property pirates, search their financial records and even freeze suspects' bank accounts." This includes "fake Chanel and Viagra", 'Wired' reports. zzz OK. Now we've seen iPod murder. How about iPod bribery dating? "Hi, I’m having my parents come visit me sometime in the next two weeks and have lied and told them I am dating someone I am in love with. You will only have to come to one dinner. In exchange for this I will buy you an IPOD - yes new - we walk into the store together and buy a new IPOD. Let me know if this interests you, and if you want to be in a loving relationship with all the benefits it brings ;-) I want to pretend we are totally in love." Any interested women might read on here ('Engadget). Jeremy Zawodny told me about this, via 'Hot Links'. 11:14:51 AM  link   your views? []

mardi 16 mars 2004

Oh yes, the Bloggies... I'd forgotten about those annual awards (Fairvue). Tom, with a well-deserved win in the Best British or Irish Weblog category, thanks the academy on behalf of 'plasticbag.org'. "More importantly, I'm genuinely delighted to report that I somehow won the Best Essay Bloggie as well for '(Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything'." One of his "rivals", Andrew Day, is in mock belligerent mood ('I'd Like to Bomb the Academy'). He'd done 'Making a Good Blog for Dummies'. I was surprised to see Rebecca Blood listed for an essay on 'weblogs: a history and perspective' (in her 'Pocket'), since it's been around for more than three years, but then if it wasn't for Rebecca, there's a chance my own experiment would never have started... Anyway, congratulations, Tom, because that essay was pretty outstanding. 10:57:45 AM  link   your views? []

lundi 15 mars 2004

A plague on black and white extremists! I've never bothered even to begin to notice which political post on 'BC' (along with views on sex and religion) triggers the most comments, pro and strongly against, but Mike Larkin's doing pretty well with 'Blood on YOUR Hands' (Blogcritics). It's scarcely surprising when he starts out with the assertion that "those who instigated the Iraq war have the blood of Madrid on their hands". Though it's scarcely an extremist piece of writing, provided you read the rest, Mike has stirred up one or two people in the narrow-minded outer reaches of both sides of the political divide. Spain's weekend election result has led to a lot of simplistic nonsense up here to the north of the country too. I'd hardly set foot in the Factory today when somebody suggested I might want to grab a copy of the daily rag, 'France Soir', for its cover picture and the Kid's growing 18th birthday collection (which will be the big headlines of her lifetime and earlier). Thanks but no thanks. For your information, if not edification, it looked like this and the caption means, in the unlikely event you can't tell, "Whose turn?" Nobody will be astonished that 'W' is making the most -- or the worst -- of the vote's outcome, informing us that "the Left has no qualms about getting into bed with Al-Qaeda" '(merde in france)', while his buddy, 'the dissident frogman', is having a field day with 'The Difference'. To a kindly communication from 'W' asking why I recently referred to 'MiF' as "that entertaining pair", I replied that I think I was confusing hysteria with schizophrenia. zzz On a less sombre and absurd note -- and especially for Lee at 'Odessa Street', who can't live without Fela's music -- the next rather aged photo I found, uncredited, at an unlikely place in Japan, AFLANG, which, like it sounds, deals mostly in Japanese with the achievements of "students and researchers who have keen interest in African languages". There are surprisingly few pictures of the late Fela in cyberspace, and most of those I spotted had him in black and white on stage, in rather less relaxed mood. What triggered the search was an article in a Nigerian newspaper about 'Fela: through the eyes of Femi Bankole Osunla', which appeared in my newsreader at the weekend via 'allAfrica'. "The photographs of Femi Bankole Osunla have introduced countless people to the beauty of Afro Beat as an art," writes Onome Amawhe in a good tribute, with anecdotes, about both artists. "His ability to capture performances and intimate moments of the maverick Fela Anikulapo Kuti during the golden age of Afro Beat, earned him the nickname 'Femi Foto,' as well as leading to his art now being associated with the genre. 'Fela’s afro beat,' declares Osunla, 'is now at the centre piece of our history that grows in eminence in each passing day.' The 49-year old is now reaping the benefits of what is justly his." (More in the 'Vanguard'). zzz Another piece to grab my attention as I caught up on events outside Europe came from Chad the physicist. "Coal miners have it much worse than academics, you see, so everybody should just stop complaining. Also, there are children starving in Africa, so eat your vegetables, you ungrateful little snots." Well, yes, that's one way of seeing it, but Chad knocks down this -- again simplistic -- kind of argument in a thoughtful entry about what he describes as "The Starving Children Fallacy" ('Uncertain Principles'). Chad takes exception to David Lester's article moaning about whiners called 'Complain, Complain' in 'The Chronicle of Higher Education', which is apparently "topic of the moment in the academic blogging world". zzz For reasons almost all not worthy of bitching about here, I'm in a sour mood myself tonight. Apart from the purely personal ephemeral ones, I think that the shock of the massacre in Spain has finally hit home, worsened by some of the immensely stupid things I've been reading about its aftermath in the news and the blogosphere. As if the event was not tragic enough without fools rushing in to make capital out of it. There's also good news and bad from west Africa. The really excellent tidings are that Laurent, my buddy in Ivory Coast, and his wife Ida now have a baby daughter. The sad news is that over the past few days, friends in Abidjan have told me that they can no longer avoid the feeling that the extremists in that country are determined to plunge it back into civil war. UN peacekeeping troops are due to arrive next month in Ivory Coast, where French and west African soldiers have been patrolling the ceasefire lines after a ceasefire signed more than a year ago, but there are extremely nasty indications that the truce is not going to hold. One can hope that an analysis piece filed by the Factory (AFP/Yahoo) on March 7 will hold good. But since then, signs of trouble have worsened, even if the world's media are paying scant attention right now to what they're getting from their correspondents there. A volatile band of thugs politely referred to in hard news copy as a "youth militia" allied to President Laurent Gbagbo, the Young Patriots, last week thought it a good idea to beat up magistrates whose appointments they didn't like, prompting Washington to go public with concern (VOA). Looking in from the outside, it's only too easy to see a pattern to a whole series of such incidents. These fiery "students" are unleashed and do their worst. It's always afterwards that Gbagbo tells them that he really doesn't approve of that sort of thing. Yeah. The disapproval and announced deterrent measures are beginning to wear pretty thin. 10:59:19 PM  link   your views? []

dimanche 14 mars 2004

Feisty ladies and Feist (iv) Sounds great OK, I know it's right off centre! You don't have to tell me that. Whoops. Let's start again. Bloggers-boobies-people-music,lead Feisty ladies and Feist (iv) Sounds great (take 2) ATTENTION - CORRECTION in first para of Bloggers-boobies-people-music pls read it x x x slightly right-of-center x x x Corrected lead follows: /// She's slightly right-of-center and will thus lend me a helping hand, if required, when I keep falling the other way. She's crafty, creative and currently on vacation with one of her kids. She's anti-feminist and got "a (very) little prodding" to found not a cult, but a community. I'm not allowed to join, since I'm inappropriately equipped, or so Cindy 'Dusting my Brain' 'Squipper' tells me in an unsolicited but nicely posted note. All these things I know because of Cindy and 'Note-it Posts', which is where she -- Dana that is -- lives and made a launch-pad for 'Bloggers with Boobies'. By way of equally unsolicited condolences, Cindy suggested that I might lend some uplifting support for booby-proud bloggers. Which, as the Faithful Five ¾ may well imagine by now, struck me as the natural thing to do. Especially in the wake of last week's conversation at the Factory about bra-burning. But I'd better spare you that... Thus it was done. And when Dana gets back from Texas, she'll find a note promising a joke in exchange for a link to the support of my support. If you're now satisfactorily lost, you can have the joke straight away, courtesy of the Kid, who will alarmingly soon be a blogger with boobies herself. Marianne sent me a pair of iBoobs -- "i" is in -- from 'Joe Cartoon' (Flash site: 'Gerbil in a light socket')... To confuse you just a little more, Cindy said she fell over me by accident (or perhaps by design) when I led her to Natalie, who has been left alone lately since Augustine on March 4 got an exclusive interview with GOD. By the way, I didn't buy the "anti-feminist" line for a minute, despite the bold declaration. So I looked further and found that what Dana really objects to is "the post-femiNazi generation". She wants them to "Suck my left tit!" If I'm not being a right tit, what this must mean is that Dana & Co are anti-feminist post-femiNazi feminists. Which must make them non-PC and puts them in good company here. Yes, all right. I'll talk about music instead. Her early career left behind, Leslie Feist (more Flash) is a Canadian who has adopted Paris and whom I discovered a week or two before 'Les Inrocks' published Renaud Monfourny's picture stolen here.* "You can be a girl who cries in the bath and the next minute goes out to party all night long," Leslie tells the magazine in an interview published this week. That's exactly the way she sounds on 'Let It Die' (or Amazon Fr.), released this month. I'll let the Kid write the first review for Amazon, since she'd like to try to win a gift voucher for 100 euros, since we're both knocked out by Leslie's astonishing voice, which is more liquid crystal. Whether introspective or in festive mood, Feist gets every note right with the vocal control of a Madonna after training, and to the Kid's ears, no less than the star quality and intimacy of a Norah Jones. Neither comparison gets her right, though. Feist switches register and dynamics with absolute ease and often the most sparing and accomplished of accompaniments put to the service of poetry set to music. Six of the memorable songs -- as far as I can make out from some very small print on a CD which deliberately says nothing at all about her and the other musicians -- are written by Feist, while she also spans the decades and performs a couple of jazzy standards by Blossom Dearie. In 'Les Inrocks', Christophe Conte says she dug "When I was a Young Girl" out of the "fabulous archives of the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax" ('Dirty Linen'). Her style is ... well, if you can find the word for such an eclectic album, you're as clever as I was when I found Feist in a FNAC store during my ongoing quest in pursuit of the voices of remarkable women. A passage in Conte's interview puts it nicely: "Feist recounts that she found the ideal illustration of her life as an artist the first time she clambered up to the top of the Arc de Triomphe and saw the avenues leaving in every possible direction from the place de l'Etoile. But the star, now, is her, and the triumph, moreover, won't hang around long before taking her by surprise in her anonymity." She wasn't that anonymous, as Mike Bell wrote three years back for Jam! (Calgary Sun), but is one of those people who feel they've lived several lives already. "When I wrote those songs," she says today of 'Monarch', her first "solo" album released then, "I found myself alone for the first time, in a town where I knew nobody." To quote the rest would be stretching the "fair use" principle, but Leslie gives the impression that if people describe 'Let it Die' as her first solo recording, they wouldn't be far from the truth. Let it die is what she's done. Let's hope her next life is a good one. _______ *All flaws in the scaled-down detail from Renaud Monfourny's picture are a reflection of my relative incompetence and not of his work. There's more of the latter at, for example, the Fun Lovin' Criminals (flcnyc). 7:16:14 PM  link   your views? []

