randomwalks/dj

Bear with me. The intricacies of GOP dirty tricks in Pennsylvania take some unraveling. But this is too rich, and the best part comes at the end.

On Thursday the Pennsylvania GOP sent out an email to 75,000 Jewish voters in the state warning that electing Obama could lead to a second Holocaust, the AP reports:

"Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008," the e-mail reads. "Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake. Let's not make a similar one this year!"

A copy of the e-mail, provided by Democratic officials, says it was "Paid for by the Republican Federal Committee of PA - Victory 2008."

It warns "Fellow Jewish Voters" of the danger of a second Holocaust due to the threats to Israel from its neighbors and touts Republican presidential candidate John McCain's qualifications over those of Obama.

The state GOP is now running away from that email as fast as it can. The AP leads with the state GOP's disavowal of the email, but it seems a bit more complicated than that. There doesn't seem to be any dispute that the state party or one of its committees sent the email. The party's defense seems to be that the consultant who the party hired wasn't authorized to send that particular email and was fired.

Except the AP got in touch with the consultant and that's not quite the story he tells:

Political consultant Bryan Rudnick was identified as the person responsible for it. Rudnick, reached Saturday night, confirmed that he no longer works for the party, which employed him a few weeks ago as a consultant to do outreach to Jewish voters.

"I had authorization from party officials" to send the e-mail, Rudnick said, but he declined to say who had signed off on it. "I'm not looking to drag anyone else through the mud, so I'm not naming names right now," he said.

That's a pretty good story in its own right: Another under-the-radar GOP sleaze tactic exposed and yet another low- to mid-level GOP operative scapegoated because he got caught on the wrong side of the McCain campaign's shifting line between what is just sleazy and what is too sleazy (a line that seems to get drawn immediately after the GOP gets busted).

But it gets better.

Like the state GOP, the McCain camp is running away from this email, and the spokesperson doing the distancing is none other than Peter Feldman. That's the same guy who on Thursday, the day the email went out, was pushing the mugging hoax to reporters as a politically motivated attack by a black Obama supporter, playing to the worst of white fears and racial prejudices.

Speaking of the email to Jewish voters and without any apparent hint of irony, Feldman told the AP Saturday night that McCain "rejects politics that degrade our civics."

Amazing.

No word on whether the AP asked Feldman about his role in pushing the mugging hoax.

Originally posted by David Kurtz from Talking Points Memo, on October 25, 2008 8:02 PM

It took me a long time to find someone who wasn't a laughable buffoon or a stuck-up prig. While I do like the idea of marrying into wealth and aristocracy, all the male aristos had silly voices and I couldn't imagine myself married to any of them. The monks were actually the most appealing, but despite my best efforts -- playing music for them, giving them the thumbs up, dancing for them -- none of them would be seduced away from their chosen path of Light.

Then in the town square of Bowerstone I found him: Cyrus the Traveler. His facial hair is a bit odd, certainly, but he was solidly middle-class and had a pleasant speaking voice. His moral standards, too, are high -- perhaps annoyingly so since he refused to go to bed with me even after we were engaged. But I respected his decision.

I took him with me to Oakfield, where I had bought the charming Luminous House cottage, where I thought we could live. Alas, he was a bit too middle-class... he told me he didn't really care for the house and wanted something better. What could I do? I asked him to wait for me and took off to gather some more money to buy a nice townhouse in Bowerstone.

After a few adventures I thought I should return to spend some time with my fiancé fearing that he would be lonely and less in love with me. I hurried back to Oakfield, splurging 8 gold on a carriage to get there faster.

But he was nowhere to be found! I ran all over the place frantically. Perhaps he had gone back to Bowerstone? I raced back to the city and spent hours walking the streets. I even waited in the pub for a bit (where we first met) in case he should drop by for a pint.

But no. Cyrus had disappeared.

Has he run off with some floozy? If so, I can forgive him if only he'll come back. Is he on a trip? He is, after all, a "Traveler" and I'm afraid our conversations didn't really reveal much about his line of work. Has something -- god forbid -- horrible happened to him? Has he been murdered by bandits or devoured by balverines? Shall I ever find out his fate?

I've tried getting over him. I even proposed marriage to a new man, after a time. He's fun, romantic, bubbly; but he has a large mustache and a silly speaking voice and he is quite stout and... frankly, he's just not Cyrus. We're still engaged but I really ought to break it off. I just don't feel the same way about him as I did about Cyrus.

Besides, what if Cyrus comes back one day? What if he reappears next time I turn on my console, with the silver ring still there like a halo over his head, symbol of his faith and loyalty while I went off proposing marriage to some other, inferior, lesser man?

The life of a hero, I am finding, is hard in more ways than I could have imagined.

Originally posted by jane from game girl advance, on October 25, 2008 6:32 PM

To give you an idea of how tough my wife is, she delivered two of our sons via natural childbirth, skipping out on epidural anasthesia in the belief it's better for the baby. One son was 11 pounds and three ounces. When he hit the birth canal, her screams were so loud that I asked for a sedative to calm my nerves. Nurses stuck around after their shifts to find out how much he weighed.

