My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Coffee: A Dark History by Anthony Wild.

Remarkably, for a plant that is now cultivated throughout the tropical world, coffee has not been shown by archaeology to have been domesticated before the 16th century. p. 25

My Soundtrack: Start A Fire by Radio 4 on WOXY.

This is what happens when you ignore necessary chores. Its been nearly 10 months (and one hard drive crash) since I’ve mucked out the stable so this is the first of three posts. These all struck my fancy for one reason or another as potential blog topics. I confess that I have little idea why they did. So, back to shovelling: scoop, lever, heave, scoop, lever…

Echidne Of The Snakes
Good And Bad Procrastination
The Changing Media Landscape
‘Elements of Style’ Goes Beyond Words
Ninjas Vs. Pirates
Sex Wars
Cluster Maps
The D*I*Y Planner: Hipster PDA Edition
Moleskine
Bagend I
Bagend II
Gizmag
Gaping Void
Aljazeera
Taking Our Eyes Off The Prize
Cleveland Equanimous Philosopher
Cathy’s World
Hex Graph Paper PDF Generator
ODP Watch
30 Hour Famine

My Soundtrack: Grace by Supergrass on WOXY.

Jeff Jarvis can get long winded (yeah, so can I) and I tend to skim his longer pieces, but I read his conversation with flack Amanda Chapel in The age of customerism and producerism from start to finish. I’ve heard business leaders rant this way about unionized employees, but customers?

Naive me, I thought Ken Blackwell’s plan to sell the Ohio Turnpike to the highest bidder was just a case of local wingnuttery. Turns out that the wingnuttery is national and a sure sign that it’s a bad idea is that the grand daddy of wingnuttery think tanks — the Reason Foundation — is fully supportive of the insanity.

From the Associated Press this morning:

Roads and bridges built by U.S. taxpayers are starting to be sold off, and so far foreign-owned companies are doing the buying.

On a single day in June, an Australian-Spanish partnership paid $3.8 billion to lease the Indiana Toll Road. An Australian company bought a 99-year lease on Virginia’s Pocahontas Parkway, and Texas officials decided to let a Spanish-American partnership build and run a toll road from Austin to Seguin for 50 years.

Few people know that the tolls from the U.S. side of the tunnel between Detroit and Windsor, Canada, go to a subsidiary of an Australian company – which also owns a bridge in Alabama.

Some experts welcome the trend. Robert Poole, transportation director for the conservative think tank Reason Foundation, said private investors can raise more money than politicians to build new roads because these kind of owners are willing to raise tolls.

So this is really about elected offiicals selling off tax-payer paid-for public works so that they don’t have to take the heat when tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans require them to find other sources of revenue to pay for their favorite pork barrel projects.

Sound reasonable to you?

My Soundtrack: Black Grease by The Black Angels on WOXY.

Part of being a good citizen of the blogosphere is visiting, reading and, most importantly, taking the time to leave a comment on other’s blogs. It’s all about the conversation. In the interest of setting an example I’ve decided to link to those blog posts that have compelled me to leave a comment.

1900 The Secret Is No Secret

1800 The Highs and Lows of Public Radio

1019 Jews feel need to flee local school district due to proselytizing

0958 I’ll have my church and state separate, thank you

0914 Loss $2.8B to gain $900M

My Soundtrack: We Come One by Faithless on WOXY.

What kind breakfast conversations do you have? From Wiley Miller.

…And why does Technorati claim they’re linked to my blog?

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Coffee: A Dark History by Anthony Wild.

Kopi luak is a fine Sumatran coffee, much valued in Japan, made from beans gathered from the dung of Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, the common palm civet, which skulks around the plantations at night selecting on the finest, ripest cherries. The beast digest the skin and the pulp of the cherry, the mucilage and the parchment surrounding the bean, and even the final obstacle, the think silver skin. In so doing it achieves exactly what modern wet and dry processing technology seeks to emulate – that is, the complete separation of the core coffee bean from all its protective layers. The civet cannot digest the hard beans, however, and they pass through its system: they are picked out of the civet”s dung because the flavor imparted by the digestive process is highly prized once the beans are cleaned and roasted. p. 20

My Soundtrack: The First Snowfall by Blockhead on WOXY.