samedi 13 mars 2004

'The Butterfly Effect': on badly burnt wings and a prayer We were going to catch 'Big Fish' this weekend, me and the Kid, but got drawn instead into a long ramble of a film. Such a winding trail, indeed, that I cheat: "A gripping, supernatural thriller that taps into the turbulent nature of past, present and future. When a young man (called Evan) learns he can change the nature of his painful life by replacing his memories, he accidentally transforms the lives of everyone he holds most dear -- with chilling consequences. As his new existence spirals dangerously out of control, he races to discover the single event from his past that will save his life and reunite him with his one true love." Hmm. "Races" is scarcely the word for 'The Butterfly Effect'! That was the "official" synopsis. I'd only seen one write-up before we went in, had never heard of its star Ashton Kutcher before (apparently he usually does comedy), and was led to expect a moderately interesting sci-fi drama. Fiction it certainly was, by the sloppy bucketful, in a series of episodes (those transformations) of varying interest which had me coming out hopping for a pee, as if we'd just sat without a break through so many episodes of a mystery B-series for TV that I lost count. Science it most certainly wasn't. The premise, you are kindly reminded at the outset, is the famous chaos theory one coined by Edward Lorenz in 1963 -- Greg Rae explains chaos (imho) -- and developed in 1972 for a talk on 'Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?' The tornadoes triggered when Evan tampers with time involve all kinds of alternatives for his one true love (Amy Smart), including plenty of sex, violence, drugs and rock'n'roll, and problems of varying sizes for everybody else, including his mother (Melora Walters). Mum gets worried early on when Evan's teacher asks the class to show her what they'd like to be when they grow up and our seven-year-old hero hands in a picture of a psychopathic killer: one the poor boy has no recollection of drawing. From there on in, the plot goes to places which are sometimes the fruit, to be fair, of remarkably lively imaginations. Marianne buried her face in my shoulder only once, and when I remarked on this later, she said she had shut her eyes rather more often (in Britain, it will be released with a R-15, in Canada it's an 18A, says the IMDb, but for the French it's R-12). The acting, at all ages, is consistent and solid, the subject matter includes some of the nastier aspects of life we now talk about openly, such as paedophilia, and writer-directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber seemed so keen to get several messages across that they forgot that the plot -- and the science -- should at least make sense! I didn't find 'The Butterfly Effect' "achingly dull", as one of the unkinder IMDB reviewers thought, but it dropped off my credibility scale well under halfway through and only stopped me escaping to the loo before the end because some of the characters sustained my interest even when I was otherwise bored or mildly appalled. Without going into gore, some of the clichés the movie fails to avoid are very unpleasant, but they are clichés of the kind that makes life itself a horrible place sometimes. It's a film I'll remember, for certain episodes, and has some amusing moments as well, but the "serious social issues" the Kid and I will be talking about in its wake were in the right places at the wrong time in the wrong way. She enjoyed it, but hasn't rated it yet. For a whole that turned out to be so much less than some of its parts, I can't manage more than a 3.5/10, even for effort. 'The Butterfly Effect' does try very hard to succeed, and maybe that's half the problem. It makes me want to be more generous to it. That prolific 'unemployed critic (IMDb)' who didn't like it at all -- though many did -- suggests that "the similarly themed 2001 film 'Donnie Darko' is a much better take on the time bending mysteries of the brain". If the rotten tomatoes are anything to go by, that looks like a sound point. 9:27:47 PM  link   your views? [] RSS news and blogfeeds clearly explained Especially for Barry -- and everybody else who has been asking me, again, of late. We have Dave Pollard to thank for 'What's this "RSS" all about?' ('How to Save the World', no less, a Salon blog). Dave kindly provides links to newsreaders for Windows users, to whom my raving about NetNewsWire is no help. Via the ever more admirable Cindy at 'Dusting My Brain' ('Squipper'). 11:55:01 AM  link   your views? []

vendredi 12 mars 2004

The bombs in Madrid: 'meta-links' and pointers As for many people, no doubt, my thoughts and feelings today have kept on returning to the barbaric attacks in Madrid, as an undercurrent to the "routine" work and the banter of the newsroom. Such savagery, the meaningless wrecking of so many lives, at first almost robbed me of words, like D.W. at 'Brain not found' (Fr.): "Ils sont graves les jours où on arrive même plus à rire de nous même. Parce qu'ils sont 200 preuves de l'absurde imbécilité des extrêmes humains. Parce qu'ils laissent derrière eux des femmes et des enfants et autant de vides irréparables. Parce que ces trains éventrés. Parce que certains jours, l'ironie n'a plus sa place." But he did find a voice again after that post, could laugh at himself and the world anew, just as we all must even when we grieve. Those who appalled me in the aftermath of such "absurd imbecility in human extremes" are a few politicians whose words we have endured today, men and women who deserve nothing but contempt for their swift manipulation of the event to their own self-serving policies, ideologies and ends. Often I'm teased for a cynic, but it's people like these whom I would call cynical, almost as callous, cold-blooded and extremist in their way as those they purport to abhor. In a striking contrast to the state of the Internet after the attack on the Twin Towers, 911 days earlier as 'news24' was swift to point out, a strange silence about the slaughter in Spain seems to have taken hold of the blogosphere, especially in my regular haunts on the far side of the Atlantic. There've been notable exceptions and I'm making no judgement about the widespread lack of comment; it's just that I'm surprised. Why's it so very quiet? In English, Xeni Jardin's been posting helpful pointers to the reactions to the attacks at 'boingboing'. Xeni also contributed to an article by Leander Kahney on how the "Net cries out for Madrid" at 'Wired'. Without wishing to engage in useless duplication of these "meta-link" articles, they include a growing list of blogs and their posts at '11 de marzo de 2004' at 'bitacoras', which also provides an automatic translation into English -- no worse than most, and certainly better than none. 'jsmooth995' put hours of effort into a similar attempt at 'hiphopmusic', coming up with 50 blogs and links. And Victor R. Ruiz did another great job at 'Blogging in the wind,' including a link to a Flash graphic of what happened yesterday morning prepared for 'El Pais' newspaper, which is as chilling an understatement, in the shape of a moving map and commentary, as the photographs have been shocking. As for comment, some of the best I have read -- and I apologise here to people whose work I've much appreciated but don't have the time to note -- comes from Chris Allbritton, who has said some of the most thoughtful things about 'Who's to blame?' at 'Back to Iraq' and in an editorial at the 'New Zealand Herald'. Though I don't share all the views expressed in it, the latter kicks a piece of "patriotic" pro-Bush drivel at the 'New York Post'' back into the gutter. I'm sure we'll see only too much more of such nonsense. Lee Harris offers a far more reflective piece on what Madrid might mean for key elections this year in 'A Greater Challenge?' at 'Tech Central Station'. At the weekend, I'll try to reply to people who've been e-mailing me lately, particularly after yesterday's post and in response to my observations on the current anti-government protests in France, but for tonight, I felt the best thing to do was try to help a bit more with the links. 10:00:08 PM  link   your views? []