To give you an idea of how tough I am, I researched vasectomies for five years before consenting to the procedure. You can't be too careful about these things. I wanted to give the medical community time to work out the kinks.

So it's last Friday, and I find myself at Planned Parenthood in Jacksonville, lying flat on my back with my pants around my ankles, trying to find my happy place. A urologist begins handling up on my junk, explaining each step in the process with the unabashed enthusiasm of Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Desperate to change the subject, I look away from my imperiled dingus and tell the doctor about a problem I had completing the online registration on his web site. The components of the web form disappear on Mozilla Firefox when you begin to input data. I had to switch to Internet Explorer to get it to work. He seems interested. We lament cross-platform browser incompatibilities and get into a debate about whether Safari or Firefox is the second most popular browser among users. He lays a surgical drape around my genitals. I let him win the argument.

I tell him that I publish sites, and when he asks which ones I am faced with a socially difficult decision: Do I tell the person approaching my wang with a cauterization tool that I publish a stridently liberal web site?

Keep in mind that we're in conservative North Florida, where doctors and just about everybody else are rock-ribbed Republicans and the presidential campaign's getting angrier by the day. Some of my neighbors in this right-wing community are finding it difficult to accept that a Democrat might win the White House. They thought a cure had been found for that disease years ago.

I bite the bullet and tell the doctor about the Drudge Retort. My wife, who's in the room observing the surgery without an ounce of squeamishness, visibly winces.

The doctor's Douglas G. Stein, a Tampa urologist who offers a no-scalpel, no-needle vasectomy procedure that's advertised throughout the state. His web site offers more reassurance to fearful patients than my wife was ever offered before childbirth. I'm not the only guy with a heightened sense of anxiety regarding my tallywacker.

How is vasectomy done without a scalpel?

No-scalpel vasectomy instruments, used in China since the mid-70's and introduced into the United States in 1989, are simply a very pointy hemostat, used initially to make a tiny opening into anesthetized skin of the scrotal wall, and a ring clamp, used initially to secure each vas tube in turn beneath this opening. The pointy hemostat is then used to spread all layers (the vas sheath) down to the vas tube itself and to then deliver a small loop of the vas through the opening as the ring clamp is released. In turn, the ring clamp is used to hold the vas, while the pointy hemostat spreads adherent tissue and blood vessels away from the vas under direct vision, so that the vas can then be divided with a fine surgical scissors and the upper end cauterized with a hand-held cautery unit so that it will seal closed.

How is vasectomy done without a needle?

Traditionally, a local anesthetic has been injected into the skin and alongside each vas tube with a very fine needle, as small as diabetics use to inject themselves with insulin. One could feel a tiny poke in the skin, then a bit of a squeeze as the anesthetic was applied to each vas tube. However, most people do not like needles of any size ... especially there!

A MadaJet is a spray applicator which delivers a fine stream of liquid anesthetic at a pressure great enough to penetrate the skin to a depth of about 3/16", deep enough to envelop the vas tube held snugly beneath the skin. Each vas is positioned in turn beneath the very middle of the front scrotal wall and given two or three squirts. That numbs the skin and both vas tubes adequately for 99% of men.

Stein becomes so animated talking politics that he doesn't announce the cauterization of my first vas tube. I figure it out when I spot a small wisp of smoke rising to the ceiling above my bits and pieces.

When I mention with excitement my recent Obama rally trip to Orlando, he asks if I saw the following billboard on my drive down Interstate 4.

I say that I did, still unsure whether the doctor -- who has one testicle to go -- leans left or right.

At this point, Stein offers a final bit of reassurance: "Those are my billboards."

As Florida blogger Jim White recently discovered, Stein replaced several of his vasectomy billboards across the state with the cutting message "Stop McSame." Stein tells me with great excitement the interest his effort has generated. White calls this campaign "preventing unwanted presidents."

I relax, to the extent that it's ever possible to relax while a stranger applies scissors to your mantackle.

Originally posted by Rogers Cadenhead from Workbench, on October 25, 2008 1:23 PM

It is time for the McCain campaign to come clean about what role any of its staffers may have had in hyping or pushing the press to hype the charges stemming from Ashley Todd's vicious and reprehensible hoax.

As Greg Sargent reported yesterday, McCain Pennsylvania communications director Peter Feldman pushed reporters on a highly incendiary version of Todd's hoax -- providing reporters with quotes from the fictitious attacker and telling them the the "B" scratched on Todd's face stood for "Barack." As the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson aptly put it, Feldman's actions showed "not just a willingness to believe it but an eagerness to incite a ... racial backlash against the Obama campaign."

Our reporting did not find any direct evidence that the McCain campaign's national headquarters played a role pushing the story.

However, the national campaign has now come forward and lied about what happened in Pennsylvania. McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers has now told NBC that alleged quotes from the McCain campaign in early reports of the story were actually the product of "sloppy reporting" and that they were actually quotes from the Pittsburgh police.