I don’t like text message shorthand: f2f, bfn, brb, etc., are all just to qt. But American spelling is bizarre when you examine it. And people have. For more than 100 years. The Simplified Spelling Society was founded in 1908 with the aim of updating English spelling. It asks: why don’t tomb, comb and bomb rime? Why do they, say and weigh rime?

Good questions.

From the Associated Press:

Those in favor of simplified spelling say children would learn faster and illiteracy rates would drop. Opponents say a new system would make spelling even more confusing.

Eether wae, the consept has yet to capcher th publix imajinaeshun.

One aspect that the SSS examines is the high rates of dyslexia in the United States as compared to the rest of the industrial world.

Scientists have shown that a language creates its own geography within the human brain in a discovery which could have promising implications for dyslexia research.

Uta Frith of University College, London, reveals in Nature Neuroscience today that differences in the structure of languages lead to different strategies for pronouncing words, which may explain why dyslexia is a common problem in English-reading nations, but relatively unknown in Italy. Italian is simple and beautiful to sing, not just because of the alternation of consonants and vowels but because the rules for pronunciation and stress are consistent.

English, on the other hand is notorious for its inconsistencies – words such as cough, bough, dough and tough are classic examples – and George Bernard Shaw remarked bitterly that a word like “ghoti” could just as easily be pronounced as “fish”: gh as in tough, o as in women, and ti as in nation. Brain scans taken while Italian and English-speaking volunteers looked at and read out words in their own language showed subtle differences in activity in precise locations in the brain.

We are creeping that way. Thru is now acceptable for Through. Lite (in terms of calories) has replaced Light. We buy Hi-Liters instead of Highlighters.

Yes, I know that many of these kute spellings are driven by advertising and ignorance, but f u cn rd ths, thn u cn gt a gd jb n advertising.

Hat tip to Molly.

My Soundtrack: Blue Skies by The Young Republic on WOXY.

Part of being a good citizen of the blogosphere is visiting, reading and, most importantly, taking the time to leave a comment on other’s blogs. It’s all about the conversation. In the interest of setting an example I’ve decided to link to those blog posts that have compelled me to leave a comment.

The Nanny State

WSJ: Boardroom profiteering on 9/11 stock slump

My Soundtrack: Nice Day by Persephone’s Bees on WOXY.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Coffee: A Dark History by Anthony Wild.

Lloyds of London, the maritime insurance company, emerged from the interests of the clientele of Lloyds Coffee House who gathered there to exchange news and gossip concerning the movement of ships. p. 14

My Soundtrack: I Don’t Know What I Can Save You From by Kings Of Convenience on WOXY.

[Update — 0224, 17 July — If you didn’t listen at 5 p.m. (shame on you) you can listen to the archived version here. Jill’s piece begins at 32:47.]

The NEO Bloggosphere’s Titania of Talk goes audible today on Statement Of Belief’s Your Voice segment. You can listen to Jill Miller Zimon of Writes Like She Talks on Your Voice which airs at 5 p.m. EDT on WARF, 1350 AM out of Akron or you can listen to the webcast. The show will also be archived for anyone who misses the initial broadcast.

I’m looking forward to it.

My Soundtrack: Hi by Psapp on WOXY.

I walked over to the Cain Park Art Fest this afternoon. Just to have some fun playing with the camera, I took 16 pictures, stopping every 20 steps to take a shot. In previous years I couldn’t have done that; the crowed would have been to big. Maybe it was the threat of rain or the noon time slot. Click through to see the rest.

Back on 21 June I speculated that laptops could be restricted on airplanes if they were found to really spontaniously burst into flames. Well it seems that I was way behind the curve as the Associated Press reports that lithium batteries in laptops and cell phones are regularly, if infrequently, errupting into flame in the air.

From Kimberly Hefling:

Did laptop batteries aboard a UPS cargo plane catch fire, causing it to ignite into flames?

The National Transportation Safety Board began looking into the question at a hearing Wednesday.

All three crew members on the plane were treated for minor injuries after it made an emergency landing shortly after midnight Feb. 8 at the Philadelphia airport.

Several other incidents have occurred in recent years in which lithium batteries – used in laptops and cell phones – have caught fire aboard airplanes.

Less than two months ago in Chicago, a spare laptop battery packed in a bag stored in an overhead bin started emitting smoke, chief crash investigator Frank Hilldrup of the NTSB testified Wednesday.