jeudi 11 mars 2004

MADRID DISASTER ¡BASTA YA! (Enough is enough, stop it) I don't know and I don't care 11 DE MARZO 2004 La Petite Claudine (Sp) Terror Oficina de Objetos Perdidos (Sp) Me uno a vosotros... La Cosa Húmeda (Sp) My city in ruins... So far so good (no permalink; Sp) Black Day Ambivalence Si a la PAZ Boulé (Sp) ¡BASTA YA! Coffee & Bagels (Sp) Pero esto que coño es? Se nos va la pinzA (Sp) Madrid, 11th March 2004 Nothing else matters today. Puerta del Sol Blog Shock and grief in Madrid (BBC) World leaders (AFP/Yahoo) Association for Peace in the Basque Country [White hyacinth credit: John Harvey] 9:42:02 PM  link   your views? [] French musicians to sue Apple? Is Apple giving artists a raw deal? 'The Register' reports from San Francisco that SACEM, the rather conservative French society of composers, music creators and publishers, plans to sue Apple for failing to compensate artists over the iPod. Coincidentally, Apple's amazing music player is right now the object of an inescapable advertising campaign all over Paris. You can scarcely set foot in the street, let alone the Métro, without seeing the posters. 'Under a French law passed [getting on for] two years ago, hard disk players are subject to a levy that goes to compensate royalty holders. Sacem (...) says Apple has failed to comply, and will sue for back fees," Andrew Orlowski writes in 'The Register'. I've mentioned before that not only such players but also "virgin" audio CDs, DVDs and every other object the French can make extra cash from to pay royalties are subject to a tax, a factor to be taken into account when it comes to the music copying debate here. The story was "wired" by the Associated Press ('French group seeks royalties on iPod'; 'The Globe and Mail', tech): "...unless Apple settles its growing account, the agency that collects the payments 'will have no other option than to go immediately to court to make sure that the rights of artists, composers and producers are respected.' (...) The levy on a top-of-the range iPod, which retails at 550 euros ($677 U.S.) at French department store FNAC, would come to 20 euros ($24.63). Sacem estimates that Apple sold 20,000 iPods in France last year, with disk capacities ranging from 10GB to 40GB. In 2003, the society collected some 150-million euros ($185-million U.S.) in levies on hard disks and blank media sales on behalf of artists and other rights holders." As one of the 20,000 people concerned, I'd have no objection to paying the levy if SACEM is right. Such levies are not the best solution to theft by file-sharing, but the artists should get their dues. With appropriate links, 'The Register' also has it that: "Last year Apple Computer quietly removed [Downhill Battle] a claim on its iTunes Music Store that the service was 'fair to artists'. Major label deals can leave artists indebted for years ['The Problem with Music' at Negativland']." 11:27:49 AM  link   your views? []

mercredi 10 mars 2004

Zapping the blogosphere (sound included) and the 'deep Web' This is truly weird and wild. "Weblogs are the voice of the people, connecting millions of individuals to their own audience on a daily basis. But what does this communication sound like?" Radio Vox Populi [now dead; Sept 04], whence the diagral, offers the ghost of an answer by sampling weblogs and reading them to you. Should you have iTunes, using one of the "tune in" buttons will open an internet radio stream. So does Audion and VLC. All done by robot. If you've got broadband, click here and if you're on dial-up, try this. It's the work of Media Lab Europe. Found via Squipper's 'Dusting My Brain'. I've meant to explore Squipper's place since the day I was flattered to find myself on her blogroll. Well, her writing was worth the wait and I'm very happy to return the kindness. I like both her pictures and her link to other Bloggers with Boobies, started by Dana who "kicks ass"! That's one community I can't join... zzz Just to make me jealous, that radio informs me that Alberto Escarlate is "Off to Brazil" ('cacheop'), his birthplace. Ever since I mentioned Cibelle (BBC World Music Awards 2004 profile), and the iPod has been filling my head either with Brazilian music or electro from Berlin, sheer serendipity has brought both places to mind every day. Highlights of those Radio 3 world music awards (including Cibelle), ceremoniously handed out yesterday, will be broadcast on BBC Four on Friday and Saturday. For the rest of us, there's a double CD available, while a webcast (in Real Player) will be online from tomorrow. If last year's webcast (still available at Awards 2003) is anything to go by, it will be listening time well spent. zzz Kate Kurdika, who makes and explains Kundalini bags told Jason K that the blog radio crashes her computer. On mine, it's a remarkable curiosity, but not for more than 10 minutes at a time. Now if my carpet-smoking, music-making, netwiz friend François (Demeyer; Fr), on the other hand, wanted to sample the thing and do something with it for his next CD, that could be interesting... Jason thinks that getting a camera-phone (Kottke) like mine has just brought him into the 21st century. He might have done me a good turn by pointing to 'Pairing an SE T610 with a Mac' at Bruce's 'bioneural.iBlog, which includes info I've been seeking for ages on exactly how to make the thing work as a modem. Until now, there's some teeny aspect to that trick I can't get quite right. Meanwhile, it's fun to use the 'phone to drive iTunes on the computer. zzz Now François has probably heard of the hidden Internet. I hadn't, but Alex Wright went 'In search of the deep Web' for Salon (by subscription -- or a free pass if you watch an ad first): "Those of us who place our faith in the Googlebot may be surprised to learn that the big search engines crawl less than 1 percent of the known Web. Beneath the surface layer of company sites, blogs and porn lies another, hidden Web. The 'deep Web' is the great lode of databases, flight schedules, library catalogs, classified ads, patent filings, genetic research data and another 90-odd terabytes of data that never find their way onto a typical search results page. Today, the deep Web remains invisible except when we engage in a focused transaction: searching a catalog, booking a flight, looking for a job. That's about to change. In addition to Yahoo, outfits like Google and IBM, along with a raft of startups, are developing new approaches for trawling the deep Web. And while their solutions differ, they are all pursuing the same goal: to expand the reach of search engines into our cultural, economic and civic lives." The full article is three very enlightening pages long. That's via 'Hot Links', a visually rich blog screenshot links place now going as deep as Level 6 (HotLinks Blog), brought to you by upian (Eng., but of French origin). For a last piece of digging, Stephen VanDyke has also been pursuing the tale of 'How News Travels on the Internet'. Again in visual form. 11:58:26 PM  link   your views? [] Putting a plug in to stop France's brain drain A colleague who finds France's political life under a government largely comprised of non-entities even more tedious and mediocre than I usually do wanted to know why the teachers were going on strike (again) on Friday. Well, it's their turn. And this is one strike I support without reservation. Yesterday, it was scientists who protested -- more than 2,000 of them resigning in a largely symbolic move. And around 5,000 researchers in white lab coats marched through Paris, while similar demonstrations took place in other cities. I'm delighted to report that a little petition I've mentioned signing recently -- joining tens of thousands of other riled inhabitants of this country -- the 'Appeal against the War on Intelligence', has seriously begun to get up the nose of the government. At first, it merely drew sarcastic comments, along the lines of "French intellectuals sign petitions, American ones win Nobel Prizes," but today Minister for Research Claudie Haigniere, a former astronaut who has come down to earth with a thump, is trying to tell the union representatives of the white coats why funding their work is so hard (Jean-Marie Godard reports for AP; Yahoo). On Saturday, a big demo is planned, bringing together researchers, teachers, lawyers, artists, health workers and others to protest against funding cuts, past and planned, which the right-wing government has foisted on France in the name of economic "good sense". Now there's a phrase which has been repeated to death by various grey technocrat officials in the past few weeks, only to be challenged by economists prepared to question the prevailing "free market" trends. Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin's regime is rattled now by the petition launched by 'Les Inrocks' and so snottily presented by ass-wipe articles in some of the "Anglo-Saxon" press, where the latter has paid any attention at all. The French right has wheeled out intellectuals for a counter-strike, including some who need very little encouragement like renowned media bore Bernard-Henri "Je suis un superstar" ['The Observer'] Levy, wonderfully portrayed behind that link by Gaby Wood. In the weekly 'Le Point,' Levy sees what he describes as a "religious" fervour in the mounting tide of protest, "a 'certain point' whence all the open wounds of a society would reveal their shadowy but deep unity." That's easily said, but it's too facile to dismiss this particular winter of discontent as an "amalgam" of ideas to be put on a par, as Levy does, with Islamic extremism. Today's issue of 'Les Inrockuptibles' is revelling in the insults flying its way. As it should. We live in a time where it suffices to put your name to a petition denouncing the government's lack of brains to be described as the "loony left" ('Marianne' magazine), or maybe "a 'good' anti-globalisation extreme left and a 'bad' Trotskyist far left" (''Le Figaro': take your pick!), and a "dangerous symptom, yet another one. Like the cars that get burned in ghetto suburbs on Saturday nights and racist inscriptions on the walls" ('Esprit'). That last, a pro-Chirac rag, has no website, but is certainly not to be confused with 'Esprit Critique' (Eng. intro page to an online quarterly in French). A "critical mind" or spirit is the last thing the French government wants to see. Some stage performers, researchers, teachers and students have put their signatures to another document ahead of Saturday's march, saying 'What we have in common...' ('Ce Qui Nous Rassemble...'; CIP-IDF). This text contains some striking statistics attributed to an unnamed sociologist: "...in the course of your life, you spend 33,000 hours at school, 63,000 hours at work and 96,000 in front of the telly. This means that all the life expectancy you have gained since the telly came on the scene, you spend in front of it." This might be total bullshit. Not having a telly, I've not timed myself of late. On the other hand, it might, for some people, be appallingly true.Could it be? 96,000 hours adds up to almost 11 years. "In France, scientists dream of leaving for more clement climates where 10 years of studies don't lead them to an unlikely and underpaid permanent job. In the US, scientists dream of being able to publish the results of their work without being thrown out of the door if their conclusions run up against the plans of an industry protected by the Bush clan (to tell the truth, few industries are not in that position...). In France, as in the US, scientists dream simply of being able to do their job. Great minds think alike." That's Padawan's outlook at 'Brain Not Found' (Fr.) But whatever happened to that entertaining pair who love shitting on nearly all things French? Having announced a "week chock full of socialist bowel movements" destined to make people just like me "jerk themselves off to sleep dreaming of 5.6% US unemployment" ('Merde in France'), they've got bored already. Do you know, it's odd? I've never once thought of US unemployment figures before drifting off at night. My juvenile little pea-tin of a brain occasionally tends to find other uplifting statistical curves rather more graceful to contemplate at such moments. 6:33:44 PM  link   your views? [] So the UN is changing. But who benefits? The reform of the United Nations to reflect "today's realities" -- and just perhaps in a way that would suit the world's only superpower better than anyone else -- is an issue coming up with increasing urgency across the political spectrum. Opposing parties, of course, have extremely different views about just how the overhaul should be done. But Mickey Z. suggests that the revised world body has already started taking shape, in 'Pillar Fight: The "New" U.N. Blames the Poor' (Press Action). Mickey's article focuses on the workings of the UN Commission on Private Sector and Development to make several telling points: "'Make no mistake,' declared Paul Martin, Canada's prime minister and co-chairman of the [commission]. 'This is a new pillar of development — unleashing local private enterprise, supported by strong, indigenous, democratic institutions.' (...) 'According to the World Bank,' says Mike Eckel, of the Associated Press, 'the cost of starting a business in Angola is US$5,531 — about eight times more than that country's per capita income. In New Zealand, the cost is about US$28 — about 1 percent of per capita income.' Sounds like we need to encourage more job training. Enter the 'new' U.N., eschewing any hint at redistributing wealth or any mention of the ominous consequences of a planet inhabited by billions of humans with literally nothing to lose. The pillars the new U.N. is sleeping on include big ideas like micro-loans with 'relatively easy repayment terms,' and on-the-job training. 'As well,' writes Eckel, 'large, multinational corporations should be encouraged to work with small-scale business for outsource work or to be suppliers of goods and services, the commission said.' (If you listen closely, you can hear Thomas Friedman [NYT] groaning with pleasure.)" What got Mickey writing -- and the "scorecard" at the end of his article is certainly worth a look when it comes to reminding yourself about inequity -- was inspired by a UN news briefing on a report from the new commission, called 'Unleashing Entrepreneurship: Making Business Work for the Poor'. "Mark Malloch Brown, Administrator of the UNDP (UN Development Programme), added that the Commission’s report was part of the continued 'intellectual revolution' at the United Nations," that briefing says. A "revolution", maybe. Perhaps even an "intellectual" one. But there's a hell of a difference between intellect and intelligence. Plus ça change,... 12:39:15 PM  link   your views? [] Unhappy anniversary In Donald Rumsfeld's own New Mexico back yard, Molly McNamara is all in favour of symbolic gestures: "A small groups of returning Iraqi exiles and the United States military staged the destruction of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. We feel that it is only fitting that a large group of residents in Rumsfeld's hometown pull down this warmongering ex-supporter of Saddam's." The Action Coalition Taos really loathes Rummy and plans to make that clearer than ever on March 20 (via Indymedia). "I so admired the Americans before the war. I was addicted to their cinema and literature. When they came they brought me a contradictory view of America. I thought if these are Americans then they are Americans from a different planet. These are men whose work is to destroy armies. What Iraq needs is not these people. It needs intelligent civilians. In the management of the country they have conquered the Americans have failed in every way. For any Iraqi who tries to present a noble project to help his own people they try to find a million ways to say no." (Amir Nasef Toma al-Sayegh, former radar technician turned Baghdad book-buyer.) For 'The Observer' at the weekend, foreign affairs editor Peter Beaumont sought to find out what ordinary Iraqis think one year on (via Occupation Watch). International Occupation Watch has an office in Baghdad and is one of the most comprehensive news portal and link sites on Iraq I've come across. Heavens, it even promotes investigative journalism... 11:53:54 AM  link   your views? []