This is simply not credible.

Initial reports specifically quote the McCain campaign. And at least two sources involved in the contemporaneous reporting have come forward and said on the record that the quotes came directly from the McCain campaign. To believe that two separate local news organizations made the identical mistake with the same quotes and are now both covering it up is simply not credible. But that is what Rogers is now claiming.

The McCain campaign's after-the-fact lie about its role in this hoax makes it essential that it provide a complete and honest account of both the local and national campaign's role. As I said above, we did not find direct evidence of the national McCain campaign pushing this story. But Gov. Palin did call Todd after the purported attack, as did Sen. McCain. And news of these calls was provided to the press.

The involvement of the candidates and specifically the release of such information -- which was clearly intended to bump up interest in the story -- shows some level of involvement by the national campaign.

Perhaps it is simply that the national campaign heard a staffer had been mugged and had the principals call the purported victim. One might further speculate that it was only the Pennsylvania communications director who heard about the calls and took it upon himself to push these out to the media.

Possible, but certainly a generous interpretation. And now that we see the national McCain campaign making false statements about what happened, its credibility on the whole story is simply too damaged to allow such a benefit of the doubt.

Reporters who the McCain camp cannot stonewall need to push for a clear accounting of what happened -- starting by coming clean on Feldman's role. If this were simply some other minor campaign mystery, the sort that is routinely tossed off late in a hard-fought campaign, it might not matter. But the awfulness of what was attempted here makes nothing less than a full accounting necessary.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on October 25, 2008 9:49 AM

Caption: The first meal we made on our trip, at the childhood home of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

By Stephanie Pierce

In my most recent guest post I wrote about how my husband and I managed to find honest-to-goodness real food on the road across 31 states this past summer. Our journey was partly about adventure (if it’s no fun, why bother?), but it was also about taking a break from normal routines to figure out how we wanted to reconfigure our lives. We felt like we had to stop the motion of those routines so that we could think about what it was we wanted to be working toward; for example, we knew we needed to evaluate the way we had structured our work, and for us it was very difficult to think about that while still working every day.

So, we left aside, or got rid of, most of the trappings of our lives. We packed all our belongings up and gave some away, and then let the lease expire on our apartment. We saved money so that we could quit any and all work entirely. We reduced cell phone plans, put a vehicle in storage, and made a budget to live on for the trip that was approximately 60% less than our usual budget.

The one place we knew we didn’t want to cut corners was on food. If part of our trip was about learning how our lives could be healthier and fuller, it would have been paradoxical to eat badly.

We had heard repeatedly from friends and news articles that eating well - and by “well” I generally mean eating as much fresh, organically and/or locally grown food as one can find - is more expensive than the convenient mainstream alternative of fast and/or prepackaged food. After several people asked me skeptically how we were planning to eat the way we wanted without any money coming in, I felt like the challenge was on.

Before I continue, I do have to say that we are avid budgeters who live pretty small. We planned and saved for this trip and had the benefit of two solidly middle-class incomes before we left; thus, I don’t feel like we can say that we were eating on a truly shoestring budget. But we did drastically reduce our overall food budget, and I think we are proof that even though governmental food policy doesn’t work for the health of the citizenry right now, if you are thoughtful and creative, you can eat well and be healthy for less than you currently spend. Here are some of the things that we did that worked well for us:

We ate less. That may sound Spartan or overly sacrificial, but it cut down how much money we spent and we didn’t suffer for it - on the contrary, we both trimmed up a bit. We didn’t have seconds at any meal because we only cooked enough for firsts. When that food was gone, the meal was over.

We didn’t buy any prepackaged food. OK, we did buy some Clif Bars for snack attacks, but after reading a recent Ethicurean post, I feel pretty vindicated in this decision. Even on the road, we made our own spaghetti sauce, our own hot cereal, our own version of a pizza, our own soups, our own salad dressing. When you add up the costs of these ingredients and then the cost of buying these items in the store - organic or otherwise - the savings almost slap you in the face. We even made our own bread at times. It ended up being a strange loaf that we used as a booster in sauces. That aside, when not on the road, we only buy bread as a special treat; otherwise, we always make our own.

[Photo, right: I was having a chocolate attack, so made these weird fudgie cookie things by mixing stuff we had on hand, like peanut butter, honey, cocoa powder. They were pretty good!]

We ate cabbage and other non-lettuce greens. Cabbage has somehow acquired a bit of a bad reputation, but it’s good and pretty inexpensive on the scale of produce prices. We also shifted around the salads we would have eaten, for greens such as collards, Swiss chard, and kale. I did not grow up eating any of these things and have had to learn how to make them for myself. Combined with a few other ingredients, greens can make an entire meal. “Nourishing Traditions,” a favorite book of mine, has a list of nourishing but less expensive vegetables that I looked at while I was writing this post: potatoes, cabbage, carrots, zucchini, onions, broccoli, chard, beets, and kale make the list and are pretty easy to find. In fact, the book has an entire section in the back entitled “Limited Time, Limited Budget Guidelines.” For you would-be budgeters, make sure to check your library before you head over to Amazon! (Editor’s note: Or check Better World Books, the “socially conscious online used bookseller,” which funds literacy groups worldwide.)