A flight attendant used an extinguisher and the bag was removed, but the bag caught fire on a ramp, Hilldrup said.

Investigators in the Philadelphia fire found that several computer laptop batteries were on board the plane, and that in many cases portions of the laptop batteries had burned, he said.

Is anybody looking into home and office fires that might be linked to such high-tech firestarters?

My Soundtrack: Black Grease by The Black Angels on WOXY.

…really does help. From Lynn Johnston.

O.J. Simpson walked away a free man from his murder trial, but was found guilty in a follow-up civil trial. Vice President Dick Cheney and 12 other members of President George Bush’s administration — including aides Lewis Libby and Karl Rove — now face a civil suit from Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame.

In their suit the couple alleges that the named government officials betrayed Valerie Plame’s trust. According to the BBC:

“I and my former CIA colleagues trusted our government to protect us as we did our jobs,” Ms Plame told reporters.

“That a few reckless individuals within the current administration betrayed that trust has been a grave disappointment to every patriotic American.”

She added: “I feel strongly, and justice demands, that those who acted so harmfully against our national security must answer for their shameful conduct in court.”

Mr Wilson said officials’ “use of power for personal revenge” broke faith with their oath to uphold the constitution.

The BBC has a good suite of stories on this development. Be sure to click down the sidebar on the main page’s right.

Why Wilson and Plame stopped at Cheney I’m not sure. Perhaps they feel that President George Bush was unaware of what had taken place. Perhaps they see Cheney as the real leader of the country and our president as Cheney’s sock puppet.

In any case, they face a hard battle and I wish them all the best.

My Soundtrack: Black Grease by The Black Angels on WOXY.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Coffee: A Dark History by Anthony Wild.

The cheap, coarse-flavored Robusta coffees that are dragging world prices down contain twice as much caffeine as higher quality Arabicas. p. 12

My Soundtrack: Roads Must Roll by Boom Bip on WOXY.

The Times (the real one, not its imitator in New York) reports today that: Baghdad starts to collapse as its people flee a life of death. Forget the countryside, forget the provinces. The mightiest military force on the planet is no longer in a position to control the capital of a country it has occupied for more than three years.

From James Hider:

As I hung up the phone, I wondered if I would ever see my friend Ali alive again. Ali, The Times translator for the past three years, lives in west Baghdad, an area that is now in meltdown as a bitter civil war rages between Sunni insurgents and Shia militias. It is, quite simply, out of control.

I returned to Baghdad on Monday after a break of several months, during which I too was guilty of glazing over every time I read another story of Iraqi violence. But two nights on the telephone, listening to my lost and frightened Iraqi staff facing death at any moment, persuaded me that Baghdad is now verging on total collapse.

It looks like we’ve turned yet another corner. I remember the final days of Saigon: the panicked lines of people rushing the embassy gates; the helicopters cycling on and off the embassy roof; the faces of those left behind.

I saw some of those faces up close when the U.S.S. Bainbridge CGN-25 rescued them from the sea as they fled Viet Nam in boats packed like those our Coast Guard sees crawling north from Cuba and Haiti.

President Richard Nixon promised Peace with Honor. I see little of either in Iraq’s near future. Hat tip to Daily Dish.

My Soundtrack: Pictures Of Matchstick Men by Camper Van Beethoven on WOXY.

Part of being a good citizen of the blogosphere is visiting, reading and, most importantly, taking the time to leave a comment on other’s blogs. It’s all about the conversation. In the interest of setting an example I’ve decided to link to those blog posts that have compelled me to leave a comment.

True Lies

My Soundtrack: LDN by Lily Allen on WOXY.

Even though I purport to earn my bread and butter by writing, I suffer from horrible grammar, the result of refusing to pay any attention when my English teachers were doing their level best to give me a command of my native tongue. When I came across Non-Errors this morning I was intrigued.

Can you spot the grammatical mistakes below?

To boldly go where no man has gone before.

This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.

A treaty has been negotiated among England, France, and Germany.

The plane will be landing momentarily.

Loan me your hat.

Climb down off of that horse, Tex, with your hands in the air.

And my, and my dad’s, favorite,

You’ve got mail.

You can check your grammar here.

My Soundtrack: Week Ends At A Time by Shapes And Sizes on WOXY.