mardi 9 mars 2004

Factory file: might a 'P13 Club' help deal with media overload? When once an AFP correspondent somewhere sunny and hot, with a fine beach, submitted one of those stories they file that are of no interest to anybody but prove they're alive and working for their money, I sent it to clients with a "P5" code. To my surprise, it zapped off into cyberspace like any other story from a P1 (priority one) news "FLASH" to a run of the mill P4. Where did it go? I wondered; who received it among our thousands of client papers, radios and TV stations? A look at the "wire" told me that I appeared accidentally to have stumbled on the system whereby confidential messages are despatched, unreadable to ordinary mortals like you and me. The clients must have shrugged their shoulders and put it down to a glitch. Oh well. No more P5s. I haven't risked a P6, who knows what might happen? But I'm seriously considering founding a P13 Club. P13, you may recall, is the number I give -- and I'm not alone in this -- incoming stories which should end up in the trash-can. No offence to sender, but no news value either. Since returning to the agency after those months off with the Condition, the conviction that took hold of me then has strengthened instead of abating: we'd all be far better off, journalists and "consumers" of our work alike, if we only released the half of what we do, but did that better. Ok, I exaggerate, but maybe you know what I mean. A case in point today was when 'Le Monde' published a story we had to pick up. It was about a police inquiry for a French anti-terrorist judge which concluded that Rwanda's current president and then rebel leader Paul Kagame was to blame for the missile attack of April 6, 1994, that killed his predecessor, downing a plane in the incident that triggered the genocide of what the Rwandan government today says was a million people. Rwanda's ruling party was very swift to deny this, of course. A party official said that the French probe had revealed no new elements and no proof to back up a notion which has been floating around since 1998. So chunks of my afternoon and then of the early evening were devoted to subbing somebody's lengthy account of the tale in 'Le Monde', writing up a fairly long story about the denial, and then writing the single story that put the two together. The sub-editor to whom I gave the latter immediately remarked that it was the only one of the three any client -- radio, telly, newspaper or Internet -- was likely to use. This was self-evidently true. And yet! I would, rightly, have had my knuckles firmly rapped had I not done all three stories. At the expense of other worthwhile African news I might have been writing. Or maybe even one of those excellent features we none of us always have time for, though we're told clients clamour for them. This is an absurd state of affairs! It's not just the Factory, of course, it's the whole "system" worldwide, where the technology has leapt so far ahead of us that we have no choice but to play this ridiculous real-time game, because the stories are there, almost instantaneously, and because if we don't somebody else will. It goes almost without saying that the worst offenders are the TV networks, always castigated when this kind of issue arises because any striking image is now seen as making a story. And a non-photogenic story isn't a story at all. Zappity-zap! What to do? Yesterday, we were "late" with some event. I was told that the Associated Press had beaten AFP to it by I can't remember how long. And when I replied that I didn't give a monkey's toss, or words to that effect, I was accused -- largely in jest, I trust -- of "dereliction of duty". This, of course, is nonsense, but it does raise a serious point. After all, we are in a highly competitive game where timing has become only too important. I will happily concede -- or "admit", if that's what's required -- that since my return to the Factory in the latter part of last year, I've endeavoured to remain more laid back when it comes to the imposed sense of urgency; more concerned, I convince myself, with getting it right than with being first. And aware that there's far more to life than AFP and career, though once such a thought felt like treason. But still I do occasionally lose a wee bit of sleep, even now, over stories I know I could and should have done better, much better. Younger journalists tell me -- have done for years -- that they lose a lot of sleep, especially over the mistake they realise they made in the middle of the night. Rather like teachers who have quit their profession in disillusionment and disgust -- I know several of those -- I've remained friends with journalists who simply dropped out of the news agency game when they could, and when there was far more money around for schemes that would enable them to do so and land on their feet elsewhere. Indeed, an almost mythical name or two came up in a related conversation with colleagues at the weekend. I'm sometimes reproached, occasionally on good grounds, for having become too laid back. But even if I wanted to drop out myself -- which I don't, since I like the people, the environment and much of the work -- realism tells me, as it does others, that any chance of starting afresh elsewhere at our still relatively young age is now next to nil. We're locked into a rapidly changing media environment just as surely as some of the young hopefuls I ventured a little advice to the other day feel locked out of it. Hence the notion of a P13 Club, a loose-knit group of like-minded journalists who -- like me as an outcome of having to face up to and deal with the Condition (in as much as it was a physical manifestation of my diseased mental state arising partly from contradictions and stresses in the job) -- have been forced radically to rethink priorities. I know there are many people who, more or less, share my concerns. We can't turn the clock back. We can't abandon the technology that is at once a great boon and a major hindrance to intelligent, necessary and on-the-ball journalism. We certainly can't launch a revolution which would slow things down to a manageable pace where every story that gets put on the wires is flawless and important. The very nature of much of "the news" is that it's ephemeral. What will remain are the most essential historical facts and the analysis of them. But I'm coming increasingly to respect those few with a permanent ability to step back from a news story, see what matters and what doesn't, and above all, how to write it really well. It may take longer to do it like that, but does this really matter? Isn't churning out over-hasty copy an insult to the intelligence of those on the receiving end? "Did you hear what Nick just said about you?" deputy desk chief Carole -- soon, sadly for us but happily for her, to take up a posting elsewhere -- asked a colleague yesterday when I mentioned his skill to her quietly. "No." "He said, 'I give him work, he turns it into art.' Now that's praise indeed." And so it was, but I didn't mean his ears to turn red. Maybe a whole bunch of us need informally to discuss and reconsider how we might use the beneficial aspects of the "system" to better effect and get rid of the dross, the wasted trees and the sheer, unnecessary rubbish that foists "information overload" on our clients -- and thus the public at large -- almost as much as it does on us. The Internet is certainly a tool for this. Such debates are already in hand, maybe lots of them. J.D. Lasica already famously touches on the issues, sometimes, and also monitors the blogosphere and alternative media. Just for instance, today he tells us that the remarkable Wikipedia has passed the 500,000 article milestone ('New Media Musings'). I missed that at 'Kuro5hin' too, being obviously unable to absorb everything in my newsreader each morning, but it says a great deal about changes even to information sourcing and data sorting that will continue unless Big Brother somewhere pulls the plugs on the Net. I plan to explore, put out feelers. In part to this end, I'm grateful to Jonathan Dube, the award-winning editor of 'Cyberjournalist', a "labor of love", for his recent reply to an e-mail, welcoming this year-old experiment at 'taliesin's log' into the company of J-Blogs, listed among those "published independently". Fellow "Engdesker" -- ah, these etiquettes! -- David is already in there with his "personal site", Sharp Words. So that makes two of us now from AFP, in some very varied and international company, including some friends I've made in the blogosphere. Journalists, they say, couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery. I daren't detail in public how the "Engdesk's" commendable coffee-machine venture was only redeemed from near disaster by thunderbolts from on high. But hope springs eternal. It strikes me that what I think of as the "P13 debate" doesn't merely concern journalists in the Factory. It's a dangerous malaise affecting the whole profession. There's no lack of people both in AFP and outside it who must have worthwhile contributions to make. 10:57:39 PM  link   your views? [] Avoid anger. It 'makes you fat' A teenage inability to deal with anger is bad for their weight. It's not just psychological problems they store up for the future, it's extra kilos. So, at least, say doctors from the University of Texas Health Science Center (full of helpful advice), according to a report on BBC Health: "They (the doctors) used psychological tests to measure how well they (the youngsters) dealt with anger. hey found that teenagers who could control their anger and responded appropriately when angry were more likely to have lower body mass indexes." So you can't blame it all on McDonalds. 11:18:30 AM  link   your views? [] Thinking about DEVONthinking (OS X) I have praised the DEVONthink tool to the highest heavens, and its partner DEVONagent to the furthest reaches of the universe. But it's true that it might be just a little more user-friendly. The pros and cons -- especially the cons about the manual -- are well identified in an item Matt Neuberg has written for Tidbits: 'DEVONthink thinks, so you don't have to'. Well. Almost... 10:58:05 AM  link   your views? [] Nearer, iPod, to thee! I like my iPod. OK. I love my iPod. But it has yet to reveal to me the secrets of the universe. "I travel a lot and I have to say that an Ipod full of tunes and Bose Quiet Comfort 2 noise-canceling headphones on my head is as close to a religious experience I have ever had in an aircraft." That was James Derk of 'The Gleaner' in Kentucky (via the Mac Observer). So what am I doing wrong? Thinking thrice before forking out on Bose cans? Keeping my feet on the ground? 10:48:30 AM  link   your views? []