We didn’t eat much meat. We still got animal protein in the form of eggs and the occasional meat product here and there, but we cut back on meat quite a bit. Now that we’re back home, we have started working for trade on a farm near us for meat and eggs. That will be a real cost saver for us — plus it’s fun.

We sprinkled rather than smothered. At first, it was hard for me to go easy on the cheese, but we stopped using as much of it in certain dishes. It saved us money, saved us cheese, and we didn’t suffer inordinately.

We reduced our dependence on oils. I admit that I love having a plethora of oils in my cupboard, but on the road and on a budget it can get very expensive to be buying sesame oil, coconut oil, safflower oil, butter, olive oil…you get my gist. I learned to get over being a purist and used whatever oil I had for whatever I was cooking. We ended up using butter and olive oil for the most part. Now that we’re home, we also save and use our bacon grease. I know this is not a very popular practice any more, but we get great bacon from great pigs and I don’t feel a bit bad about it.

As I revisit these tactics to write this post, I find it sad and frustrating that these very simple home-economizing strategies are things that I had to learn on my own rather than them being part of my formal or informal education. All the Wendell Berry essays I’ve read are trickling into my brain, insistently reminding me that understanding how to run a home economy is of vital importance - not an old-fashioned idea for times gone by. Especially now, as we watch our government muddle through a giant mess of high-risk gambles and credit spending gone bad, it seems to me that as a nation we should prioritize relearning the languishing art of thrift, and at the same time really look at what foods are worth spending money on.

Stephanie Pierce spends part of her working time teaming up with Fourth Sector Consulting, a for-benefit company that works only with mission-driven organizations. As she settles back into life after six months of travel, she is looking to spend another part of her working time away from the computer getting her hands dirty. She works for trade on a farm in her area, putters in the kitchen and writes while on long walks. A native of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Stephanie can tell you why she believes Lake Superior is better than Lake Michigan and how to correctly pronounce “sauna.”

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Originally posted by Guest from The Ethicurean: Chew the right thing., on October 25, 2008 9:35 AM

This showed up briefly on FiveThirtyEight the other day:

Not only is this bad advertising (all the McCain people are doing is reinforcing the Obama brand identity), it’s also a potential legal problem. If that “speak out” button goes to a donation link, then the McCain people are using the distinctive Obama logo and design commercially, as trademarks. Under the circumstances, it’s pretty easy to make out an argument that some people are likely to click on the link thinking that it’s an Obama ad, and we should all go support his campaign to make sure that this election does turn out the way the 2004 election did. That’s consumer confusion, and trademark law doesn’t like it one bit.

I can’t say more without seeing where that button actually took people. This may not have been about money at all, in which case the free-speech defenses are much stronger. Still, that this ad ran at all, however briefly, is yet another sign of how oddly amateurish the McCain campaign has become. It really is like they just don’t have enough competent people to pay attention to everything, with the result that a lot boneheaded stuff makes it out the door. Contrast this with, say, the Obama camp’s astonishing typographical consistency.

Originally posted by James Grimmelmann from The Laboratorium, on October 25, 2008 9:02 AM

Remote island communities have always fascinated me. From the independent nature of the people who call them home, rugged scenery that often graces the landscape, the animals that live there- they can really spark the imagination. The Faroe Islands, located about halfway between Scotland and Iceland are one of those places, and provide a stunning backdrop for Flickr members who live and visit there.

    

    

Photos from Rune Johnsson, Felix van de Gein, erik_porkeri, Niquinho and g.norðoy.
View more in the Faroe Islands pool, or search by tag.

      

Originally posted by Kevin Collins from Flickr Blog, on October 25, 2008 8:53 AM

Shared by mathowie
I'm sharing this because Sippey used fuelly as a datasource. Also I'd want this car.

I'm sure this has been covered to death on the autoblogs, but I learned about it via Mini USA's email list: they're looking for 500 drivers in Southern California, New York and New Jersey to participate in a field trial of the MINI E, "a 100% electric, zero-emission premium vehicle ready for every-day driver use."

• Lithium-ion batteries
• Two-seater only; what's normally the backseat in a Mini is now full of batteries
• Zero to 60 in about 8.5 seconds; top speed electronically limited to about 95mph
• Range of about 150 miles
• Full recharge draws 28 kilowatt hours, which equates to 5.4 miles / kwh
• If you pay $0.15 / kwh, that equates to about about $0.03 per mile, which is about one-third the cost per mile of Mini Cooper.[1]

Of course, next to the Pious there couldn't be a more latte-sippin' blue state car than an electric Mini, and this one's only a pilot program, but I'm hopeful we'll see car makers push more hybrid and electric options...