lundi 8 mars 2004

Sounds great (iii): with 'Sarac'h', a Breton takes on the world Unlike the Kid, her mum and large numbers of my friends and workmates, I scarcely know Brittany and have only set foot there twice, though it's one of the nearest parts of France to Paris that could almost be a different country. But Marianne loves its legends and has told me several stories which are echoed in old tales I knew from the south-western part of la Grande-Bretagne, my native side of the water. Good Breton music was, until the late 80s at least, a feature of my corner of town, since that part of the country is served by trains from Montparnasse and some of the streets around the large southern Paris station acquired Breton "settlers", bars, shops and clubs. Apart from the many crêperies still to be found today, most of that has disappeared in less than two decades. All honour, then, to Denez Prigent, a Breton musician from northern Finistère who first learnt a traditional and difficult a capella narrative style, known as gwerzioù, from his grandmother as a boy in the 1960s and has gone on to captivate people in Paris, the nation and recently, other parts of Europe, with some increasingly original and wonderful albums. Like his internationally renowned compatriot Alan Stivell (Fr., Eng. and Breton), Denez believes that Breton musical traditions are best upheld and maintained by reviving them with a leap across barriers and venturing into some bold juxtapositions and harmonies of style. His latest CD, Sarac'h' (Oct 2003, Barclay), is proof that "he who dares -- sometimes -- wins". And, surprise, it's part of my ongoing exploration of the voices of women too. In this instance, those of Lisa Gerrard ('Immortal Memory' and ex-Dead Can Dance), Gaelic stunner Karen Matheson ... and Bulgaria's Yanka Rupkina as well as fellow Breton Louise Ebrei. This mixture works. Admirably and beautifully. And so does Prigent's call on musicians as diverse as Nabil Khalidi from Morocco, with his oud, or lute, Latif Khan playing Indian tabla drums and Marcel Aubé on both the guitar-like north African gembri and the Chinese violin in the accompaniments, alongside more customary instruments and some carefully dosed electronica. The recording is of spectacularly high quality and the CD's lavish presentation in little book form original. Some of the songs are on traditional, story-telling bardic themes, with unusual excursions -- 'La Gwerz de Kiev' on famine in Ukraine, 'Geotenn ar marz' on genetically modified crops -- and I've no idea what others are about, since not all the lyrics are translated and I don't understand Breton. In an interview I've just found at M La Music (Fr.), Denez explains: "...I only translated what can be translated, because not everything is, like rhyme and humour. It's pretty difficult to translate a gwerz into French." Not that it matters. Music is a language all its own. Though one French reviewer comments that if you have only just one album of Breton music, make it 'Sarac'h', I don't hear that myself. Breton it may be in origin and tradition, but the only possible pigeon-hole for this CD is "world music". It's that broad in its scope. "Sarac'h" apparently means the rustling of the breeze in leaves. And there's a Ridley Scott connection. Prigent features on the soundtrack of 'Black Hawk Down', while we have Lisa Gerrard and Hans Zimmer to thank for the score to 'Gladiator'. 9:55:13 PM  link   your views? [] And this calls for 'quiet diplomacy'? The BBC rapes the truth: that's one of the things Zimbabwe's vile propaganda machine has said about what correspondent Hilary Andersson had to report after months investigating the country's youth "training camps". "Several young men took me through the techniques of electrical torture and how it worked. Once in the flow of the conversation it was as if they were trying to explain to me something as mundane and technical as how a car works. 'You connect this here, and that there,' they would say. 'Then you apply the wires to the person's genitals or arms in short bursts.' One boy went into a lot of detail about how to hang someone upside down and dunk their head in a bucket of water. The strangest part, as the journalist, comes not when you ask the questions, or even when you get the answers, but when you say goodbye. What do you say? Thank you? That was an excellent interview?" In 'From our own correspondent', Hilary tells the story. 10:55:35 AM  link   your views? []

dimanche 7 mars 2004

Are epidemics bad for your blog? Still in rude and frosty vein, I buried myself deeper in my lunchtime reading, after shaking his hand, when André B showed up at the Canteen and plonked himself virtually next to me. The unfortunate fellow's going through one of the phases that means he's best left alone. But still he was out to provoke (I summarise): "What are you reading?" "Science et Vie." "Is is still as bad as it was?" The sneer was almost audible. "Not on a par with 'Nature' or 'Science'? A popularising magazine?" "Not especially, André. I find it worthwhile enough to suscribe to, often very well-written." He peered closer. "Ah. Sub-atomic particles. For the kind of people in search of the very latest kind of everything." 'It's really quite interesting." The warning edge must have slipped into my voice. "But what is its hidden agenda, its ideology?" "Its ideology? I'm not aware that there is one!" "It doesn't talk about psychoanalysis then? All about brain structure and neurons..." "The focus is more on the hard sciences, yes." "So it considers psychoanalysis of no great interest. Hmm. That's what I mean by its ideology." Now I was exasperated, since it was evident that we were headed straight back to yet further discourse on Papa Freud. "I'm no longer terribly interested in psychoanalysis myself, these days," I told him bluntly, without bothering to qualify the observation. "I can't think of anybody I know who's been through it and come out the better for it." "Oh!" This exclamation was followed by a theatrically pained silence and then a muttered something I didn't catch apart from the word "knife". A moment later, he shoved his newspaper under my nose, in which he was busy underlining passages of yet more on the horrors perpetrated by the American and Israeli governments... If Baudier wants me to blog him again, which he does, insisting on believing that being one of the cast here adds to his international renown whether I'm nice or nasty, he must find a new hobbyhorse or two. I'm not flogging his regular ones to death. Tom Coates is generally less unkind, noting that there "are people out there reading (my mother, my brother, some potential employers) who I have to be aware of." Me too, but I can't let my own awareness of those who constitute the "Faithful 5 ¾" -- as still I prefer to think of those who regularly stop by -- be a constraint on what I write, even when the family take issue with me. Though I'm not deliberately hurtful and respect people's privacy, there's no point in being any more paranoid about this blog than I am on the rare occasions I've known my email to be be tapped or the more frequent ones when somebody's listening in on 'phone calls, as can happen at work. If they don't like it, that's their lookout. But Tom can be trenchant sometimes too, even aggressive, by his own admission today at 'plasticbag'. As part of an ongoing debate, he writes: "My link read: 'I've noticed that people are much less intellectually rigorous when they read articles that they agree with. Case in point: Most read blogs least original, says blech 2lmc'." The debate, which has been lively in the blogosphere, was triggered by an article Amit Asaravala wrote for 'Wired': "The most-read webloggers aren't necessarily the ones with the most original ideas, say researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs. Using newly developed techniques for graphing the flow of information between blogs, the researchers have discovered that authors of popular blog sites regularly borrow topics from lesser-known bloggers -- and they often do so without attribution" ('Warning: Blogs Can be Infectious'; Wired', March 5). Few things raise my journalist's hackles more than this failure to attribute copy or to source your material. You see it frequently and I've got four words for it: plagiarism, disrespect, incompetence and idleness. It's because this is one of my hobbyhorses that some names, including one or two "famous" ones, have been ousted from my blogroll without compunction. I'll happily link to people I disagree with, knaves included, but not those who ignore the basic criteria for credibility. Amit's story for 'Wired' told us that the HP researchers had come to their conclusions with the help of the 'Blogpulse' innovation from marketing and business intelligence outfit Intelliseek. This firm has been mining data since 1997 and is one of many whose activities, while part of the common business practice of our time, make me feel uneasy. Its press room (Intelliseek Events) promotes what they call "Webinars", such as this one on March 23: "'10 Things Everyone Needs to Know About Word-of-Mouth' What marketers traditionally know as 'word-of-mouth' behavior has exploded with the growth of online discussions, Internet 'buzz,' online blogs and other consumer-to-consumer discussions in cyberspace. Intelliseek dubs the phenomenon 'Consumer-Generated Media,' and CMO Pete Blackshaw lets marketers and others in on the key concepts to remember about today's cyber-enabled word-of-mouth." Their previous "Webinar", next Tuesday, is on "Financial Services: 'Unlock the Insights in Customer Data'." To be clear, I'm not for one instant casting doubt on Intelliseek's ethical code or integrity. I'm simply using the firm and its tool as an example of one of any number of ways people out there are professionally mining and classifying all kinds of information we -- you, me, hundreds of thousands of bloggers -- often unwittingly cast out into the Net, the better to be "targeted" in the relentless process of free market capitalism in action. Like the dozens of cameras that film the city dwellers among us as we go about our daily business, above ground and under it, this is a fact of life we have to endure. To endure such practices, however, obviously doesn't mean I like them. Where I do feel an affinity with Baudier is in querying social trends and underlying assumptions about their rightness and necessity we are all expected to take for granted, particularly the international homogenisation of economic and consumer practices which make it hard to distinguish nowadays between old-fashioned notions of "left" and "right". Last weekend, I read an article in the "Trib" about a development in France which had me musing a livid letter to the paper. "It was an affair that could not last," wrote Alan Riding in 'Paris intellectuals on ramparts' (IHT). "One year after France's leftist intelligentsia and conservative government joined forces to oppose war in Iraq, the love fest has ended in fresh talk of war. The intellectuals have now accused the government of waging 'war on intelligence' - brain power, that is, not spying. The government, in turn, views an angry petition signed by about 40,000 members of the educated elite as itself a declaration of war. Behind the squabble is money, of course." Where the hell does that arrogant, patronising and complacent "of course" come into it? That's what I wanted to know. Had Riding actually read the petition? Was that all it came down in his opinion disguised as fact? Money? And how dared the paper publish as front-page "news", without qualification, a masterly achievement in completely missing the point of the petition? The "Trib" was rarely more than a compendium of agency copy to begin with, but with this, since the take-over by the New York Times, it really had gone down the tubes. It was pontificating to the world about the "squabble" in France in a way which perpetuated received ideas and almost implied that the ruling French right was right to dismiss the petition as an exercise in "overwhelming conceit", as Culture Minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon did. On reflection, Riding's article is more balanced than I initially allowed. Nevertheless, it's penned on the basis of the unwritten assumption that free-market capitalism and savage budget cuts across the spectrum raised by intellectuals with nothing in common but a "gripe" -- another loaded word -- are, of necessity, the natural, correct and sensible way of managing an economy and a culture. And suddenly, I could be Baudier myself, angrily underlining whole passages in articles that get up my nose. Instead, I align myself with ... ahem, everybody else who signed the petition (at 'Les Inrocks)' and thus protested against the trend to uniformity and "dumbing down". We fear an undermining, almost by default, of the right to free thought, creativity, genuine innovation and a caring society. These are the things defended by many of the signatories. It's not merely money the researchers, artists and teachers want, except in so far as they've objected to cuts in spending in key sectors of life and welfare. I've read the petition as an expression of outrage, in fact, at the assumption that financial gain, profit and cost effectiveness are -- of course! -- the motive forces underlying any healthy society. Here I come back to Tom Coates. If something interests him less than a fair number of bloggers, it's his own navel, which is one reason why his site is among the oldest "friends" in my blogroll (even if he doesn't know me from Adam). Tom has also long been one of the rare people occasionally to look at the blogosphere from the outside and challenge assumptions. For once, I'm going to quote a blogger on blogging at length, because part of Tom's essay today -- 'Why do bloggers kill kittens?' (plasticbag) -- taking HP's Blog Epidemic Analyser for his starting point, strikes a very strong chord in my own thinking: "Firstly, we get straightaway down to the distinction between weblog as written for an audience versus weblog as written for me. Now clearly it's not just for me - I have to change what I write on occasion because there are people out there reading (my mother, my brother, some potential employers) who I have to be aware of. I don't write in the same way as I did when I started. Then I could bitch about people I didn't like and talk about my life without feeling particularly exposed. I was talking to strangers with no impact on my life. Now I'm not. But while my weblog isn't any longer 'just' for me, it's definitely not just for an audience either. I use my weblog as a searchable archive - a repository of things that I've seen and read and that I thought were interesting, I use it to record thoughts that I think might be useful and that otherwise I'll forget. I use it as a notepad, as a chronicle, as a place to store my photographs. There's an interplay between trying to be fresh for other people and not really giving a damn about other people. I think this comes back to my understanding of a weblog as a representation of a person online - an avatar with a voice. A self-representation is about being both true to yourself and knowing how to self-edit in different circumstances. That's what a weblog is to me. Secondly, I operate with an understanding of my links as a kind of microcontent vote (also here and here). It's the idea that by linking to something I say, 'Yes - this deserves some of your attention - this is a good thing', and that the more sites that do that the more attention something will get. So by voting for something I like (alongside dozens of other people) that thing becomes incrementally more visible in Google, Blogdex, Technorati, Daypop. Also, in turn, those people who don't read a lot of other weblogs but read mine also get exposed to it. And those other people who have weblogs may choose to pick up that link and post it to, thus exposing more people to it in turn - putting their votes behind it too. Massive link propagation (as far as I'm concerned) is not a bad thing at all - it's how the web determines what's worth reading." The rest of Tom's long piece is well worth reading; I've picked up only his primary links to previous thoughts in the above. In the past, with regard to other blog "analysis tools", he has rightly queried the dangerous US-centricity of what they sometimes come up with. I share that concern. It's evident that American websites, blogs and cultures dominate the Internet and are bound to do so for a long time to come. But Tom's ideas help me to firm up a notion I've already recently voiced here. If it's on Daypop, Blogdex and the like, or now in the "top 40" of the 'Blog Epidemic Analyser', then that's an excellent reason to buck the trend and blog about something totally different. At the risk, of course, of seeing somebody pinch it. Unattributed. But I think I'd still marginally prefer to have any original notions of my own stolen, uncredited, than be a conformist. I'd rather be hung for a wolf, or -- heaven forfend! -- an accursed intellectual, than run with the sheep. 9:29:19 PM  link   your views? []

samedi 6 mars 2004

The unfair sex, featuring Sounds great (ii) Mariza and Cibelle Aaah, women! Today's been a day for collecting more tales about you, ranging in my African department from Charlize Theron -- uncharitably described as a "floozy" by somebody who thought the Factory might do better than to pick this 'Monster' Oscar-winner as South Africa's contribution in the overnight "package" for clients -- to Louisa Hanoune, the outspoken, charismatic Trotskyite who next month becomes Algeria's first woman to take on the politico-military establishment in a presidential election there. However, all the attention AFP is putting into preparations the weekend ahead of International Women's Day (infoplease) makes an agreeable change from even good stories about appalling men like Charles Taylor (AFP/Yahoo) and Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Yet more copy arrived this afternoon, well-written too, about how Haiti's ousted president-priest is proving a fearful embarrassment to his impoverished hosts in Central African Republic, but I didn't do an English version; the world, I felt, could do with a break. It was already patently obvious yesterday that the CAR people will have to do all they can to shut the fellow up, short of confiscating his 'phone, until South Africa decides to take him in after all ... once their elections are safely out of the way almost at the same time as the Algerian ones. None of us are quite sure whether it's Washington or Paris which must be giving the CAR enough money to pay the usual wage arrears for public sector workers in return for this little favour. Thabo Mbeki, the president sometimes taken to task here for his inscrutable stance on Zimbabwe and his nutty and dangerous policy on Aids, gushed over the "floozy", with more about how she, "in her own personal life, represents a grand metaphor of South Africa's move from agony to achievement. We rejoice in the recognition by the most critical minds in filming, that Charlize Theron is pure gold" ('iafrica' early this week). Mbeki has a point. It takes a very brave woman to make it like Theron has done after the horror, at 15, of having your mum kill your drunken dad in self-defence. But he's off the rails again with "the most critical minds in filming". Really? Quentin Tarantino chairing the team at Cannes (official site; Eng. version) this year promises a much more entertaining prospect than the tired old Oscars. I ramble, but doing so reminded me to rush out to Francis's shop as he pulled all the newspaper stands in off the street to lock up, so I could grab the last copy of the 'Pulp Fiction' DVD he's been selling this week at a ridiculous knockdown prix choc... Next week, I shall pay particular attention to the ladies. Even the Wildcat. I've felt a little bit guilty since cutting her short in "cold and rude" fashion when last she called, especially since it emerged that some of the gifts returned after our Christmas to-do came back to me "by accident". However, it's taken rather longer to steal my heart back than anticipated or previously revealed here. I owe her one. The Wildcat gave me Mariza and there's no way I'd return 'Fado Curvo' (EMI, 2003). Exactly like the man says in the Amazon review linked there, "this album takes a while to reveal its subtle charms", but the rising Portuguese fado singer with the striking hairdo has a voice which is out of this world. (I couldn't hear it on the Mac at first because of EMI's outrageous "copy protection" trick, but the La Cie DVD/CD drive happily ignored that nonsense and let me put it on the iPod without a hitch.) There's no online sample version I can find of one of my favourite tracks, "O Deserto", which risks a jazzy intrusion and breaks the mould of the traditional fado style Mariza masters with a strong emotional investment and wide-ranging command of vocal skill. This young woman is already a diva in the best sense, sensual and immensely talented. What she does with "Primavera" -- the only fado on the CD borrowed from Amália Rodriguez -- is in itself a gift from a star who has to be followed. For a follow-up, also partly in Portuguese, I bought 'Cibelle' (Ziriguiboom, 2003) by Cibelle in ignorance and on impulse after listening to a little in the shop -- and, I admit, because the lass's looks on the cover turned me on wildly. (Yes, I remember what I wrote about my mending heart -- out with the violins -- but other bits of me know that it's spring, the sap is rising and this is not yet another year to waste time... Ah! I have so much to give -- violins again... ) But let's forego the lust for a moment, though Cibelle brings a sultry, sexy style to bear when she wants: this Brazilian has another great voice, a refreshing and self-assured change from those who are made stars by their promoters without the punch that comes from their own insides. I'm in love with this highly varied first album and the girl's "only" 25, all the songs her own or in part by her, some in her native language, others in English. If this is more of the new "Latin" wave, bringing sometimes unexpected instrumentation (mellotron, djembe, acrylic drums...), jazz and an electro touch to the Rio roots, it's yet another good reason to board a flight to Brazil. Brazil and Berlin (two places where I'd dearly like to hear some live sounds right now, the latter for a future blog entry). 'Cibelle' comes with a surprise. The Kid has an uncanny talent for knowing which films are going to produce something unexpected at the end of the long credits, when most people have quit the cinema -- we always stay to the finish, because that's when the music gets listed. This CD is like that; the sting in the tail after a long silence proves that the singer has a great sense of fun! 10:08:26 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 5 mars 2004