[1] Spreadsheet here, based on an eyeballed average 30mpg for Coopers on Fuelly buying gas at $3.00 per gallon, which is about where the national average is right now.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from this is sippey.typepad.com, on October 24, 2008 5:15 PM

Ashley makes her perp walk ...

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on October 24, 2008 4:37 PM

Mike Brant was an Israeli singer who became a pop sensation in France.  He sang in French for the most part but apparently learned the language along the way.  In a French documentary that I came across on YouTube (and can no longer locate), I learned that Brant used to have French songs transliterated into Hebrew to aid his pronunciation.  Here are two screen shots that illustrate how this was done:

Originally posted by Adriana from Stingy Kids, on October 24, 2008 2:30 PM

“Apple is publicly opposing Proposition 8 and making a donation of $100,000 to the No on 8 campaign. Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights — including the right to marry — should not be affected by their sexual orientation. Apple views this as a civil rights issue, rather than just a political issue, and is therefore speaking out publicly against Proposition 8.”

- Apple Hot News (via John Gruber)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on October 24, 2008 10:51 AM

A collection of photos of signs located in NYC from 14th St to 42nd St in Manhattan. Many of the photos were taken in the 80s and 90s and the signs they depict are already gone. The photos are extensively annotated...this is a real history lesson.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on October 24, 2008 10:48 AM

Movable Type has proven time and time again that it can help some of the Internet's most influential and most innovative blogs become some of the largest as well. Not every content management system is up to the task of publishing sites on this scale, but Movable Type is. One reason for that is that its publishing engine has tremendous flexibility in regards to how it can be deployed, allowing every site to fine tune its performance independently across as many machines as is necessary.

One critical component often used by these large sites is the "Movable Type Publishing Queue" - a simple publishing service to which the system can offload the task of keeping a web site up to date. This in turn dramatically increases performance, and improves the stability of the entire system by distributing much of the work a content management system must perform to a set of dedicated and distributed resources.

To give users the transparency and visibility into this critical system, we have begun work on a new plugin called Publish Queue Manager. This free and open source plugin provides its users with the following features:

• view a list of all the jobs in their publishing queue.
• see which jobs on the queue are currently being worked on.
• change the priority of any of the jobs on the queue.
• delete jobs off the queue.

Of course, not every Movable Type user has a need to use Publish Queue, but those that do have come to rely upon the benefits it provides a great deal, which is why this plugin can be so useful to those users. So how do you know if you should be using Publish Queue?

1. It seems to take Movable Type a long time to publish a single entry or new comment.

2. Your readers leave a lot of comments, or your site tends to get a lot of comments submitted all at once.

3. You utilize a lot of archive maps on your site, like Comment Feeds, Author Archives, Category Archives, Category-Monthly Archives, etc.

4. You have one template on your site, like a large Google Sitemap, or a large archive listing that by itself takes a long time to publish.

5. Your system is often publishing multiple comments or entries at the same time.

If you feel any of these apply to you, consider consulting our documentation on how to get started using Publish Queue.

Help us test the Publish Queue Manager Beta now by downloading it, installing it and letting us know what you think!

Originally posted by Byrne Reese from MovableType.org - Home for the MT Community, on October 24, 2008 10:36 AM

It's that time of year.

TPM brings on a new class of interns each season. And we're now taking applications for our Winter 2008/2009 cycle. TPM interns are probably as intimately and rapidly involved in the preparation and production of news coverage as interns at any other news organization. And that ranges from work on the news section of the front page to research for our news blogs to video editing to bylined articles. Winter cycle interns will work closely on stories relating to the presidential transition and the start of the new Congress. The application deadline is November 7th. To find out details for how to apply, click here.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on October 24, 2008 10:33 AM

On November 7 & 8, 2008, the University of California, Berkeley will hold a symposium on appropriation rights in the digital era. This event will bring together artists, lawyers, art historians, and representatives from the information technology community to discuss the changing field of appropriation art in the wake of the emergence of new digital media technologies that have radically altered access to and manipulation of information.

 Bookmark this on Delicious - Saved by yatta to copyright conferences creativecommons unmediated - More about this bookmark

Originally posted by yatta from Delicious/subscriptions/djacobs, on October 24, 2008 10:29 AM

Well, for everyone who had eyes to see, this thing stunk to high heaven. But now we have official word that that McCain volunteer who had the straight-out-of- the-trash-novel story about being assaulted by a mugger-cum-Obama-activist has confessed that the whole thing was a hoax. It is the classic story that is so perfect for certain malevolent actors that if it hadn't happened they'd have to make it up. As indeed they did.

To say this is a dark moment does not do justice to the deep awfulness of this stunt. It's the metaphoric pedal-to-the-metal for the sleazy sub-rosa campaign of racial fear-mongering that so far has failed to derail Obama's candidacy.