Self love It's odd when you accidentally find out that you once made somebody's day. I don't think I did that at the Factory, during a period of temporary insanity this afternoon, playing the fool again to keep everybody happy with the prospect of international women's day looming anew. Carole wanted lots of stories about it. But my victim kept her end up. I know I promised, if not in public, to steer clear of Daypop's Top 40. After all, what's the point of blogging about the same thing as everybody else? But here's the exception that bends the rule: "SELF LOVE - Lady, I know your team win the game, but wait until you gets home??" That's merely the top listed entry, at the moment, on the list at Derek Yu's 'Accidental Video Porn Game Archive'. Far worse follows... The observant may have noticed the recent appearance of another manifestation of self-love. The addition of some "wishful thinking" on the right-hand side of this page is not the working of a diseased imagination erroneously and laughably convinced that anybody is actually going to send me anything from Amazon I've put in the list. It is simply a knot in the handkerchief. A Gordian note to self. Otherwise, I tend to forget what I want. Or may have wanted. Or had a more than passing interest in, aroused by reading. Whose day did I make? Pavi Thomas's. At 'integrate - CHAOS AND CONVERGENCE'. Last December 11. It was something I said. Ships in the night. Unable to manage a serious mood, I was surveying the blogosphere. Bits about me, in particular. To find myself even blogrolled by people I've never written about or encountered. Trouble is, even the friendly light of ships in the night is no cure for shits in the day, which is why I kept disappearing this afternoon. The passing vengeance of the Condition, scarcely mentioned for too long, persists. Unless it's the fault of the rosy kidneys in the AFP canteen, which were absolutely delicious at the time but ensured that nobody wanted to look when I brought my tray up to the Desk. I think it's all gone now, which means I can safely go to bed. Which means I will be bushy-tailed in the Factory tomorrow, if not necessarily bright. 11:02:50 PM  link   your views? [] Hubble finds Van Gogh's stars ... and 'phone cheats "As above, so below". Or is it in our heads? "'Starry Night', Vincent van Gogh's famous painting, is renowned for its bold whorls of light sweeping across a raging night sky. Although this image of the heavens came only from the artist's restless imagination, a new picture from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope bears remarkable similarities to the van Gogh work, complete with never-before-seen spirals of dust swirling across trillions of miles of interstellar space." Not only is the big picture stunning to look at, the story behind V838 Mon is an interesting read at Red Nova news (via a Moreover feed). zzz "Darling, I'm still stuck at the dentist's." In a tip for the devious, Slashdot reveals a mobile phone background noise cheat with Simeda's SoundCover. For 15 misspent dollars, you can stick a traffic jam in the bedroom. And worse... 11:15:39 AM  link   your views? []

jeudi 4 mars 2004

Sounds great (i): Dave Clarke, Carla Elves, Lenine So now the Kid, for whom I've been a musical dinosaur with a few respectable tastes, warns me that should I pursue the burning interests she's aroused with some of the CDs she brings round at weekends, I'll be outpacing her own grasp of contemporary music trends. "Well yes, darling," I confessed at the weekend, "but a lot of this stuff is really good!" Indeed, it's called for a revision of my budget slots, which already feature a smaller allowance for clothes than many people's, a larger one for "culture" with a small "c", less on cigarettes and 'phone bills and more on music. I've also stopped buying one or two magazines from which I've decided I learn little, in favour of more instructive ones. I don't plan to take too much business away from Francis, my favourite newsagent, sage, football fanatic and purveyor of essential local tidings, but he's up against places like Info Presse (Fr) for cut-rate subscriptions. And finally, I'm becoming as skilled at knowing where to find new releases both legally and at low prices as my colleague Karin is at tracking down cheap flights and holidays for people. She amazes us with some of the deals she turns up. I'll admit now that the ears that last year made little distinction among Marianne's various musical tastes and were prone to hear it all as abominable noise have become more discerning. She still swiftly turns it down when I enter the room, but I've asked her to stop this; it was partly her rush to keep the volume low that had me missing most of the subtleties and dismissing it as all more or less the same kind of racket. The other nice thing about yesterday, apart from that strong hint of a Parisian spring I hastened to mention before the weather turned grotty again, was that it was the first "music allowance day" in the new month's budget. Notable recent discoveries include Dave Clarke. Not to be confused with the Factory's Lagos bureau chief -- whose original trance-dance style has doubtless now introduced new trends to Nigeria which some of us were first privileged to see in Youssouf N'Dour's Dakar nightclub (now temporarily closed to improve safety standards) --I mean the British hip-hop DJ turned techno producer and album maker. 'Devil's Advocate' (Skint, 2003) proved an admirable and eclectic introduction to a range of dancefloor music which has passed me by, where it's evident even to an unpracticed ear that Clarke also sends up precisely the kinds of techno and house I haven't liked. "Banging a few metal objects together over a solid 4x4 used to be hours of fun. Ask any respecting tech-head and they’ll tell you that you just can’t get better than a bit of Black n’ Decker. Or so they thought." That's the start of a review at Ministry of Sound which expresses one of my dislikes better than what I was going to say about some prevalent techno noises that bore me rigid. 'Devil's Advocate' doesn't and is strongly recommended. Out of France and not yet at Amazon UK, Carla Elves, aka Laurent Hô, is provocative with 'Soundtracks, the Tronica Project' (UWe, 2003; Trip-Hop; Fr), which is another eclectic album drawing on samples and weird extracts of dialogue (in American, German...) to make a kind of tight electronica cinema music. 'Soundtracks' has grown on me, a subtle and sometimes sombre album with a coherence I've come to appreciate on repeated listening. My real surprise of the week so far was Lenine's 'Falange Canibal' ( Ariola, 2002), a Brazilian album which brings rock, funk and electronic techniques to music in samba, bossa and other "traditional" styles. It comes out of international musical encounters at a popular nightclub and bar under the Lapa arches, an aqueduct turned tramway in Rio de Janeiro, with a strong social message to some of the poetic lyrics. Lenine, a big name in Brazil but new to me, and his friends produce some great melodies and some very odd noises on a staggeringly original CD. I can find little about Lenine in English on the Net, but there's some good stuff (sound and video too) at Mondomix, a French world music site. Whether the Kid will like Lenine is a different question. 10:54:56 PM  link   your views? []

mercredi 3 mars 2004

Signs of life in the air Hallelulah! For the second time this year, braver Parisians were eating their lunch outside on the café terraces. North of the river, where business took me, about a dozen policemen were raiding some sort of school. Across the street, scores of young protesters were relaxing while more police watched them, their 'No to the the search!' banner drooping unattended as everybody stood about chatting in bright sunshine. Nobody could be bothered to tell me what was going on and I didn't push it. If this was their idea of a fun afternoon, fine. Even underground, people were behaving in an almost civilised fashion, despite the renewed crush in the Métro now that the school holidays are over. And I got a radiant smile from Ms "I'm almost married" Cécile, one of the belles du quartier. That's what she told me a while back when I asked her out. "Maybe Monday?" she said. "I'm not working then. But I'm almost married. I thought you ought to know that." Now that was the kind of answer I like: straight to the point. The only thing wrong with such a day off was being woken ridiculously early by a pressing reminder that the Condition, if very much better than last year, remains determined to disturb me on occasion, just as the doctors warned. Once the pigeons realised I was unavoidably up, they came flocking. I think I've been unwise. A family in the building across the garden out the back has put up a bird feeder, but last month I noticed that the pigeons inevitably get to it before all the smaller ones we'd like to keep in town. Being unable and disinclined to shoot them, I've taken to crumbling up left-overs from Paris's N° 1 bakery every morning and putting the bread on my windowsill with the aim, obviously, of drawing the pigeons away from the seed. This plan has worked only too well. For the first two or three days, they dared not approach until I was out of sight, but now they've realised that I don't plan to kill them and have even begun inviting their friends. "Poison the buggers," somebody suggested at the Factory, but I can't bring myself to do that. It's hard when you're almost on speaking terms. One entertaining place, Le Scarabée, warned last year that Paris's sky-rats were mutating. I know they're pests ... but so am I. "Original Email sent to various Hotels in Austria: Dear Sir, I've been a huge fan of the Crocodile Dundee movies since I was a little kid. I have already booked my flight to Austria. I plan to arrive in a town called Vienna in December. Do you have any vacancies for the first week of December? I plan to see kangaroos, Koalas and the Sydney Opera House. Are the Austrian Aborigines a friendly people? Do you know if the Red Kangaroo is extinct in Austria or not? In closing let me just say 'Good Day, mate' and 'Throw another shrimp on the barbie for me!' Sincerely, Lawrence Silverman" This particular pest -- "bothering people from Denmark to Brazil" -- posted the replies at 'greencats' (via 'growabrain'). 9:02:20 PM  link   your views? []