There are many questions to be asked about who pushed this story yesterday afternoon and last night. A lot of explaining.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on October 24, 2008 9:44 AM

Great interview with Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men. Gender roles are a big focus of the show, something that wasn't necessarily apparent in the first two shows when I thought it was going to be some sort of lopsided misogyny-fest.

And the big intellectual skirmish going on was "Is it great that we're so different, men and women, or is there no difference at all?" No difference at all is where is started. Let's have equality and legistlate it like that. And then it became so much more complicated when you added sex to it and biologically the relationship is always sexist in some way. What's sexist in the office is fuel in the bedroom. We're wired that way to some extent. Women become more aggressive and it becomes strange for men.

(via fimoculous)

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on October 24, 2008 8:16 AM

This is an independent interview I did a few days ago, which has been uploaded to Current. Thanks to Kyanna for a great interview, it was a pleasure talking to you. Be sure to go over to Current and "Vote Up".

Originally posted by Adam Brickley, aka "ElephantMan" from Draft Sarah Palin For Vice President, on October 24, 2008 8:08 AM

This off-season, I intend to do interviews with players, executives, reporters, bloggers, fans, etc., on the subject of blogging and baseball – as I try to learn more about the medium.

Today, I talk with Nelson Figueroa, not only because he pitched for the Mets in 2008, but because he also has a blog of his own, which he writes with his wife, Alisa, titled The Figueroas.

By the way, Nelson and his wife also help with the blog Rally for Recovery, which is currently running an impressive sports memorabilia auction that will benefit former Major League Baseball player Ricky Stone, who was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor in August 2008.

Matthew Cerrone, from MetsBlog.com: So, to what extent are you guys, as players, aware of blogging and aware of new media? I know that the newspapers are dominant, but are you aware of these other communication tools?

Nelson Figueroa: Absolutely. I think that it’s the kind of media that is so instant and current and there are so many inside tips that you read about. I was in Triple-A and I heard about things that were happening with the Mets organization through different blogs…They can voice their opinions and other things on blogs. So, it’s a new medium that people are taking advantage of and I think a lot of fans use well.

Matthew Cerrone: At the same time, what used to just be facts and then reporting has now become a lot of opinion. Even myself, a lot of times I feel awkward being here, at the stadium, around players, because, you know, I might have said something about somebody and I get paranoid about that. How do you guys deal with that added element now?

Nelson Figueroa: Well, we can’t change it, that’s the thing. That’s the downside to it, because all of a sudden everybody thinks that because they can write a blog they are an expert. You know, they feel they can judge you based upon the fact that they’ve seen two years of baseball, they know everything about the game and what went into the game…

Although it’s a great medium for people to get some inside information, it’s also, in a lot of ways, it hurts some people because there are things that come out that there is no validity to.

You know, you can hear about things, like where a guy ate dinner last night to where they saw him out at a club. There is no way to back us up because if you refute that kind of story, then obviously you must have done it or you must be guilty. So, it makes it tough as a professional athlete to be out and about anywhere…

Because, if one video of you out some place, or one little clip comes out on YouTube, you know, all of a sudden, that gets blogged about more than anything and anything that you have done up to that point. So, it makes it, it is a little tougher to be a professional athlete especially in a city like New York. You know, where there are a lot of eyes on you.

Matthew Cerrone: Does that make you guys want to be more distant, or be a bit more guarded than you would like?

Nelson Figueroa: I think that’s a downside, you know, the superstar, the David Wright, the Pedro Martinez, the Johan Santana, it’s harder for them to go out anywhere. You know, just to go out to the mall, because you never know what somebody is going to write about you – especially in a blog. Or, if someone is going to take a photo of you doing something and it might come out. I think for the superstars, they need to worry about that. Even some guys, up-and-coming rookies who don’t know any better, they go out to a bar and have a shot or two, and there will be a picture of them doing a shot. So, it makes it tough, but then again it’s part of being a professional athlete, so it’s the dual-edged sword.

Matthew Cerrone: At the same time, technically, a player could write his own blog, like Curt Schilling. I mean, you could almost circumvent the media by taking control of the dialogue. Does that ever cross anybody’s mind?

Nelson Figueroa: It does, but, again, because of the various things, whether they are good, bad or indifferent, if your opinion is different than management, different than the manager, different than your follow teammate, you don’t want it to be misconstrued in a certain way. Even though you might be talking about one instance, if it gets taken the wrong way it could affect the chemistry in the ball club and people don’t want to be around you, they don’t want to be near you, people don’t want to go out with you because they think, ‘Hey, this might come out on his blog.’ So, it’s very hard during the season to write a blog.

In the off season, you know, it’s a little different, I could write about my travels all over the world, I’ve blogged about that. I’ve blogged about my experiences with my family life in my downtime. That is something that is really important to me and a lot of people don’t get to share in. So, being that I was in Taiwan and Japan last year, I had an opportunity for everybody to know how I was doing on a daily basis – and people kept up with it… But, it is hard to do it during the season; it is something that is kind of frowned upon just because of that fact.

Matthew Cerrone: Especially here in New York.