mardi 2 mars 2004

When I was Nancy: advice to aspiring journalists For several long unnerving months, I was Nancy. That's what some said at the Factory. "Ah, you're Nancy. I see!" You'd never believe it these days to look at us. Nancy, bless her and no idle compliment this, hasn't changed much over the years since I was finally put on to her contract while she was on maternity leave. Back then, I was surprisingly timid for somebody who'd just taken his previous boss to court and won. I'd been union deputy and occasional fall guy to a wily Tunisian. Much to the chagrin of most other employees at 'AfricAsia' magazine, a monthly which survived for four years alongside a French bedfellow, Faouzi and I were astute enough to see that after month upon month of late salaries and unconvincing excuses, we had a choice. One option was to wait for the company to go bust. Then we'd all be out of a job, without compensation. The other was to shut it down by going to court, having the official receivers brought in and force everybody out of work, but ensure that we got paid enough to survive a spell on the dole. When the court handed down its judgement, I remember rushing out and sobbing instead of celebrating with the others, leaning over a bridge across the Seine. I was weeping with sheer relief! Later, I got my first temporary contract at AFP, where I'd done the tests on the quiet. Even then, it was a nightmare. One Thursday, I got a call: "You start on Monday." If I remember right, it was the Sunday night that the same bloke, who's still around and thus should perhaps remain nameless, called again and told me I wasn't required after all. Oh, and for the record, 'Afrique Asie' is back on the newstands, has been for years, and claims on the Net to have a quarter of a million readers. They even get it on AFP's Desk afrique. I wish all who sail on that particular ship well enough, I'm told it's a stout vessel, but if there's one magazine I could never bring myself to read again, that is it! I recalled that tough time today, when I went out for a cigarette break and found one of the Factory's fundamentally decent people, a senior editor, in the stairwell with a young journalist hopeful of a job. The poor woman was clearly stuck, obviously wishing gently to disabuse him but not wanting to put him down completely. After all, he'd just been told by management that the five months he'd worked in one of AFP's bureaux abroad counted for nothing when it came to employment prospects in the engine room in Paris. But that, unfortunately, is how it is. As in almost every other media company I can call to mind, we've not quite got a hiring freeze but there are already so many people inside the place on temporary contracts, waiting for a permanent job to come up, that the chance of a toehold for a newcomer is even slimmer than it was in the days when I was Nancy. Well, I gave my senior editor friend a helping hand to break the tidings, which earned me a grateful smile. There is always a chance, but I've seen dozens of professionally trained aspirants like that youngster show up with stars in their eyes. I know how few of them make it. And I've never forgotten how it feels. It's always hard to give it to them straight, every single time, but they're much better off -- and so are you -- when you do. I remember being Nancy well enough to know that there's almost nothing worse on the job front than being sustained by false hopes and vague promises that will never be kept. But I did have two or three tips for the guy too, which he seemed to appreciate, so I'll pass them on. If you want to break into the media nowadays, the chances still are that you eventually will if you're any good. The prospects aren't hopeless, but being good matters more than it once did. One of the few real "advantages" of the ever-increasing competition in the profession has been the slow collapse of nepotist networks. A particularly favourable time to go knocking on doors is before the holiday periods, just when you might feel least inclined to do so. It's precisely then that news editors are sometimes wondering where they're going to find decent temporary replacements for absent regulars. Don't expect miracles. If you get a temporary contract, the chances are that you'll be shovelling shit, working on boring but necessary stories that nobody else wants to do and putting up with the most anti-social hours. Almost all of us have been there and done it. I spent several years at it until people started handing stuff I actually enjoyed my way. Be a specialist. You can expect to be doing "general news" for starters, but if you have something like fluent Chinese or inside knowledge of the workings of the Vatican tucked away on your CV, this well get noticed. And possibly, eventually, used. One of my English freelance friends broke into journalism because he knew the history and functioning of France's labyrinthine trade union system and labour laws better than the back of his hand. This, believe it or not, was of interest to obscure clients in Scandinavia and elsewhere. He's had lean years and fat ones since, but now he's often doing completely different things and sometimes having to turn down work. And he's been paid to travel to interesting places I've scarcely heard of in the course of the job. Above all, don't be shy. If there's one thing most experienced professional journalists hate, it's arrogance in a newcomer, people who reckon their copy's so good that they behave like kids throwing tantrums when others change it. Almost nobody really writes that well, least of all me, and I've been at it since 1976. But worse than arrogance is insufficient self-confidence. Journalism is not a profession for people who dither, can't organise their ideas and are indecisive. And these days, that's truer than ever. I've never bothered to try to measure how much faster the news moves on today's media, not how much more of it there is, than when I started. If I could and did, I think I might fall off my chair. As for Nancy, did I ever dare tell her that I was on her contract for so long while she was getting into motherhood that until she showed up one day in the Factory, I'd begun to think she was a myth? 9:55:32 PM  link   your views? []

lundi 1 mars 2004

Personal search I'm happy with the search engines I use, especially DEVONAgent (Mac OS X), but the San Jose Mercury News reports a bid to get personal: "Modern search engines do a lot of things well, but they can't read minds. When someone types in the keyword 'jaguar,' most search tools can't tell whether the user wants information about the animal or the British sports car. That may be about to change." Via Lasica's 'New Media Musings'. While the notion of personalising your searches by monitoring where you browse may have a certain appeal, I'd hate to think where that could lead. Targetted advertising might be the least of it... 10:44:38 PM  link   your views? [] 'I wonder if on Mars it can rain upwards' Scientists are excited by reports from the Red Planet, it seems: "Evidence that suggests Mars was once a water-rich world is mounting as scientists scrutinize data from the Mars Exploration rover, Opportunity, busily at work in a small crater at Meridiani Planum. That information may well be leading to a biological bombshell of a finding that the red planet has been, and could well be now, an extraterrestrial home for life." ('Space') Especially chuffed is "former Viking Mars lander investigator" Gilbert Levin, now 79 and the chairman and executive science officer of a multi-million-dollar biotech and IT company, Spherix ('Mission to Mars', Business Gazette).. "Levin points to Opportunity imagery that offers conclusive proof of standing liquid water and running water on a cold Mars. Other images show the rover tracks clearly are being made in 'mud', with water being pressed out of that material, Levin said [to 'Space']. 'That water promptly freezes and you can see reflecting ice. That's clearly ice. It could be nothing else,' he said, 'and the source is the water that came out of the mud'." 10:10:05 PM  link   your views? [] Burying Oscar "...[Robert] McNamara survived the 1960s, when he contributed more than most to the slaughter of 3.4 million Vietnamese (his own estimate). He went on to run the World Bank, where he presided over the impoverishment, eviction from their lands and death of many millions more round the world. And now here he is, the star of Errol Morris's much-praised, in my view wildly over-praised, documentary The Fog of War, talking comfortably about the millions of people he's helped to kill." "Oscar Winning Director Thanks War Criminal Before Audience of Billions" was how Alexander Cockburn at 'Counterpunch' saw the show that I, devoid of a television, didn't last night (via the perspective of ex-taxi driver and former professor of film history Richard Oxman, who wrote "Oscar's Obituary" for 'Press Action'). 9:13:52 PM  link   your views? [] 'Paycheck': a fortune thrown out of the window Let's look on the bright side. "The good news is that there are some decent action scenes that save 'Paycheck' from the garbage can. There is a good motorcycle chase scene (where did [Ben] Affleck learn to drive like a Hollywood stunt driver ... ahh who cares?) and a good final showdown back at the lab. But the movie is just too ridiculous. 4/10." That was Dr. Gore's comment at the IMDb. The trouble with those routinely explosive scenes is that while they were noisy enough to stop me falling asleep, my brain had switched off completely by then. Not even Uma Thurman, of whom I had high hopes after 'Kill Bill vol. 1', could redeem this film, which was the first serious failure of a bid to bring a story by Philip K. Dick (official site) to the screen I've seen. For once, I was disappointed by 'Les Inrocks' (Fr), which ran an interview in the current issue with director John Woo, as the film was released in France, that had me thinking 'Paycheck' could be worth queuing to see. Unfortunately, any hopes of intelligent life in this film had gone out of the window long before the first sheet of plate glass got spectacularly broken. Plenty of things get smashed, sometimes in de rigueur slow motion. In the interview, Woo failed to say that his visual metaphors are laid on with a trowel, while if the deliberately repetitive passages had a point to make, I'm blowed if I got it. The best thing I got out of this film was subsequently finding "the inside-out story of how a hyper-paranoid, pulp-fiction hack conquered the movie world 20 years after his death," an article Frank Rose wrote for 'Wired' shortly before 'Paycheck' was unleashed. 8:35:21 PM  link   your views? []