Nelson Figueroa: Oh, absolutely. I mean, if you look at Wikipedia, if you go on and read something about yourself you can go on and erase it. But, other than that, somebody can put whatever they want about you. I mean, my sister’s name has changed three different times. It said in 2003 that I converted to Judaism. So, if I don’t stay on top of that and if I don’t stay on top of what is out there about myself and just checking whether it is photos or this or that…

My wife reads the blogs all the time and there was a blog where someone was like, “There are three people on this earth that I would like to kill,’ and my name came up as one of them and my wife just wanted to know why he would say that.

Matthew Cerrone: For the record, I’m pretty sure that was not me. At least, I hope it wasn’t me (laughing).

Nelson Figueroa: I’m almost sure it was not you (laughing).

It was just one of those things that it is a scary world and, again, with the Internet and people having access to the Internet, you know it is hard to police that sort of thing. At the same time, we are fortunate enough that we have MLB securities so that if something like that does turn up, they handle it and that website is probably taken down very quickly.

Matthew Cerrone: Thank you very much, Nelson.

Nelson Figueroa: No problem. Thank you.

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on October 24, 2008 7:30 AM

So my daily delicious chron doesn't seem to be working. Just as well really as this blog had degraded into just a link log. That said here are a few links I've made tasty over the past few days.

Susan sez: Social media must haves for the recently laid off - Susan Mernit has some great advice for the recently laid off like me. I'm looking forward to her next post about how to save money.

John Borthwick on the coming changes and opportunities that this lovely market is bringing us - great and inspiring post. And even though I was recently one of the 10% I hope to be back in action soon.

Mark Crispin Miller on Bill Moyers Journal  - My favorite propaganda Professor and political watchdog hits the big time or at least what I consider the big time.

Barack o'lanterns -  Gallery of pumpkins carved in support of Obama. They also have stencils. We are getting one for our house.

Originally posted by joshua mack from Joshua Mack, on October 24, 2008 7:14 AM

We've been listening to a John Lithgow children's CD in our house lately and the words from Pick Myself Up, are inspiring. We are also listening to a lot of Dan Zanes and his depression era songs are also heartening but those for another post.

"Nothing's impossible I have found,
For when my chin is on the ground,
I pick myself up,
Dust myself off,
Start All over again.

Don't lose your confidence if you slip,
Be grateful for a pleasant trip,
And pick yourself up,
Dust yourself off,
Start all over again.

Work like a soul inspired,
Till the battle of the day is won.
You may be sick and tired,
But you'll be a man, my son!

Will you remember the famous men,
Who had to fall to rise again?
So take a deep breath,
Pick yourself up,
Dust yourself off,
Start all over again.

Originally posted by joshua mack from Joshua Mack, on October 24, 2008 7:13 AM

Filed under: Friday Favorite

Welcome to Friday Favorites! Every Friday, one of us will get all sloppy over an app, web service, or Mac feature that makes us grin like an idiot every time we use it. This week, Robert tells us about his favorite Web development tools.

It's no secret that I heart Coda. I've been in love with the one-window web development app since the day it came out. It turns out, though, that I was just scratching the surface of using Coda until I signed up for my new favorite web service: Beanstalk.

Beanstalk is a service that hosts your version control repositories remotely. This is great for far-flung team members with firewalls and other networking hurdles between them. Having a zero-configuration Subversion repository available no matter where you're working is hot stuff.

Best of all, Beanstalk publishes items committed to the repository to my team's development server automatically. It's just like it lives on our network.

To make Beanstalk work with Coda, I first had to check out a copy of the repository with Versions. Versions is still in beta (and Christina has written about it before), but its ease of use is unparalleled. In fact, it has Beanstalk in mind, with shortcuts to help you connect with your Beanstalk repositories.

With the repo downloaded, it's just a matter of setting it up as a site in Coda, and entering my username and password for Beanstalk. Coda does all the heavy lifting from then on. Committing changes and adding files is as easy as clicking an icon in the same position as if I was uploading it (and not using Subversion). I love that it keeps my muscle memory working for me, and not against me.

Coda is $99, Versions is free (while it's in beta), and Beanstalk starts at $15 per month (which is the plan I have). Put together, though, it's a million-dollar solution.

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Originally posted by Robert Palmer from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on October 24, 2008 6:00 AM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on October 24, 2008 5:56 AM

a scrabble board made from more than 30,000 SWAROVSKI crystals and thought to be valued at 20,000 dollars
is currently being auctioned off on e-bay, to mark 60 years of success for the popular word-building game.
the classic board game was developed by an unemployed american architect, alfred mosher butts during
the depression. it was originally named 'criss-cross', but after many failed attempts, changed the rules and
renamed it scrabble.

the one-of-a-kind board was commissioned by hasbro inc. each of the crystals have been matched with the
original colors of the board game and applied by hand. the board itself is made from glass with colored and clear
SWAROVSKI crystals embedded in the squares in which players can place their tiles. the auction closes
october 30th, so you still have a chance to make a bid. all of the proceeds will go to st. jude children's research
hospital based in tennessee.

related

designboom's SWAROVSKI 'crystal vision' book

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Designboom - Weblog, on October 24, 2008 12:45 AM

At work, I’m working on a project where we’re modeling newspaper content in a relational database. We’ve got newspaper titles, issues, pages, institutions, places and some other fun stuff. It’s a django app, and the db schema currently looks something like:

Anyhow, if you look at the schema you’ll notice that we have a Page model, and that attached to that is an OCR model. If you haven’t heard of it before OCR is an acronym for optical character recognition. For each newspaper page we have, we have a TIF image for the original page, and we have rectangle coordinates for the position of every word on the page. Basically it’s xml that looks something like this (warning your browser may choke on this, you might want to right-click-download).

So there are roughly around 2500 words on a page of newspaper text, and there can sometimes be 350 occurrences of a particular word on a page…and we’re looking to model 1,000,000 pages soon … so if we got really prissy with normalization we could soon be looking at (worst case) 875,000,000,000 rows in a table. While I am interested in getting a handle on how to manage large databases like this, we just don’t need the fine grained queries into the word coordinates. But we do need to be able to look up the coordinates for a particular word on a particular page to do hit highlighting in search results.

So let me get to the interesting part already. To avoid having to think about databases with billions of rows, I radically denormalized the data and stored the word coordinates as a blob of JSON in the database. So we just have a word_coordinates_json column in the OCR table, and when we need to look up the coordinates for a page we just load up the JSON dictionary and we’re good to go. JSON is nice with django, since django’s ORM doesn’t seem to support storing blobs in the database, and JSON is just text. This worked just fine on single page views, but we also do hit highlighting on pages where there are 10 pages being viewed at the same time. So we started noticing large lags on these page views — because it was taking a while to load the JSON (sometimes 327K * 10 of JSON).

As I mentioned we’re using Django, so it was easy to use django.utils.simplejson for the parsing. When we noticed slowdowns I decided to compare django.utils.simplejson to the latest simplejson. And just for grins I figured it couldn’t hurt to see if using pickle or cPickle would prove to be faster than using JSON. So I wrote a little benchmark script that timed the loading of a 327K JSON and a 507K pickle file 100 times using each technique. Here are the results:

method	total seconds	avg seconds
django.util.simplejson.loads	97.619314	0.976193
simplejson.loads	3.31	0.033183
pickle.loads	36.118291	0.361183
cPickle.loads	5.982417	0.059824

Yeah, that’s right. The real simplejson is 29.5 times faster than django.utils.simplejson! Even more surprising simplejson seems to be faster than even cPickle!! This is good news for our search results page that has 10 newspaper pages to highlight on it, since it’ll take 10 * 0.033183 = .3 seconds to parse all the JSON instead of the totally unacceptable 10 * 0.976193 = 9.7 seconds. I guess in some circles .3 seconds might be unacceptable, we’ll have to see how it pans out. If you want, please try out my benchmarks yourself on your own platform. I’d be curious if you see the same ranking.

Here are the versions for various bits I used:

• python v2.5.2
• django trunk: r9231 2008-10-13 15:38:18 -0400
• simplejson 2.0.3

Makes me that much happier that simplesjson aka json is now cooked into the Python 2.6 standard library.

Originally posted by ed from inkdroid, on October 23, 2008 11:09 PM

Penelope and Sand, originally uploaded by mgtrott.

Today was Penelope's first trip to a beach, courtesy of a warm October day in San Francisco.

She's a very generous little person and will pick up things and bring them over to people. Then, she makes a little sound that sort of means "here." She started doing that with grains of sand. She'd pick up a pinch of sand and then bring it to me. What totally delights me is how she would take time to pick just the right grains out of the billions out there.

I'm sure that there is some lesson to be learned from this baby's action and that it would make some great sort of Zen parable.

Originally posted by Mena from Dollarshort, on October 23, 2008 10:47 PM

Sarah Palin on $150k blingfest: "That is not who we are."

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on October 23, 2008 6:58 PM

Literary Schadenfreude (via Gothamist)

Poet Clive James wrote a poem in which he gloated over finding a competitor's book in a remainder bin.  Honestly, though, the best place to find contemporary poetry books is the 50% off stacks at The Strand.  The last time I was there I found a number of fantastic and current books of poetry but I'll resist naming names just in case being remaindered or discounted hurts anyone's feelings.  One book was dedicated by a young author to a Major Poet.  Even more devastating was the discovery of a personal letter penned by the author (in blue-tinted calligraphy) nestled within the pages of this book.

 

Nobel to Salinger?  Nah, He's American.  (via Gothamist)

Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which administers the Nobel Prize in Literature, got a lot of flack for stating that U.S. Literature was "too isolated, too insular."  He then went on to say that "[t]hey don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature."  That much is true.  Translated literature makes up a pathetically small percentage of book sales in the United States.  U.S. literature, on t